The author of horror reasoning knows very well
Last year, when I received the translated version of Meng Ming Rishan's Other Personnel (2007) from the publishing house, I was not only very happy that the work of the Japanese horror novel geek, who has risen in recent years, was finally published in Taiwan Province, but I even privately imagined that Hirayama's another award-winning masterpiece, Monologue of the World Transverse Mercator Projection (2006), would also meet readers one day in the future.
After the Chinese translation of Other Personnel was published, I heard many comments about the polarization of this work. Some people think that "Reading Other Personnel" writes the most horrible and profound sense of despair in the world. Some people think that this work will only show off its cheapness and naked cruelty, which is not desirable in essence.
At present, in Taiwan Province Province, even within the scope of popular literature, horror novels have not reached the same recognized and valued position as other types of novels. Perhaps it is influenced by the conservative and limited publishing atmosphere for many years. It should be after the media lifted the ban and a large number of foreign horror films were imported. Prior to this, Taiwan Province province's understanding of horror novels was actually very limited, except for a few unavoidable masters, such as edgar allan poe or Stephen King.
In the state of few learning objects and behind closed doors, the creation of horror novels in Taiwan Province Province is not only based on a wide range of materials, but also relatively monotonous and poor in expression. On the other hand, the introduction of foreign versions is very slow and insufficient, which easily makes readers fall into the subjective feeling of "lack of good horror novels".
Just as mystery novels have already extended from the traditional puzzle school to cold and hard, police and bandit novels, crime novels and other tributaries, killing tricks and guessing the real killer are no longer the only writing routes in mystery novels. For mature and complete modern horror novels, "how to make readers feel more horrible and shudder" is not the absolute goal pursued by horror novels, but we often see it in modern horror novels. Writers constantly try to describe and portray "the extreme reaction of human beings in the face of fear" with various techniques, and further use the special emotions created in the story to connect the readers' real life and psychological state.
Therefore, whether the story stage is the real society or the overhead world, and whether the characters in the scene are ghosts or serial killers are actually rooted in the writers' creative choices and their creative attempts hidden between the lines. As for whether the reader really gets the horrible pleasure, it is still the focus of the writer's writing, but more proportion should depend on the reader's past reading experience and psychological expectation. From this point of view, it is not difficult to find that Hirayama uses concise, light and short text descriptions and diversified story settings, which makes its dramatic effect effectively played on the platform of mobile phone novels. In addition, readers are younger, and the use of comics or images is also a major feature.
In contrast, although they all belong to a collection of short stories, the expression of this monologue in the world horizontal Mercator projection is completely different from other people. Although Hirayama has always maintained the diversification of material selection, most of his works have been included in the planning library with the theme of "horror and strangeness", which is not only long in length, but also exquisite in layout, fully demonstrating his unique performance skills.
More importantly, for Meng Ming Hirayama, The Monologue of the World Transverse Mercator Projection is also a key milestone for him to become a popular Japanese writer from an ordinary writer who accepted the publishing plan. Therefore, before analyzing the characteristics of Hirayama's works, let's review the moment when it was assembled and published.
At that time, the Japanese reasoning literature was still filled with the atmosphere of disagreement that was still rippling after the end of the "Suspect X Ben Gur Debate".
The so-called "Debate on Suspect X Ben Gul" originated from Keigo Higashino's The Dedication of Suspect X (2005). Immediately after its publication, it swept the whole Japanese literary world, and it was invincible. In addition to including the three rankings of annual reasoning voting-This Mystery Novel by Bao Dao Institution, the Top Ten Case Reasoning of the Year by the original research and the Top Ten Case Reasoning of Wen Chun Weekly, it won the first place, and later won the134th Naoki Award and the sixth case.
Reito Nikaido, another writer who is good at case reasoning, put forward the argument that "although this novel is interesting and an excellent reasoning novel, it is not case reasoning" in his personal website "Black Dog and Black Cat Hall", and even thought that Dongye "didn't write the truth in the ending".
Soon, many famous figures and mystery novel research groups in Japanese mystery literature joined (or were involved in) this "What is a prototype mystery novel?" The debate about the definition of ""spread from the internet to magazines, but it hasn't subsided for a long time.
Just when the definition of this case reasoning has been flushed, in 2006, "This mystery novel is really amazing" fell below everyone's glasses. The horror novel Monologue of the World's Transverse Mercator Projection by Hirayama Meng Ming was unexpectedly unpopular, ahead of Sasaki's police novel Uniform Search (2006) and Shusuke Michio's case reasoning Shadow (2006). However, the other two rankings of that year,
This work can hardly be regarded as an empirical and cognitive mystery novel in terms of format and appeal, let alone beat everyone to win the first prize of "This mystery novel is really amazing". In particular, it is in great contrast with the demands of "pure love motive" and "Benge trick" in The Dedication of Suspect X, and I am afraid even "What is a mystery novel?" Will be brought up for review.
In an interview with Bao Dao Society, Hirayama, Meng Ming, once said that he never thought that his horror novel would become the champion of voting. There was no reasoning element, no story about catching the murderer, and even he didn't think it was a mystery novel.
However, in fact, all the stories that can stimulate readers' curiosity are full of "why?" "What will happen next? From the critical point of view, as long as there is a bizarre layout that people are constantly chasing and a convincing ending is given, The Elements can be classified as a generalized mystery novel.
So, maybe we can taste the short stories in this book from this angle.
Nicotine and teenagers were originally included in The Devil's Feast III-Caozi at Home (200 1) compiled by monster master Shigeru Mizuki. The so-called "Hayashi Kusoko" is a short story circulated in Muromachi era (1336- 1573). These stories describe the traditional customs of Japan and are full of folk flavor, including the famous stories such as One-inch Master and Taro Qidao.
Since the concept of "Imperial Kusoko" is applied, the stage of "Nicotine and Teenagers" is naturally modern Japanese society. Hirayama's horror novels are mostly inspired by the current realistic environment, highlighting the distorted and deformed face of society from a special perspective. We saw school bullying written by Hirayama, Meng Ming in Rezare is Terrible, and we can read more extensive "group violence" in Nicotine and Teenagers.
Group violence can be said to be an oppression of "non-Chinese". A closed group is bound by ethics or social norms. In order to alleviate the pressure and bitterness of interpersonal relationships, it seeks for specific members who lack the ability to resist, and obtains a sense of personal superiority and collective identity from the malicious behavior of crowding out and bullying this object.
A few years ago, the word "gap" was popular in Japan, which means that there is no gap and communication between different social classes, which will solidify social classes and further expand social contradictions, which is extremely unfavorable to the long-term development of society. Based on the gap between the rich and the poor and the gap between urban and rural areas, the elites of the upper class constantly try to consolidate and safeguard their vested interests, resulting in social phenomena such as "information gap" (only some classes can obtain important information) and "education gap" (the educational resources enjoyed by different classes are far from each other). Nicotine and Teenagers describes a "society with poor morality", and the townspeople discriminate against tramps, which makes people shudder after reading it.
Just as mystery writers are bound to challenge Murder in the Chamber of Secrets, the classic theme that horror writers are bound to challenge should be "cannibalism", and "ω Eucharist" is Hirayama's work that challenges this theme-taking the trio's "corpse disposal" as the main axis, the whole story permeates Hirayama's unique personal style: cold, bizarre, surreal and tragedy hidden in the bottom of his master's psychology.
This book was first included in the book Alien 14 ── Circus at the End of the Century (2000) edited by Jing Shangjing Yan. This is also the first time that Hirayama was included in the commemorative works of Alien Collection, and he has since become a regular writer of this series.
At the beginning of his debut, Hirayama was invited to write a planned book series "Super Horror Story", and he wrote anything as long as it made readers unhappy and fishy. During this period, he also mastered the writing skills to quickly seduce readers' curiosity. 1994, he published The Killing of Extraordinary Happiness, a criminal record, which introduced seven serial killers who appeared in the United States in the 20th century. Their criminal acts were outrageous and attracted considerable attention. Later, in 1996, he published a long horror novel "The Sinker" and officially debuted as a novelist.
Sink-Sink quoted the story structure of Thomas Harris (1988), taking sadistic serial killing as the theme, and adding special elements of super-power case handling, which won good comments and attracted Masahiko Inoue's attention. According to Hirayama, Inoue Masahiko was very nervous when writing, because his editor's eyes were sharp and his writing was not good enough to be published. However, if he can be adopted, it means that he also has the talent to write this type of novel.
Because there are many famous writers in Alien Collection, Hirayama thinks this is the best stage to become more prominent and establish himself. In this way, Hirayama regularly published short stories in Alien Collection, which was finally compiled into a book.
Pray for Innocence was published in the issue of problem novel1March 1999, with the theme of "child abuse". If readers still remember Disassembling My Son and Mom and Gear, it is not hard to imagine that Home is Hirayama's favorite object. In this work, Hirayama not only combines the description of serial killers that he is good at, but also integrates the Stockholm syndrome from a special perspective, adding some unspeakable complex poems mixed with cruelty and pure love.
The Portrait of Operation Restriction is included in The Collection of Alien Works 34- Art Preference (2005), which describes a future world in which human values are completely different from modern times. It is a typical theme in science fiction to imagine the future world as a resurrected totalitarian government and control people's minds with more unimaginable technology.
The characters in Hirayama's novels often have some social marginality. Apart from the strangeness of daily behavior, more importantly, the psychological quality of these characters is always incompatible with the public, but their strong feelings are more vivid and profound than those in the bleak apartment. From this work, we can see Hirayama's skill in describing "degenerates".
Hirayama's crime thriller works are deeply influenced by The Silence of the Lambs, and another example can be seen in Egg Man published in Alien Collection 17 ── Night of Robots (2000). In this novel, the interaction between Egg Man and Karen is reminiscent of the relationship between Dr. Lecter and clarice Starling. However, with the addition of sci-fi background and the arrogant and cold-blooded statement of "Egg Man", this story with simple relationship between characters has been interpreted surprisingly well.
In Japanese bookstores, there is a special bookcase in travel books, which contains "dark trips" to the African continent and underdeveloped countries in South Asia. This kind of scalp-numbing, treading on thin ice's alternative travel experience is only to satisfy readers' curiosity, and I'm afraid it's impossible to evaluate its authenticity. Although this kind of travel notes make ordinary people stay away from it, they are rich resources for the "tropical zone that should not be visited". This book, published in the June 2003 issue of Novel Gem, is a dangerous journey in the wild world. However, despite the bloody brutality, Hirayama's unique black humor still flashes from time to time in his works. Life really doesn't matter.
The Monologue of the World Transverse Mercator Projection Map was published in Alien Collection 32- Magic Map (2005), which is a crime novel that personifies the map. It is this work that makes Hirayama take the first step to be promoted to a first-line writer.
In May 2006, the Japanese Inferior Writers Association awarded this work the Short Story of the Year Award. The protagonist of the story is an "atlas carried by a serial killer"-an anthropomorphic map, which acts as the latitude and longitude of the murderer for a long time with the humble narrative tone of a mansion housekeeper, as if the real protagonist was leading the crime.
This novel is full of fantasy, and it is a crime novel with a very strange perspective. At the same time, it also symbolizes that japanese mystery's definition territory is constantly expanding and evolving, and there will be more avant-garde and experimental special works in the future, not just sticking to the traditional categories of puzzle solving and gangster novels.
Face like a monster? The Son and the Man with the Melting Bell was included in Alien Collection 19 ── Nightmare (200 1), which is definitely the ultimate display of Hirayama-style sadomasochism. The story stage is also a recent fictional world, with laboratories specializing in torture. The protagonist is a cold and silent executioner. While he executed people with all kinds of tools without expression, he created a clean and beautiful lake house in his dream, belonging to his own utopia. No matter how much blood is stained on his hands, he can be purified as long as he enters that dreamland.
One day, a mysterious woman with a broken appearance came to surrender and asked for punishment. As a result, they began a series of confrontation between abuse and abuse. Abusers are more vicious, while masochists want to find "romance" in punishment This process is horrible and difficult to understand, but with the development of more and more bloody plots, the deepest sadness collides with the ending. In the Japanese mystery literary world, I fell into "What is a prototype mystery novel? When the debate on the definition of "monologue of the world's horizontal Mercator projection" is deadlocked, it gives reasoning fans a different perspective. Such an extreme and unusual work may make us reflect: no matter how grotesque the expression is and how challenging the moral limit is, "man" is the most important mystery in the novel after all.