Japan, 1946. The country has just lost the war and has not yet begun to recover. In the most recondite places, progress has barely arrived and people are still anchored in the customs and traditions of their ancestors. The men who return from the front are faced with the difficult task of resuming their lives with the imperishable memory of the comrades who have not been able to return. «I ask you to go to the island of Gokumon in my place ... If not, they will kill my sisters ...». These are the last words that Chimata addresses to his friend and war comrade, Kindaichi Kōsuke, before passing away. Moved by moral obligation, this will travel to Gokumon-tō, literally, the Isle of the Gates of Hell, a small islet populated by descendants of pirates, located in the middle of the Seto Inland Sea. There you will find a closed and suspicious community of the stranger, in which a series of horrible murders planned in cold blood, which escape reason, are taking place. Thus begins a superb thriller starring one of the most beloved and remembered detectives in Japan, a hero who, under his eccentric appearance, hides some prodigious deductive skills that he will have to use to fit the pieces of a puzzle in which they intermingle Secrets of the past, struggles for power and classic haiku. Gokumon-tō is considered by Japanese readers as the best mystery novel of the twentieth century.