Dramatic serialization of best-selling author Miyuki Miyabe’s latest addition to her “Saburo Sugimura Series”, the sequel to “Nameless Poison.” Sugimura is living a reverse Cinderella story having married the daughter of president to a major conglomerate, and now working as editor of the firm’s in-house gazette. A devoted husband and doting father, Sugimura aspires to an ordinary life but invariably has to unravel various company-related “incidents” at the request of his father-in-law. One day, Sugimura finds himself at the center of an armed bus jacking by an old man with gun. The perpetrator’s hidden motive speak to the core of Japan as a nation and to the difficulties of the human condition. While no one is above making the occasional “lie”, what does one do when a lie grows a life of its own and becomes irreversibly damaging to many. How does one begin to atone?

A dramatization of a work by Japan's undisputed queen of mystery and perenially popular author, Miyuki Miyabe. Saburo Sugimura is employed in the public relations sections of huge conglomerate, Imada Corporation. when he receives an odd request from his father-in-law, Yoshichika Imada, the company chairman. The favor has something to do with looking into the tragic death of the chairman's personal driver, Nobuo Kajita, who had been an enthusiastic supporter of Sugimura's marriage to the chairman's daughter. While Sugimura hopes the death was nothing more than an accident, new facts come to light that point instead to foul play. All people have "poison" in their hearts in varying quantities, and Sugimura finds that Kajita's death may have been the result of the daily gradual spread of secretly-harbored poison of the heart. Here then ensues a genuine psycho thriller that brings the varied drama of the human condition into bold relief.

The male-female reversal of fortunes all began here… in the Edo period under the rule of third-generation Tokugawa shogun, Iemitsu. An epidemic illness affecting only men and boys has thinned the male population to one-quarter that of females. Iemitsu himself falls ill and succumbs to the plague, sparking a crisis of succession within the Tokugawa family. This prompts head lady of the court, Kasuga-no-Tsubone, to find a born-out-of-wedlock daughter of Iemitsu, disguise her as a boy and secretly groom her in the palace’s inner palace as Iemitsu. When she turns 16, Kasuga-no-Tsubone coerces the handsome Buddhist priest, Arikoto, visiting from Kyoto to serve the girl heir Iemitsu as her page. Arikoto ends up unable to resist Kasuga-no-Tusbone’s pressure and laicizes himself and his young pupil, Gyoku, to enter into the service of the inner palace. The result is a female shogun and 3,000 handsome male attendants, all entwined in the intrigue, jealousies and pure love drama of Edo castle.

A woman cartoonist struggles to make her way in the face of social restrictions. Her home office is the setting for encounters with editors, assistants and even her mother-in-law, and it’s often hard to distinguish friend from foe. Yet her ability to deal with problems somehow makes our own difficulties more bearable.