"When the Prayer Ends" is another long speculative novel by Keigo Higashino after "Relief Grocery Store", and won the 48th Eiji Yoshikawa Literary Award after its publication.
The protagonist of the book is the criminal police officer Kyoichiro Kaga, who divorced his father when he was very young, and the news of his mother again was the news of his mother's death. In order to understand his mother's life after the divorce, he was transferred to the Nihonbashi jurisdiction, but after more than ten years of investigation, he still knew nothing about his mother's life.
Until a woman is strangled in a cheap apartment, in the process of tracking down the case, Kaga Kyoichiro discovers one of the clues related to the twelve bridges, which he has seen in his mother's relic. After an in-depth investigation, Kaga finally found the truth of the case and got a letter left to him by his mother.
Some people will abandon their own flesh and blood because of selfishness, and some people will hide their names for decades in order to let their daughters live a stable life, and even pay for their lives.
The image comes from the internet
<h1 class="pgc-h-arrow-right" >01 shallow middle male</h1>
Hiromi Asami's childhood was not good.
Mom was always complaining that Dad didn't have any money, that she had been tricked by a matchmaker to marry him, and that she was always in contact with some people who didn't have much to do. So much so that Hiromi was ridiculed and isolated by her classmates at school because of her mother's bad reputation.
And Dad was always very silent, silently making money and living silently.
Bo Mei once thought that life should not be worse.
However, one day, my mother took all the money in the family and ran away with someone else. In addition, she borrowed money from loan sharks in the name of Bo Mei's father.
Loan sharks come to the door every day to collect debts, but their purpose is not on money, but on Bomei - they want to take Bomei to pay off the debt.
This time, Hiromi's father, who was forced to a dead end by his wife, finally stopped being silent, and he escaped with Hiromi on a dark and windy night in a month.
Maybe that's the explosive power of parenting. If it was for himself, he could bear any humiliation, suffering and blow, but he could not let his daughter be taken away, and he could not let her life be ruined.
Images are from the Image Gallery
They fled to a very remote place where Hiromi's father found a cliff below the sea.
In fact, at this time, Bomei's father was ready to commit suicide.
He was penniless and didn't know how to live with his daughter. He thought that if he died, his daughter would be taken care of by the government agencies, so that she could live safely.
Yet life is always full of changes. Before Hiromi's father prepares to commit suicide, Hiromi kills someone.
While they were eating at a small restaurant, they once met a man who worked at a nuclear power plant. This person saw through the dilemma that Bo mei and her father were running away from debt, so he used pocket money to lure Bo Mei and him to help him.
Hiromi senses that her father has suicidal thoughts, and in order to help her father alleviate his predicament, she agrees to the other party's request.
However, in the process, Hiromi repented, she wanted to escape, and the other party would not let her. In the push, Hiromi inserted a chopstick into the throat of the other party.
Hiromi was paralyzed in fear. Fortunately, Dad showed up.
In order to cover up the fact that Hiromi killed people, and in order to enable Hiromi to live a stable life, Hiromi's father is determined to change identities with the deceased.
The process of changing identities was successful because Hiromi's father not only threw the body off a cliff, but also smashed his face. The police eventually closed the case with the result of "asaka Nakao committing suicide".
As a result, Hiromi was sent to an orphanage, and Asaka Nakao disappeared from the world.
<h1 class="pgc-h-arrow-right" >02 No kissing</h1>
When Bo Mei was in the orphanage, the former class teacher often came to see her, and in the middle of coming and going, the two people actually fell in love with each other.
Growing up, Hiromi left the orphanage and went to Tokyo alone to study theater performance.
At this time, the class teacher snubbed his wife for more than a year in order to be able to be with Bomei, and then left a divorce agreement and ran away from home. Before leaving, he also went to the school to go through the resignation procedures.
The class teacher who gave up everything for Bomi, the discipline of Hiromi is getting tighter and tighter, and even follows her out.
After Changing his name and surname, Bomei's father has been using a pseudonym to contact Hiromi. At this time, Hiromi was already famous, and in order to avoid being recognized, the two usually met at the hotel.
This time, when Hiromi and her father met, they were discovered by the class teacher who had followed her.
After Hiromi left, the class teacher recognized Hiromi's father in the underground parking lot.
Since then, the class teacher has disappeared.
Because her father once asked Bo Mei to help rent a car, she actually had some feelings about the disappearance of the class teacher. But Hiromi never asked her dad for an exit. Dad never said anything to Hiromi either.
Since then, Hiromi and her dad have stopped going to the hotel to meet. They met on the bridge.
Twelve bridges, corresponding to twelve months. If you want to meet, go and meet on the corresponding bridge that month.
And meeting, it's really just a meeting, a distant meeting. If you want to say something, just say it on your phone.
If two people want to give each other something, they will put it under the bridge, and after they leave, the other party will take it again.
Li Bai once wrote a poem "It is better not to see each other than to see each other", but for Bo Mei's father and daughter, it is extremely difficult to meet in peace. They dare not ask for more.
<h1 class="pgc-h-arrow-right" >03 liberation</h1>
Bo Mei's father and daughter, for more than ten years, have been protecting each other in this way of meeting on the bridge.
Until one day, Hiromi's father told Hiromi that he was going to travel far away, and asked Hiromi to take care of himself and live well. He also asked Hiromi to stand closer to him.
Hiromi realizes that her father is not in the right mood and decides to follow her father.
Dad didn't go back to the cheap apartment he had rented, but went to a tent where a homeless man lived.
When Hiromi entered, Dad was already pouring gasoline and preparing to set himself on fire.
It turned out that when Hiromi's father went to see the play directed by Hiromi's new director, he met Hiromi's junior high school classmates. It was Hiromi's only friend in the whole junior high school, and he used to come to his house often. The woman recognized herself at a glance.
Hiromi's father, worried that revealing his identity would cause trouble for Hiromi, tricked Hiromi into a cheap apartment and strangled her to death while she was not ready.
This is the second time that Hiromi's father has killed people to hide his identity. And from the first time Hiromi's father helped Hiromi cover up the killing, he has been running away in anonymity for decades.
He didn't want to live like this again.
More than a decade ago, he once fell in love with a woman who, fearing that when she was depressed, she would hurt her son, so she chose to divorce her husband and left the house.
Father Hiromi and the woman warmed each other and comforted each other. However, the woman died of a heart attack when Hiromi's father went to work at a nuclear power plant.
Because of his status, Bo mei's father could not help the woman hold a funeral, and he did not want the woman's ashes to go unclaimed. So he asked his daughter for help, found the contact information of the woman's son, Kyoichiro Kaga, and informed him of his mother's death.
Since then, he has been surviving every day. Now, he wanted to end it.
And this time, only with his death as the end, the daughter can continue to live happily.
Murder requires the murderer, and the identity of Bo mei's father cannot be exposed, so the murderer kills himself and dies after killing people is the perfect answer to everything.
Eventually, Hiromi compromised, and she let go of the hand that held her father.
But Hiromi couldn't bear the pain of her father's self-immolation, so she strangled him with her own hands and then burned the body.
Asaka nakao was finally relieved, but this way of liberation was too sad. He protected his daughter all his life, and even killed two innocent people, but eventually died at the hands of her daughter.
As he said to Hiromi: Listen to me and live happily. Watching over your growth and success is the whole meaning of my life, and the more you grow and succeed, the more it is a curse on my destiny.
We may not agree with The Waybomi's father and daughter used the exchange of identities to evade legal sanctions, nor can we forgive Asaka For killing innocents in order to prevent his identity from being exposed, but we have to admit asaka's love for Hiromi.
Although this deep fatherly love also contains the opportunity to kill others.