What We Owe

The body under the warehouse floor has been found. Ren Ishida told the police where to dig.

Confession was supposed to be the end of it. It is the beginning. The yakuza chairman who gave the order lies in a Tokyo hospital bed with officers at his door. His enforcer has gone to ground. And the old payment that cost Naoki Senda his life in 2007 leads somewhere nobody wanted it to go: to a contractor’s invoice, a sick driver who has kept quiet for nineteen years, and a murder the whole city blamed on someone else.

Ren no longer has a family, a job or a future worth protecting. What he has is the truth, and everyone wants him to trim it. From a police cell, the chairman offers him his old life back if he will change one sentence. The dead man’s daughter wants only one thing from him: the record put right.

Moving from the interview rooms of Kawasaki to a Yokohama courtroom, What We Owe follows a guilty man through the slow machinery of Japanese justice and asks what a confession is worth when it can’t give anything back.

The conclusion of The Buried Ledger Duology. Read What We Buried first.