Juvenile laws are not enacted for victims or to stop crimes, but exist to save juvenile delinquency. From these legal provisions, the grief and unwillingness of the victims cannot be seen, only the illusory morality that ignores the status quo.
---- Keigo Higashino's "Blade of Wandering"
"The Wandering Blade" is a controversial work of Keigo Higashino, but it has always attracted the attention of readers because of its twisty plot and soul-piercing torture.
Fifteen-year-old Nagamine and his father are kidnapped by three bad boys at a fireworks display, and the teenage devils abuse the flower girl to death and record the whole process of their violence with video.
Two days later, Nagamine's body was found downstream of the Arakawa River. In grief, his father, Nagamine, receives a call from an informant and finds the address of the murderer. Saw videos of her daughter being abused. When the law cannot give him justice in his heart, he can only take revenge with shotguns and blood.
An ordinary middle-aged office worker, in the murderer's residence, looks at the image of the daughter of The Pearl in the Palm of the Hand being humiliated, and every frame is torture, but he cannot help but look at it, because he wants to find the murderer.
Whatever picture would appear, he said to himself, whatever picture would appear, he would have to look at it. Perhaps this is the only chance to find out the truth about Emo's death.
He shed tears. The thought of the daughter left to him by his wife, whom he had always regarded as more important than his life, and his only treasure in this life, had been ravaged by this scum who could only become a beast, he almost went crazy.
Hell isn't over yet, and the picture of Emo being violated by the men clearly appears on the screen. The men were like beasts, and they didn't look at the fifteen-year-old Emo as a human being. They let her put herself in various positions to satisfy her ugly desires.
Reading this passage can make people shudder and despair, so when Nagamboshi executes him with a kitchen knife and castrates one of the culprits, he will feel happy after being bloody.
Changfeng Shigeki did not choose to call the police, because these devils are not yet underage, they can be sheltered under the juvenile protection law, just go to jail for a few years, and then live again. The murderer who took someone else's life has not been taken away.
Nagamasa knew he had no power to punish criminals. This should be the duty of the court, but will the court really sanction them?
No, through newspapers and television, Changfeng knew how the trial was conducted. In his personal perception, the court will not sanction criminals.
In such cases, the name of the teenager will not be exposed, and the case will not be tried in public. Therefore, only he himself can punish the beasts that insult Emo.
Escape and revenge become the main theme of the later text, and the story ends with the police shooting and killing Nagamine Shigeki in order to protect the murderer who insulted Emo. Such an ending feels ironic and dark, but it is often a portrayal of reality.
In the final chapter, Officer Kutsuka's interpretation of the police and the law is even more thought-provoking.
The police do not protect the citizens, but protect the law, and desperately run to prevent the law from being breached. But is the law absolutely correct? If it is absolutely true, why do you have to change it so frequently? The law is not perfect. Can the police do whatever they want to protect imperfect laws? Does it not matter if you trample on the hearts of others?
The police sympathize with Changfeng, but they have to stop Changfeng's revenge, so which side of justice is it? Therefore, as the blade of justice, they also began to become wandering.
"The Wandering Blade" and "Murder on the Orient Express" are both stories about "extrajudicial lynching", the difference is that the latter has a successful revenge and has the help of everyone on the road to revenge, while the former is completely tragic. The sad and angry father walked alone in the night, but in the end he only carried out his revenge halfway and took his own life.
From beginning to end, the long peaks and heavy trees are lonely. The parents of the murderers did not feel the slightest apology and guilt for the murdered girl, but instead defended the shelter everywhere. The rape of young girls is described as a prank on girls.
Unscrupulous media people use the victims' families to increase profits, awakening their painful memories over and over again, without the slightest regard for how much harm this will bring to their lives and psychology.
People who don't care about themselves treat this matter as a cooking talk, and still choose to forgive easily after expressing anger in the face of the camera. Because it's not them who are hurting.
If "The Wandering Blade" is just a literary creation, then the murder of a mother and daughter in Hikari city in 1999 has caused a discussion of juvenile delinquency in Japanese society as a whole.
In this incident, the murderer was an eighteen-year-old juvenile suspect Takayuki Fukuda. Disguised as a worker inspecting drainage pipes, he entered the victim's home with the intention of rape. After fierce resistance, the victim was strangled to death and the body was raped. Fearing that the eleven-month-old baby girl would cry and attract the attention of his neighbors, he strangled the baby girl to death.
The killer was caught, but a large group of human rights lawyers claimed that he was a minor and that "there are endless possibilities in the future", and the court refused to sentence him to death. As a result, Kimura, who had lost his wife and daughter, began to seek appeals continuously.
What is chilling is that the murderer Takayuki Fukuda was very comfortable during his arrest, and he actually wrote in a letter to a friend: "It was just a male dog walking on the road, and happened to meet a cute female dog, and the male dog naturally rode up... Is this also sinful? “
For such an unrepentant murderer, because it involves Japan's sensitive and controversial "human rights," a large number of "human rights" lawyers in Japan have huddled together to defend him. On appeal to the Supreme Court, Takayuki Fukuda had as many as 21 defense lawyers. These human rights lawyers defend so-called justice with their absurd arguments.
Where vice is vengeance follows. In nine years, three trials, and a dozen court sessions, the evil teenager Fukuda was finally sentenced to death, but the defense team was still going through the appeal process (in 2012, the appeal was rejected, and the defense team filed a retrial request). To this day, Fukuda remains held in the Hiroshima Detention Center.
The book "The Wandering Blade" is Keigo Higashino's speculation and torture of juvenile delinquency as a writer, and such a work naturally caused great repercussions in Japanese society. Japan and South Korea have related film and television adaptations, which are worth watching.
Korean version of the Wandering Blade Movie (starring Jung Jae-yong)
Japanese Version of the Wandering Blade Movie (Starring Satoshi Terao)