七日間の遺書

About this title

Creator
crom編集部
Status
Ongoing

Synopsis

Haruka Asakura, twenty-seven years old. Her father, Kazunari, fell to his death from a hotel during a business trip in the autumn when Haruka was twelve. Her mother, Shino, died four years later when her car went over a guardrail on a rainy prefectural road. Separate accidents, separate years, separate places. No one connected the two.

After the fifteenth anniversary of her father's death, Haruka discovers his old datebook in the closet of her family home. Tucked into the last page is a single line written in her mother's handwriting, dated three days before her father's death. That night, Haruka slips on the stairs at home, and when she wakes, she finds herself on September 1st, fifteen years in the past, in her childhood bedroom. Not in her twelve-year-old body, but still in her twenty-seven-year-old form. She has no choice but to approach her parents by introducing herself as "a junior colleague from Father's company."

She can remain in the past only from September 1st through the 7th, the days before her father's death. When the morning of the seventh day arrives, Haruka is inevitably pulled back to the present and must start over again from September 1st. All she can bring back with her is memory. And with each loop, only the fates of those she touches shift slightly—in the loop where she manages to save her father, her mother dies on the seventh day instead.

The suspects were close at hand. Her father's colleague, Ryota Kuze, behind his facade as "the kind senior who looked up to Father," was holding ledgers of the company's fraudulent accounting. Department Chief Kashiwagi, whom her father had been trying to expose, was also an acquaintance of her mother's from her student days. Her mother's best friend, Natsumi Mizushima, is the only person who knew the circumstances her mother couldn't tell anyone, and her testimony changes with each loop. And Haruka's current boyfriend, Sota Shiga, appears as a boy standing in an alley during the second loop—a boy who shouldn't have been in this town fifteen years ago.

With each loop, Haruka comes to realize that her image of her family was a fabrication. Her father's business trip wasn't for work. The site of her mother's accident wasn't on the road to her mother's family home. Though their deaths are four years apart, both have their cause within the same single week. And what is finally revealed is the fact that Haruka herself, at age twelve, triggered this loop where something inevitably happens on the seventh day. The single line from her mother tucked in the datebook was a suicide note addressed to Haruka.

In the final act, Haruka must choose: expose the truth and rewrite both deaths as "murder," or honor the final promise her parents made to each other and let them rest as accidents.

Main Characters

Asakura Haruka is a twenty-seven-year-old medical office worker, cautious and meticulous about records, with a habit of measuring people by facts rather than emotions. Asakura Kazunari (father, forty) is a sincere, taciturn accounting section chief. Asakura Shino (mother, thirty-eight) is a former teacher who appears cheerful but harbors secrets. Kuze Ryota is her father's colleague, a man in whom sincerity and calculation coexist. Department Chief Kashiwagi is the prime suspect yet the first to be cleared. Mizushima Natsumi is her mother's best friend who has reasons for giving false testimony. Shiga Sota is her current boyfriend, yet the greatest mystery is his presence in the town fifteen years ago.

Structural Intent

In the first loop, she devotes all her energy to saving her father, and the moment she thinks she's succeeded, her mother dies. From the second loop onward, the choice of "whom to save" becomes the investigation itself in this mystery, with the morning of the seventh day serving as the time limit and cliffhanger for each episode. With each loop, the hidden face of one suspect is peeled away, and in the final act comes the structural reversal: "both accidents are rooted in the same single week."

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