Officer Shimada and the Disappearing Girl

by Will Ferguson

Genres: Crime, Mystery, Japan

306 pages, Paperback

Expected publication February 23, 2027

About the author

Will Ferguson is an award-winning travel writer and novelist. His last work of fiction, 419, won the Scotiabank Giller Prize. He has won the Stephen Leacock Medal for Humour a record-tying three times and has been nominated for both the IMPAC Dublin Literary Award and a Commonwealth Writers’ Prize. His new novel, The Shoe on the Roof, will be released October 17, 2017. Visit him at WillFerguson.ca

Ferguson studied film production and screenwriting at York University in Toronto, graduating with a B.F.A. in 1990. He joined the Japan Exchange Teachers Programme (JET) soon after and spent five years in Asia. He married his wife Terumi in Kumamoto, Japan, in 1995. They now live in Calgary with their two sons. After coming back from Japan he experienced a reverse culture shock, which became the basis for his first book Why I Hate Canadians. With his brother, Ian Ferguson, he wrote the bestselling sequel How to be a Canadian. Ferguson details his experiences hitchhiking across Japan in Hokkaido Highway Blues (later retitled Hitching Rides with Buddha), his travels across Canada in Beauty Tips from Moose Jaw, and a journey through central Africa in Road Trip Rwanda. His debut novel, Happiness, was sold into 23 languages around the world. He has written for The New York Times, Esquire UK, and Canadian Geographic magazine.

Reviews

[Virginia Van]

When Superintendant Kaito arrives for an inspection of the one person police station on a tiny island in southern Japan, Officer Shimada is puzzled. Why would Kaito make this his first stop after being appointed regional superintendant? And why is he so interested in the old story of Shimada's solution of the myserious death of a man alone in an elevator? After an evening of drinking, Shimada realizes that Kaito's real concern is the myserious disappearing of his sister 15 years ago when she got into an elevator in the bar building where she worked and, when the doors opened, she hd simply vanished.

This elegantly written novel is a locked-room mystery with a twist. The characters are fully realized and complex and the Japanese setting is brought vivildy to life.