The Wings of the Kirin

Tokyo, Nihonbashi. A man is found dead beneath the statue of a winged kirin; he had been stabbed and walked all the way there. The suspect, Yashima, is hit by a car while fleeing and goes into a coma, so he cannot speak. His partner Kaori says he is no murderer. When Detective Kaga opens the file his question is this: why did the man go to that statue and nowhere else. The answer rests on something about the dead man that not even his children knew. Nobuhiro Doi directs the Japanese film; a hundred and twenty-nine minutes, with Hiroshi Abe as Kaga, adapted from Keigo Higashino's novel. It is the feature version of a television series built on the same character; solving the murder, Kaga is less interested in what people are hiding than in what the survivors have not been able to say to each other.