Frost on Silent Hands

In the cold corridors of Tokai University, historian Hayashi Reiko uncovers a 1945 document hidden inside a colonial-era wage ledger: a secret pact between the founding patriarch of the ruling Seiwakai Party and the Nishihara Corporation to operate a forced-labor network across occupied Heijo. When Hayashi shares the file with human-rights lawyer Mizushima Takuya—who is building an unpaid-wages claim for Koryo workers in contemporary Nishikawa Prefecture—both become targets of a quiet erasure. Modeled on the bleak moral landscapes of Arnaldur Indriðason, this Japan-Korea political thriller traces how every colleague who looked away, every archivist who re-shelved a box without reading it, and every reporter who buried a tip becomes a fingerprint on the blade that finally silences the truth.