Journey Under the Midnight Sun (Byakuyako) — Filming Locations & Real Places

Journey Under the Midnight Sun left me heavy for a while after I finished it, so I went looking into where it was set.

Turns out this is one of the few Higashino novels that names a real place directly: Fuse, a district of Higashiosaka City, Osaka.

Kintetsu Fuse Station and the Fuse Honodori shopping street right in front of it — the neighborhood where the 1973 case begins is a real place you can visit today.

It still carries the texture of a working-class Showa-era Osaka neighborhood, which is why it stirs nostalgia for older generations of Osaka residents.

The pawnshop, Kirihara, was never given an exact address. Fuse itself is real, but the shop where the case unfolds stays fictional.

오사카성 천수각 · CC BY-SA · Wikimedia Commons

The story opens in 1973, when the pawnshop's owner, Yosuke Kirihara, is found murdered. Detective Sasagaki discovers the victim had been visiting the Nishimoto household, but without decisive evidence, the case goes cold.

Then the novel leaps forward. From 1973 to 1992, across nineteen years, it alternates between two children — Yukiho and Ryoji — growing into entirely different lives.

Yukiho becomes a flawless, high-society woman, worlds away from her impoverished childhood. Ryoji's path diverges after his father's death.

The two of them barely ever appear on the page together — but reading it, you sense they've never once stopped watching each other, one way or another.

It's right there in the title. 'Byakuya' means a night when the sun never fully sets — neither day nor night. These two never once walk together under real sunlight in their entire lives. Once you finish the book, the title reads completely differently.

도톤보리(道頓堀) 거리, 오사카 · Wikimedia Commons

Even after retiring, Detective Sasagaki can't put the case down. Following his relentless nineteen-year pursuit, the reader is gradually drawn toward a truth.

I won't spell out what the two of them really were to each other here. But there's a reason this is often called the Higashino novel with the deepest, heaviest aftertaste of them all.

Serialized starting in 1997, this novel made it to the Naoki Prize finals but didn't win that year — that came later, in 2006, for The Devotion of Suspect X.

It was adapted into a film in 2011, starring Maki Horikita and Kengo Kora. Following Higashino's death in July 2026, this novel — perhaps the one most steeped in the Osaka of his own hometown — is being revisited again.

Visit Fuse, and you can walk the actual street where these two lives began to split apart. Wandering the shopping street, you'll probably keep imagining the two of them watching each other from somewhere, always just out of sight.