Detective Story 2007

Takashima Raita, known as a brilliant hacker, moves into a low-rent apartment next door to Kazama Raita, a private detective who shares the same given name. One night, a girl named Inoue Manami comes looking for the detective, finds him drunk and unwilling to help, and they agree to meet again in the morning. But on her walk home she is murdered, a chilling start that pulls Kazama Raita into a case that seems to intensify with every new clue.

The following morning, instead of meeting the girl, Kazama is confronted by police detectives who have traced her last known location to his building. Rather than shrink away, he takes it upon himself to lead the investigation, sensing that the truth may lie closer to his doorstep than anyone expected. As he probes, a second victim—Asanuma Ritsuko—is found, and the police stake out his apartment in their hunt for the killer. He dodges their scrutiny while digging into an affair she was involved in with a bartender, only to discover that the police have linked a third victim to the same spree because the bodies all show organs removed from the deceased. The gravity of the murders weighs on Kazama, keeping him under a growing cloud of suspicion while he presses forward.

Seeking new angles, Kazama visits Gamou, a convicted child killer whose skin was burned off by the father of one of his victims, hoping for a clue that could crack the pattern. With Gamou’s reluctant hints in hand, he locates Takashima and persuades him to enlist his hacking talents to aid the investigation, bridging the worlds of crime and cyberspace. The police respond by raiding the building, forcing the two Raitas to flee into the sewers, where danger and desperation mingle in the tunnels beneath the city. A janitor eventually finds Kazama Raita’s famed “Kazama Lighter,” and the two men retreat to safety in the bartender’s apartment, trying to stay one step ahead of those who would pin them for the killings.

From there the trail leads to an elderly artist named Aoyama Yuki, who paints religious imagery and has earned reputations as the “Master of Tragedy” and the “Artist of Madness.” Yet his newer canvases are disturbingly different—paintings made with blood and ground flesh of corpses—hinting at the dark well from which his art now flows. In a local bathhouse, Kazama asks a female friend to help track down the artist, signaling how far he is willing to go to unmask the truth. Back at the bartender’s home, Kazama is assaulted by an unknown attacker, and his fingerprints are later found on the Kazama Lighter by the police, placing him under a fresh cloud of suspicion and turning him into a wanted man.

In a tense confrontation, Kazama appears at Takashima’s workplace. As police arrive, he seizes a moment of danger, pretending to take Takashima hostage with a box cutter to force an escape, turning the tables on the chase and keeping the hunt off balance. The chase then pivots to a quieter, more domestic thread as a friend of Kazama tracks down Aoyama Yuki’s home and speaks with the artist’s daughter, Maho. She reveals that all three victims were fans of the artist, deepening the mystery around why his work and his life have become entangled with their disappearances and deaths.

The investigation widens as it’s revealed that after his wife’s suicide, Yuki moved in with his lover, Seto Masami, who works as a housekeeper. She rings Kazama with crucial details, theorizing that Chie, the artist’s late wife, was driven mad by the affairs surrounding him and killed herself; this family drama begins to illuminate possible motives and patterns behind the murders. In a twist, Yuki had a daughter named Maho with art student Akimura Mizuho, and that daughter now lives in a foster home. The daughter later reveals that Yuki also had a son with Seto Masami named Masakuni, a discovery that further complicates loyalties, lineage, and the artist’s influence over those around him.

With each thread pulling tighter, Kazama starts to piece together a broader, darker mosaic. He accelerates toward the artist’s studio in Izu, pursuing a final confrontation that promises to reveal the truth behind the killings, the family secrets, and the unsettling transformation of art into a doorway for violence. The narrative builds toward a climactic encounter that binds motive, opportunity, and blood in a way that only a city’s underbelly and its most guarded secrets can produce.