Keiko Ito has spent nineteen years as a registrar, the last eleven at the National Art Center Tokyo. She documents everything that enters and leaves one of Japan's most prestigious exhibition venues. She does not investigate crimes. She reconciles records.Then the body of Dr. Se-bin Yun, the Korean provenance researcher accompanying a Joseon dynasty moon jar, is found in a basement service corridor. Keiko discovers something the police cannot see. Se-bin left a message, not in a note, but as a seven-line annotation handwritten in Korean on page four of Keiko's own condition report.While the official investigation circles a defensive visiting scholar, a nervous estate lawyer, and a deputy director with three missing hours, Keiko follows the only trail she trusts. She checks the badge log that records every door, the inspection schedule she filed herself, and the 1938 acquisition records buried in a second-floor archive. Se-bin found those records and chose, deliberately, to protect them inside the one system nobody thought to watch.What begins as a registrar's itch, the specific unease of a professional who knows something is not where it should be, becomes the methodical construction of an airtight case.Unfolding across ten days in late October and concluding six weeks later in December, The Joseon Retrospective is a literary mystery about institutional trust, colonial history, and the quiet, durable power of a correctly maintained record.For readers of The Cloisters and The Last Masterpiece who love a quiet, documentary mystery in the tradition of B.A. Shapiro.Approximately 245 pages. Includes a reading group guide and archival appendices: a provenance timeline, the 1938 letter, a floor plan, and a glossary of curatorial terms.