The ones who thought they were too smart

I am a senior accountant at a firm in Shinjuku and I have been auditing accounts for twenty-four years. In that time I have encountered a small number of situations that I cannot discuss and a larger number that I can discuss only in fiction. Financial crime is, in my observation, always the same story: someone believed their setup was unusual enough that the ordinary detection methods would not apply. They are rarely correct. What interests me is the psychology between the decision to begin and the moment of discovery, which can span years and which involves a particular kind of double consciousness, the professional self and the other self, running in parallel. I write crime fiction in the evenings and on weekends. My current manuscript is set in a medium-sized construction company in Osaka and follows an accounts manager who discovers an anomaly that the firm's senior leadership clearly already knows about. The question is not who committed the fraud. The question is what she does with the knowledge. I read a great deal of Matsumoto Seichō growing up and I think his influence is still in everything I write, the attention to procedure, the moral weight placed on ordinary professional decisions.