5 min readUpdated: Aug 6, 2026 06:48 PM IST
Crime novelist Keigo Higashino, who put Japanese detective fiction on the world map, passed away from colorectal cancer on July 23, his publisher said on Monday. He was 68.
Famous for reverse-engineering whodunits so suspects were identified at the beginning, Higashino was known for his tight mysteries and satisfying emotional payoffs, which won him legion fans over 106 novels spread over four decades.
The engineer’s approach to the human heart
Born in Osaka in 1958, Higashino began his career as an electrical engineer at Nippon Denso, dabbling in writing during his off-hours. “I always wanted to write novels based on my experiences as an engineer,” he told Publishers Weekly in 2021. In his own words, as told to the Times UK, he approached plotting with the same rigor he might apply to disassembling and assembling an alarm clock, something he did as a child. He would make sure each component met its match, and no unsightly wires were dangling about.
He was not afraid to experiment, from the brain-scratcher that was The Devotion of Suspect X to Kyoichiro Kaga’s elegiac neighborhood mysteries and even novels with a supernatural element.
Readers pick up Higashino with hopes of dismantling a perfect alarm clock, only to be surprised to find a beating heart hidden within. His works contained multitudes, which made him so formidable. Impressed by his fabulous sales, the West dubbed him “the Japanese Stieg Larsson.” An unfair, if flattering comparison, but in no time he established himself as peerless.
The reluctant icon
His debut, After School, won the Edogawa Rampo Prize in 1985 when he was just 27. He quit his engineering job the following year, moved to Tokyo, and never looked back. But the spotlight he eventually found was one he sought to constantly evade. Higashino was famously reclusive, refusing interviews and photographs. “I prefer not to be recognised on the street,” he told the Wall Street Journal.
Nonetheless, he remained prolific. His 1998 novel Himitsu (Naoko) won the Mystery Writers of Japan Award, but it was Yōgisha X no Kenshin (The Devotion of Suspect X) that cemented his standing in the world of Japanese letters. After five nominations, it finally secured him the Naoki Prize in 2006, Japan’s most prestigious literary award. Two years later, the English translation would make him an international phenomenon and cement his reputation as the writer who decisively put Japanese detective fiction on the global map.
Story continues below this ad
A tale of two detectives
His most durable creations—physicist-detective Manabu Yukawa (“Detective Galileo”) and homicide detective Kyoichiro Kaga—embodied different facets of their creator’s genius. Yukawa, who began as a narrative device to justify scientific problem-solving on police cases, was modeled on no less a figure than Doraemon, the beloved gadget-producing robot cat. It was a charmingly self-deprecating origin for a character who would become synonymous with cold, cerebral deduction.
Kaga, by contrast, walked the aging streets of Tokyo, solving murders among shopkeepers and factory workers, striking a faithful, nostalgic record of a city slowly being worn down by big-box retail, as translators Giles Murray and Alexander O. Smith told Crime Reads.
The guilt that precedes the Crime
In many of his novels—including Suspect X—the culprit is revealed early, sometimes in the first chapter. The suspense lies not in who committed the crime but in how they will be caught, and more devastatingly, why. This inversion allowed guilt and anguish to build across the entire narrative rather than resolving in a single, cathartic denouement. This technique found eager audiences across Asia. His work was adapted for film and television in Japan, China, South Korea, Thailand, and Vietnam.
In India, cinephiles who had never read a word of Higashino learnt of the writer and his penchant of knitting impossibly intriguing yarns when Jeethu Joseph’s blockbuster Drishyam drew inevitable comparisons to Suspect X (though Joseph denied any link). Vasan Bala’s Monica, O My Darling and Sujoy Ghosh’s Netflix adaptation Jaane Jaan also draw inspiration from Higashino’s novels.
Final novel
His final novel, Eien no Kioku (“Eternal Memory”) – the 11th book in the Detective Galileo series—is scheduled for release on August 5. More English translations are expected to be published in 2027, including new Galileo and Laplace’s Witch entries. Higashino is survived by his wife and children.
