If The Dedication of Skeptic X shows the profound duality of the protagonist: pure love and extreme rationality, then Malicious shows the chilling ugly part of human nature itself. "Malicious" is described in this novel as a strong negative emotion towards an object with no reason or little reason. This kind of emotion is subtle at first, but in the end it is extremely surging.
I'm sorry I didn't read this novel earlier. It was published by 1996 ... but even if I read it at that time, I'm afraid I couldn't understand it. Even if I did, I'm afraid it wouldn't be as profound as it is today. If you finish reading this novel earlier, you may be able to take a more calm attitude towards many things that happened later, because people's "malice" is so unreasonable. I may not ask so many "why" questions, and I don't think there are so many things I can't understand-if I am a victim in a novel, it is a typical death without knowing. A little misunderstanding or hatred in daily life, compared with the psychological activities and actions of the characters in this book, is probably really the difference between fireflies and the moon.
It is a rule that the ending of mystery novels can't be said in advance, so I can't tell you what happened. Because of the particularity of the story itself, if I say a little, I have to say something else, and then little by little, it becomes a line, and this line is truth.
What makes this novel so special lies in its special form: record. Or further, Malicious is not a novel, but an anthology of diaries or notes of several people. The problem is that when we read the same incident described by different people, it is easy to believe any one of them, so that when we read 1/3, we thought the truth of the incident had been exposed, but we could really sit for the next two thirds and find ourselves seriously fooled by the author again. In addition, the biggest feature of diary is "subjectivity", which subjectively describes objective events. And because most people think that what is written in the diary must be true thoughts, the degree of cheating in the diary may be the highest. Kaga, a talented agent created by Keigo Higashino this time, is a person who can realize this and keep a pair of eyes in the dark clouds laid by the murderer. Speaking of which, I'm really ashamed. As an ordinary reader, I also racked my brains to follow the investigation, and finally found that I was really a big guy and was cheated for a long time, just because I thought it was ... in fact, ...
In addition, the last article "The Dedication of Skeptic X" mentioned that Dongye is good at switching between different perspectives. But this time, he brought the benefits of the first angle of view to the extreme, that is, revealing the minimum facts, so that readers gradually put on first-person glasses, which made them unable to extricate themselves. The first perspective may be extremely applicable in the creation of love literature, because being there can reflect the deep hatred of love. However, the first perspective is a challenge in mystery novels. Although the author has the right to write and disclose the least information at will, on the other hand, he loses the opportunity to let another character he created participate in deception. That is to say, what A has done is not testified by B, so when writing A alone, he can do whatever he wants, and when writing B, it must be completely consistent with what A did before. However, A and B do not appear at the same time, which makes the matching things lag behind and makes it easier to check the authenticity. Of course, you are smart enough to arrange several lines in advance, so there will be no inconsistent low-level mistakes. But the question is, how to make these lines that travel alone finally converge into a net, which is not only reasonable but also surprising, but for a work with a first perspective, this is the biggest problem. Sometimes this is equivalent to letting the reader completely overturn what he has read before, and not only that, but also taking off his hat to the author's thoughtful consideration. This job is not easy.
I suddenly thought of william faulkner's famous saying: "Facts really have little to do with the truth." The fact and the truth are usually completely irrelevant. I'm afraid this sentence is the best word to explain the beauty of this novel. This is not only manifested in the deception of the first-person narrative mentioned above, but also in the theme of this novel-"the viciousness of human nature." Although the cases used in Dongye's novels are juvenile delinquency and school violence, it is a bit low to classify the theme only at this level. In my opinion, the author probably chose this carrier out of concern for this social problem, but it only lengthens the horizontal length, which makes people shudder that malice can exist for so long. I'm afraid what Dongye really wants to say is what he spit out when a student in Kaga's class who was a middle school teacher at that time was asked why he abused his classmates: "ただにわなぃから" (that is, he didn't like that guy)-people. Many people we usually see may be normal in fact, but if we dig deeper into their truth, we find that there are 108 thousand. The superposition of facts may only be the result, and the superposition of truth is the reason. Therefore, I admire Schwarzman, the founder of Blackstone Group, a once famous private equity fund, who said, "I need to know what makes a person successful." I need to know what people are motivated to do something. If you want to know what kind of life a person leads, don't look at it by his usual performance. Of course, this does not mean that everyone can't believe it, but it is true that most things that are easy to believe will be falsified.
It's another long speech, and I don't know how many people will buy this book because of my reading experience. However, I think my motivation at this time is:) Not only to tell you that there is a mystery novel called Malice, written by Keigo Higashino, which is very beautiful and such a thing. But I'm telling you, if you want to know more about human nature, or accurately, the dark side of human nature, I'm afraid this novel will be a good way.