Konan

Konan, near Kumagaya, is a rural setting where Adelstein’s investigation brings together a series of disappearances, the vanished organized-crime figure Yasunobu Endo, and a police investigator who lived in the town. Its modest landscape gives the inquiry a local scale: the people at its center were not distant names but figures with homes, neighbors, and histories in the community.

Setting and Character

Adelstein described Konan as a throwback to the 1960s, organized around a large Zexel factory, a golf course, the town hall, three schools, a grocery store, and a family restaurant. Beyond those landmarks were fields and some agriculture; he could find no obvious downtown. A temple devoted to Monju, the Buddha of Wisdom, was a local point of distinction. The town’s limited commercial center and open surroundings gave the investigation a markedly different setting from the urban worlds of organized crime and policing that also run through the book.

Local Ties and the Disappearance Cases

Konan entered the investigation through the case of Gen Sekine, a dog breeder near Kumagaya who was suspected of being a serial killer. Over the preceding decade, several people associated with Sekine had disappeared. Saitama Prefectural Police had investigated after the first three vanished, but the leads dried up and the original case faded from public attention. The disappearance of Akio Kawasaki revived concern: when Kawasaki’s wife told police that her husband had disagreed with a dog breeder, the officer in charge treated the detail as a warning sign and urged her to prepare for the worst if her husband had been involved with Sekine.

The town was also closely associated with Yasunobu Endo, who had lived there before vanishing. Adelstein learned through inquiries at the fire department that Endo had been the number two man in the Takada-gumi, a third-tier group in the Inagawa crime family. Residents did not describe him only through his criminal standing. They spoke well of him and expressed concern for his welfare; one firefighter recalled that Endo had once driven a truck and had run for mayor in 1984. Endo received 120 votes and lost by a wide margin. A photograph he had submitted as a candidate was kept at the town hall, a small civic record of a man whose public and criminal identities coexisted in the town’s memory.

Homes, Police, and the Investigation

After learning about Endo, Adelstein took a taxi to the house where he had lived. The neighborhood was quiet, and the property was a beautiful semitraditional home. Its gate stood open, and mail overflowed from the mailbox. As Adelstein stepped inside to look more closely, an elderly man approached him. The encounter brought the search for a missing gang figure down to the immediate details of a residence and its unanswered mail.

Konan also figured in the description of a police investigator assigned to the Sekine case. A contact in the Organized Crime Division characterized the investigator as an outsider who avoided promotion examinations but was exceptionally effective at breaking suspects, and said he lived in Konan, possibly having attended school with Takada. The detail connects the town not only to the people under investigation but also to the local knowledge and personal histories that could shape the police inquiry. Konan’s significance lies in that closeness: a place described through a factory, fields, schools, and a quiet residential street becomes the ground on which long-forgotten disappearances and organized-crime connections begin to acquire faces and addresses.