Zero Focus

Teiko's new husband disappears on a business trip. She discovers a pair of mysterious postcards hidden away in a book that may be clues to his fate. Kenichi and Teiko Uhara are one week newlyweds. Promoted to his company Hakuho Ad Agency's Tokyo headquarters, Kenichi heads on a short business trip back to Kanazawa, where he was that branch office's manager, to wrap up his business there, leaving Teiko alone in Tokyo to unpack their apartment. Although he is reported to have left Kanazawa to head back to Tokyo on the day planned, he doesn't come home on the scheduled day, without anyone in his and Teiko's personal life or his business colleagues knowing what happened to him. In addition to the police who Teiko notifies about her husband's disappearance, Teiko is assisted intermittently in trying to locate Kenichi by her mother, Kenichi's brother and sister-in-law, and Mr. Honda, who was a subordinate of Kenichi's at the Kanazawa branch office and its new manager. Teiko realizes through her early investigation that she knows little of Kenichi's life, especially nothing of his friends and colleagues in Kanazawa. This lack of knowledge is illuminated by some information about her husband's past which she did not know, as well as some continuing mysteries about his past, such as no one seeming to know where he had been living for the past eighteen months. Even Mr. & Mrs. Murota, who are supposedly Kenichi's best friends from his years in Kanazawa, he a business client, are unable to provide much information beyond Kenichi becoming more pensive as the wedding approached. Teiko is going to have to piece together these mysteries in Kenichi's life if she is to discover what happened to her husband. —Huggo