Quest For The Missing Girl back

A tale very much for our times as one man perseveres against corporate corruption and police complicity to soldier on in the face of overwhelming odds to find the missing daughter of his late best friend who married the woman of his dreams. Accompanied by flashbacks to his experience way up high in the magnificent mountains of Japan, shared with his best friend and indeed with that man's daughter, Shiga must venture into the less familiar territories of urban crime and high-rise corporate grime to find a girl he presumed naive and innocent, but who was in fact far more worldly-wise than he. She's just got in over her head. No one wants to talk, not even her so-called best friend. Shiga will have to adapt swiftly and intelligently to what he finds in front of him before the trail goes as dead as the girl he's now searching for. And then he's going to have to scale something even more treacherous than the most difficult of mountain passes - literally.
Taniguchi stands shoulders above so many of this peers. There's an interest in personal ethics that is most certainly a nationalistically shared trait, but which finds itself reflected in lamentably few manga books so far translated. And then there's his love of the beauty of nature as evidenced in WALKING MAN, while the two are combined in A DISTANT NEIGHBOURHOOD volumes one and two.