A Japanese national bestseller.
Best detective novel of 2023.
Winner of literary awards.
Fourth place on the list of the most popular sales in the genre.
A man named Tagosaku Suzuki is brought to the Nōgata police station in Tokyo—he has been detained for a minor offense. He looks like an ordinary drunken man, but unexpectedly he claims that in five minutes, exactly at 10 o’clock, an explosion will occur in the Akihabara district—news he supposedly got through a mystical enlightenment.
Soon after, an old building in Akihabara really explodes.
Suzuki insists this won’t be the last explosion: there will be three more, or maybe even more… or fewer.
Detectives believe Suzuki is involved in what happened and demand a confession. But he only smiles enigmatically and proposes a game in which he will give the police hints on how to prevent the next explosions—if they can figure out his clues.
Thus begins an intellectual showdown…