✪ A major bestseller with 180,000 copies sold
✪ Winner of the Mystery Writers of Japan Award
✪ Voted the #2 Best Japanese Mystery in 2008
✪ Nominated for the Naoki Prize, and the Booksellers Award
✪ A Hundred Years of Solitude meets The Wuthering Heights

A family saga of three generation of women in postwar Japan, RED GIRLS blends elements of magical realism and crime mystery in a homage to Gabriel Garcia Marquez’s ONE HUNDRED YEARS OF SOLITUDE.

Manyo, an orphan born with a Cassandra-like ability of prophecy, is adopted by the rich and powerful Akakuchiba family and later marries the heir. Throughout her life, she stays silent about the future she foresees, including the premature death of her firstborn son.

Manyo’s daughter, Kemari, spent her rebellious youth riding with the motorcycle gang, and later becomes a popular comic artist who is adored throughout Japan.

The granddaughter, Toko, is the narrator of the book. A self-proclaimed "useless" young woman, she undertakes the mission to solve the mystery of Manyo's dying words: "I am a murderer." Set against the drastic changes in the last fifty years in Japan, from the postwar era through the Cold War, the economy bubble and to the 21st century, the fate of the Akakuchibas rise and fall, and so do the women in the family...