Falling Leaves

Lea O’Harra
Works of: Fiction
Publisher(s): self-published (Byron Books)

Falling Leaves is divided into two parts. The first is set in the autumn of 1983 in a small coastal town in Japan and describes the abduction of a thirteen-year-old girl on her way home from badminton practice at her school one evening. Mei Noguchi has been kidnapped, like many other Japanese in the late seventies and early eighties, to teach Japanese language and customs to North Korean spies, but her parents don’t know that, wondering if she was drowned or killed. It is not until the early 21st century, when Kim Jun Il admits to such abductions, that the mystery of her disappearance is finally cleared up.

The second part of the story takes place forty years later. Mei Noguchi’s family has spent two decades unsuccessfully campaigning for her release while, on another Japanese island, in another small town, the police are called on to investigate the apparent suicide/possible murder of a female university student at the university who was bullied because of her North Korean father. The case takes on a personal resonance as one of the investigating officers is Mei Noguchi’s cousin.

Falling Leaves is a murder mystery that also focuses on the troubled relations between Japan and its nearest neighbors: north and south Korea.