Keigo Higashino, Master of Japanese Mystery Fiction, Dies at 68

Confirmed announcement

Keigo Higashino, one of Japan's most widely read mystery novelists, died from colorectal cancer in the early hours of July 23, 2026. He was 68. Kodansha announced his death on July 27 and said that his funeral had been held privately with family.

Publishers responsible for his work also shared a joint message through Higashino's official social account. Their statement said that his bibliography comprises 106 books, excluding co-authored works, from his 1985 debut After School through the Japanese title永遠の記憶.

From engineer to bestselling novelist

Born in Osaka in 1958, Higashino studied electrical engineering at Osaka Prefecture University and joined Nippondenso, now Denso, as an engineer. He wrote fiction while working and won the Edogawa Rampo Prize in 1985 with After School. He left the company the following year to become a full-time writer. Our sourced biography of Keigo Higashino follows that career in greater detail.

His engineering background became one of the signatures of his fiction: ingenious mechanisms, careful logical construction, and an interest in the human consequences of science. Yet his popularity extended far beyond puzzle mysteries. Novels such as The Secret,Journey Under the Midnight Sun, andThe Miracles of the Namiya General Store explored grief, sacrifice, family, and moral responsibility.

Galileo, Kaga, and international recognition

Higashino created several enduring series. The Galileo stories pair police investigators with physicist Manabu Yukawa, while the Kyoichiro Kaga novels follow a detective whose patient attention to relationships often matters as much as physical evidence. See the completeGalileo series guide andKaga series guide.

The Devotion of Suspect X won the Naoki Prize in 2006 and later received an Edgar Award nomination in the United States. His work was published in 41 countries and regions and repeatedly adapted for film and television across Asia. By 2023, domestic circulation of his books had exceeded 100 million copies.

Translation also changed how individual works were introduced. Our English book pages keep those market titles together: The Devotion of Suspect X,Malice, Silent Parade, andNaoko / Secret. Each page distinguishes the Japanese work from its English and Chinese editions rather than treating translated titles as separate books.

His latest book

Bungeishunju published 永遠の記憶 (Eien no Kioku) in Japan on August 5, 2026. This site refers to it asEternal Memory, an unofficial English rendering rather than an announced English title. The publisher identifies it as Higashino's 106th book; its ten-work Galileo catalogue makes this the eleventh Japanese series book. No English edition has been announced as of August 8.

The book's publication will follow a career of more than four decades. Whether readers first encountered Higashino through a tightly constructed crime novel, an adaptation, or one of his gentler stories, his work leaves an unusually broad map of modern popular Japanese fiction.

Check the Eternal Memory release date and English edition status →