Matsumoto Seicho is a famous contemporary Japanese novelist, born in 1909 in Kokura City, Fukuoka Prefecture.After graduating from high school, he worked in an electrical machinery factory and a lithographic printing factory, and his life was hard.Since 1938, he has successively worked in the Kyushu Island Branch, the Western Headquarters, and the Tokyo Headquarters of the Asahi Shimbun, while practicing writing.In 1950, he published his first work "Saigo Banknotes", using the chaotic situation caused by the excessive issuance of military bills by the Saigo Army led by Saigo Takamori in the early Meiji period to allude to the inflation and depreciation of banknotes in Japan in the early postwar period.In 1952, he won the Akutagawa Award for "The Biography of Ogura Diary", and has since entered the literary world.In this short story, the author expresses sympathy for those who are struggling at the bottom of society.In 1956, he resigned from the newspaper office and started his career as a professional writer.

Matsumoto Seicho was a prolific writer. In 1974 Bungeishunjusha published "The Complete Works of Matsumoto Seicho" in 38 volumes.Since 1963, he has successively served as the chairman and president of the Japan Reasoning Writers Association, and he resigned in 1977. Matsumoto's early works were mostly historical themes, and he also wrote some short mystery novels, such as "Cold Current" and so on.Mystery novels are a popular literary genre in Japan. The main content is to write criminal investigation stories based on logical reasoning.Matsumoto was not satisfied with this. He wrote "Starting Point of Zero", "Points and Lines", "Eye Wall", "Pictures of the Black Land", "Sandware" and so on from the late 1950s to the early 1960s. , endeavoring to explore the complex factors of modern Japanese society by focusing on the motives of crimes in a broad social context.These works have an obvious tendency of realism, high ideological and artistic qualities, and are very popular among readers.In this way, mystery novels have entered a new stage of development, thus forming a unique literary genre-socialist mystery novels.

The most characteristic of Seicho Matsumoto's works is the reportage that exposes the inside story of the US and Japanese authorities after the war, which is his representative work in this regard.In addition, he also wrote "Modern Bureaucracy". Published in three volumes from 1960 to 1961, the book has a total of 12 chapters, all of which analyze some famous unjust prisons or atrocities that occurred in Japan during the US occupation.The author said in the post: "I did not write these works with an anti-American point of view from the beginning, nor did I use the scale of 'conspiracy of the occupation army' to measure all events from the beginning. I am just investigating each event. After the ins and outs, such a conclusion can be drawn."

In 1962, the author selected six of them, revised them, and published them as an anthology. This book is translated based on this anthology. editor August 1979