From the author of Tokyo Year Zero , an exquisitely dark new novel that returns us to post-World War II occupied Japan: a Rashoman-like retelling of a horrific murder--based on an actual event--its aftermath, and the hidden war-time atrocities behind the crime.

On January 26, 1948, a public health official arrives at a branch of the Teikoku Bank in Tokyo. There has been an outbreak of dysentery in the neighborhood, he says, and he has been assigned by Occupation authorities to treat all locals who might have been exposed. The staff gathers as the official pours the first of two medicines into cups and instructs them how exactly to drink it. Within five minutes, ten employees are dead, and the official has fled. But this horrific crime is merely the catalyst for this blistering novel. It is in the twelve different voices telling the story that the narrative gathers staggering power and pathos. Each plays a part in a tangle of witting or unwitting complicity in blurring the line between truth and lies: in their own lives, in the life of their city, their history, their nation, and the newly emerging post-war world.