Frequently Asked Questions

The Joseon Retrospective is the first novel in the Keiko Ito Mystery Series by J. McCarthy. Keiko Ito, Senior Registrar at the National Art Center Tokyo, has spent nineteen years documenting everything that enters and leaves the museums she serves. When Dr. Yun Se-bin — the Korean provenance researcher accompanying a Joseon dynasty moon jar — is found dead in a basement service corridor, Keiko follows the only trail she knows how to read: the documentary one. Badge logs, inspection schedules, and 1938 acquisition records lead her somewhere the police investigation cannot yet see.

Yes. The National Art Center, Tokyo opened in Roppongi in 2007, and it is that rare thing among major art institutions: a museum with no permanent collection — everything arrives, is documented, is exhibited, and goes home again. Everything else in the novel is invented: the staff, the exhibitions, the security arrangements, and the crime. No character is based on any person who has ever worked there.

Readers of cozies will feel at home: there is no graphic violence and no explicit content, and the crime itself stays off the page. But it is a quiet, literary take on the form — closer to a documentary procedural than a village whodunit. If you like your mysteries gentle in content and serious in theme, this is that book.

Keiko is not a detective; she is a registrar, and she solves the case the way a registrar would — through badge logs, condition reports, archives, and the details others overlook. The novel is deliberately slow-burn: justice arrives through documentary evidence rather than car chases. If you have been looking for a mystery with a meticulous, introverted protagonist who works in records and archives, Keiko was written for you.

Yes — carefully. During Japan’s colonial rule of Korea (1910–1945), a very large number of Korean cultural objects left the peninsula, many under circumstances the paperwork of the period recorded in careful euphemism. The specific documents in the novel are inventions, but the pattern they represent is documented history, and the work of tracing and returning such objects — provenance research and cultural restitution — continues today.

It’s written for readers of The Cloisters and The Last Masterpiece who love a quiet, documentary mystery in the tradition of B.A. Shapiro — an art-world novel that trusts paperwork the way other mysteries trust confrontation.

The novel closes with the case’s own paperwork — a colonial-era letter in translation, an exhibition checklist, a provenance ledger, a floor plan, and a glossary. All are inventions, presented the way Keiko would have filed them. Newsletter subscribers receive an expanded digital dossier free: The Condition Report, The Catalog Entry with its neighboring entries, The 1938 Letter in an annotated edition, and The Floor Plan with all three plates.

Each Keiko Ito novel tells a complete case. Starting with The Joseon Retrospective is best — it introduces Keiko, the museum, and the questions the series keeps asking — but no book will strand you.

Ebook, paperback, and hardcover, available everywhere books are sold, beginning October 2026.

The Unsigned Falcon, Book Two of the Keiko Ito Mystery Series, arrives in Spring 2027. Read the teaser and be first to hear the publication date here.

The novel contains a murder and its investigation, handled without graphic depiction. Its historical thread — the colonial-era dispossession of a Korean family’s heirloom — is treated seriously and without sensationalism.

Keiko’s cat: ink-dark, with a white smudge on his chest like spilled correction fluid, already middle-aged and opinionated when she brought him home. He supervises the case from the kitchen table. Newsletter subscribers occasionally receive dispatches from his side of it.

Yes — twelve discussion questions, printed in the back of the book and free to download here. The guide is deliberately spoiler-free, so groups can read it before everyone has finished.