2022 Reading Plan Week 2 "Barrel River Stalking Massacre"

This book is the 7th highest scoring book in Douban in 2021

■ This work is known as the "Japan Journalists' Conference (JCJ) Award" and the "Editor's Choice Magazine Reporting Award", which has been praised as "Journalist's Textbook" and "Pyramid of Japanese Documentary Literature".

■ This case led to the promulgation of Japan's Code of Conduct for Tracking Harassment Act.

Why should we read this book?

This book is not a criminal case documentary in the simple sense, but from the perspective of a conscientious reporter of a "third-rate" weekly magazine "FOCUS", the mental journey of tracking a seemingly ordinary murder.

This book has a strong sense of substitution, and readers will follow up and think next to Qing Shuijie (the author himself) as a reporter. The peaks and turns, the appearance of inconspicuous information and personnel, so that the third-rate small reporters who were not recognized by the police station gradually stopped relying on the information given by the police, and even found the key figures Takeshi Komatsu and Kawakami before the police, and the main culprits of the case, Komatsu kazuya, had already surfaced. This situation alone allows the author to gradually have a new understanding of the case and reflect on the causes of similar incidents.

The victim, Shiori Ino, and her family went to the police station many times before the crime to report the crime, why did they not get attention?

Why did the police treat the case negatively many times during the case? Or even go to the door to tempt family members to "withdraw the case"?

After the reporter provided the police with information about the murderer, why did the police remain indifferent?

After the murderer was arrested, why didn't the police issue a wanted arrest for the mastermind?

Is the final characterization and wanted for the case even more ridiculous?

Why has the police been dominating mainstream public opinion? Why is the information of these key figures not valued and made public?

Is the occurrence of the whole case a case? Is the attitude of the police station really just a few individual police officers who have been dismissed?

Finally, it is gratifying that after this case, Japan's Code of Conduct for Tracking Harassment was introduced.

After reading this book, I feel more enjoyable than reading speculative fiction in the past. The simple words, delicate brushstrokes and character descriptions, only because they originate from the truth, step by step stripping away the cocoon and the review of the key dialogues make people call "as it is".