The Makoto Murders

A pitch-black, Dexter-like thriller with a razor-sharp skewering of our darkest fantasies, in which a Tokyo paparazzo commits murders to generate the photos his magazine’s readership ghoulishly demands.

Ken Kato is a half-British, half-Japanese photojournalist working for a low-brow weekly magazine in Tokyo. He achieved fame with a photograph of a boy who drowned in the tsunami that hit Japan in 2011, whom he could have saved had he not been more concerned with finding the right light and composition for his shot. Four years later, he has failed to repeat that success and, facing irrelevancy (and, worse, redundancy), he decides to turn serial killer to generate his own attention-grabbing pictures—for which he’s inevitably always first on the scene. His magazine then publishes the pictures, causing a sensation in a society where murder is almost unheard of, and tripling its sales figures. Hoping to impress his colleague Hayashi’s estranged wife Makoto—whom he is stalking after a short affair (though she clearly sees things differently)—Kato murders only men and women with the same name as her. Inevitably, the police are suspicious but can find no evidence as he is meticulous in his planning and execution. Kato’s editor is also suspicious, but is willing to ignore the evidence as sales boom.

A dark satire on where ambition will take us, as well as our obsession with true crime and fascination with morally repellent serial killers, The Makoto Murders asks plenty of uncomfortable questions of the listener while never forgetting it’s first and foremost an engaging thriller.