Shiro Kikutani, a high-school teacher, murders his wife, wounds her lover, and sets the lover's house - with the lover's old mother in it - on fire.In jail for life, he is convinced of his righteousness: his beautiful young wife had been in bed with another man. Why shouldn't he have stabbed her lover before plunging the kitchen knife's long blade into his wife?After sixteen years in prison, Kikutani is released into a world he no longer recognizes. He must adjust to the intensity of Tokyo while living with the memory of his crime. Akira Yoshimura charts the psychology of a quiet man as he negotiates through the traumas of freedom: finding a job, a place to live, even something as simple as buying an alarm clock. Kikutani takes comfort in the numbing repetition of the chicken farm where he works, only to be drawn inexorably back to the scene of the murder. As Yoshimura's carefully crafted plot swings in ever tightening arcs, we are drawn toward a shattering, perhaps inescapable conclusion. Read Less