When it comes to ballet, most of the words "elegant" and "beautiful" come to mind for the first time. When the ballet dancers performed one beautiful or poignant fairy tale after another with their dancing postures on the stage, the audience received aesthetic and artistic enjoyment. Sometimes, we wonder: what kind of life will the ballet dancers who walk off the stage live?
Japanese reasoning master Keigo Higashino's "Sleeping Forest" is a work featuring "ballet dancers" and the second part of the "Criminal Police Kaga" series. The novel revolves around three death cases, drawing out the "obsession spell" hidden inside the dance troupe.
Cover of The Sleeping Forest
At the beginning of the story, the strange man who broke into the ballet company lies on the floor of the office, no longer breathing, and the dancer Ye Liuzi claims that he is out of legitimate defense and accidentally smashed him with a heavy object.
After several investigations, the police learned that he was a painter named Toshiyuki Kazema, who had planned to travel to New York the next day. Soon after, kajita, the troupe's artistic director, was murdered in his last rehearsal before the performance. A few days later, Kajita's real culprit was poisoned, and another dancer, Yasuko, committed suicide in a rented apartment.
The deaths of Kazama Toshiyuki, Kajita, and Yasuko prompted the criminal police officer Kaga to conduct a more in-depth investigation of the ballet. He found that among the dancers such as Ye Liuzi, Yasuko Yasuko, Asaoka, Yashiko Takayanagi, Yanagi, and Cyano, a small group of dancers had formed an almost closed group, and their careers, love, and lives had many secrets that were not known to outsiders.
Stills from the movie "The Sleeping Forest"
As an early work of Keigo Higashino, "Sleeping Forest" is not perfect in terms of story line setting compared to novels such as "White Night" and "Malice", but he uses three death cases to fully show the complex entanglement of human nature, art, love and justice.
<h1 class="pgc-h-arrow-right" >01 Behind the death is a series of "big and small lies."</h1>
If you can trace the root causes of these deaths, you need to go back to New York 4 years ago. At that time, the two dancers of the Takayanagi Dance Company, Takayanagi Yashiko and Yasuko, went to New York for further study and met the young painter Koichi Aoka, who was impressed by Yashiko's dancing style, and the two fell in love. But within the dance troupe, love is not allowed, and when arguing with Aoka about breaking up, Yashiko accidentally stabs Aoka.
Stills from the movie "Sleeping Forest", Aoka's oil painting for his girlfriend Yashiko
Kajita, who rushes to deal with the mess, makes the first false arrangement: in order to protect Yasiko's ballet career, Aoka must claim that his lover is Yasuko, and describe the murderer who stabbed him as a strange Asian prostitute. Aoka agreed one by one, and Yashiko and Yasuko were also kept in the dark.
However, this seemingly seamless lie fermented into a tragedy of 3 deaths a few years later.
First, Aoka, who had lost his lover, embarked on the path of self-abandonment, fell seriously ill, and died. Toshiyuki Kazema, a student who is about to go to New York, is well-intentioned and wants him to see his beloved lover one last time. He first arrives at Yasuko's house, and after being told that Yashiko is his real girlfriend, he breaks into the ballet and is hit in the head by the dancer with a heavy object, and he cries out for his last life.
Yasuko has always wanted to become the lead female dancer, even at the expense of her body to achieve the "perfect body shape" required by Kajita, but the result is getting farther and farther away from the "Kajita Standard". What was even more painful was that she could not imagine that she had become a scapegoat for Yahiko's misdeeds.
Tormented by the resentment of "betrayal," she made the extreme choice: to install homemade poison on Kajita's coat and poison him to death a few hours before the performance. Later, she committed suicide in the same way.
The death of Kazema is also covered by overlapping lies.
At the scene of the crime, Ye Liuzi took the initiative to bear the responsibility for the murder. In fact, the real murderer was her friend WeiXu, who first heard the fight in the office, rushed over at the first time, and smashed the bronze vase into Kazema Toshiyuki.
At this time, the secret that had been hidden for a long time was revealed: because of a traffic accident half a year ago, her brain was damaged, and soon her hearing would be completely lost, so the next performance was her finale. She has her own selfish intentions in her actions to protect Yahizi: because Yahizi is the main dancer, once Yahizi is injured, her wishes will be in vain.
In order to protect the unsuspecting wishes, Ye Liuzi and Yahizi both lied when the police questioned, and the truth was once again obscured by lies.
At the heart of all the lies is ballet, Kajita Ichichi wants the "pillar" Yashiko to shine on the stage, and he wants to leave the most precious memorial of his life with ballet, and Aoka can't forget his beautiful dancing girlfriend before his death.
So, how much magic does the ballet stage really have?
<h1 class="pgc-h-arrow-right" >02 Shadow of a Stage Spell: Another "Moon and Sixpence"</h1>
Kaga's first contact with the ballet stemmed from an "arranged" blind date, in which he watched the classic play "Swan Lake" with his blind date.
Throughout the performance, he was in a drowsy state, but when the black swan appeared, he was suddenly shocked by the black swan on the stage and looked at it intently. Although this blind date failed, the story between him and the dancer Asaoka Who plays the black swan has just been foreshadowed.
On stage, her unsung eyes are sharp and have a breathtaking charm, but in the rehearsal room and life, she is a girl who is quiet to the point of being slightly shy. During the short performance, the stage seems to have a huge magic that allows the dancers to enter a new identity and become a completely different version of themselves.
Playing the black swan on the stage
This almost "flow" peak experience is the ultimate pursuit of countless ballet dancers, and it is what they strive for to take the stage, get weighty roles, and become the principal dancer. But to achieve such a goal, it takes talent and hard work, and it also faces countless abandonments at all times.
Artistic Director Kajita is a "dream maker", and his choreographed dances always have the power to shock people's hearts. But the other side of the fantastic dance is that he has a "perverted" harshness on the figure of the actor and the movement of the dance, he does not allow the dancer to integrate into his feelings and thinking, and can only do according to the movements he requires, and there is no difference in the pool, otherwise it will be a scolding of splitting the head and covering the face.
"One day on stage, ten years off stage", if you want to become a real ballet dancer, you must persist in hard practice day after day. For the sake of her dream of being a "principal dancer", Yasuko leaves early and returns late every day, even when she is sick and uncomfortable, she refuses to give up practicing. Thus, for the actors of the ballet, there is almost nothing left in their lives to dance, nothing else.
Ballet has extremely high physical requirements, and in addition to exercise, dieting and weight loss have also become the norm among dancers. In Kajita's view, only a figure like Yashiko is basically up to standard, and he also hopes that she can be thinner and more perfect, and Yasuko does not hesitate to thin herself into the shape of skin and bones.
On the stage, the princess who has been sleeping for a hundred years will wake up with the gentle kiss of the prince, and usher in a new and wonderful life surrounded by cheering elves and fairies.
Reality is the opposite, people on the stage are only briefly surrounded by the aura of love and happiness, and after stepping off the stage, their real life is limited everywhere.
In Kajita's view, dancers cannot fall in love or get married because it will have a bad impact on dancing. The president of Takayanagi Ballet, Shizuko Takayanagi, did not have children in her lifetime, but adopted Yashiko as her adopted daughter and continued her ballet career. The love affair of Yashizi, Ye Liuzi, etc., either ended without illness, or was deeply hidden in the heart, and did not dare to make it public. After a short experience of the sweetness of love, they must return to the original world.
The glamorous dancers on the stage are mostly very poor. In addition to the meager salary they receive for their performances, they pay a certain amount of maintenance fees to the troupe, buy dancing shoes, and have no time to work other part-time jobs because they have to invest a lot of energy in training every day. Therefore, for dancers with general family conditions, their material life is very average. Most of them live in cheap rental houses, which are poorly soundproofed. When buying fruit, we will also try to choose varieties that are not in good condition but have a lower price.
The performance of the ballet "Sleeping Beauty" is not yet ready
These dancers are almost moth-like choices, and why are they not the "moon and sixpence" in the art of dance?
<h1 class= "pgc-h-arrow-right" >03 Obsession in the hearts of people is the source of all tragedy</h1>
In the ballet Swan Lake, the black swan transforms itself into the form of a white swan in an attempt to take away the prince's love. In Sleeping Beauty, the 13th witch, who was not invited to a court feast, spoke of the spell that the princess would be killed by a spindle.
Black swans want handsome princes, witches want to be respected and seen, and these "expectations" form an obsession in their hearts that drives them to act hurtfully.
In fact, in "Sleeping Forest", everyone has "obsessions" in their hearts, or art, or love, or friendship.
In the Takayanagi Ballet, Yasuko wants to be the lead dancer and play the most high-profile white swan; Shizuko Takayanagi hopes that the dance company can continue to pass on; Kajida hopes to rehearse a dance that perfectly matches music and movement; and Yuki hopes to leave the most beautiful figure on the stage as the curtain before becoming deaf.
For Ye Liuzi, her obsession is the "atonement" in friendship, because of her impulsiveness and unintentional mistakes, so that her friends suffer great pain, she wants to use the "top sin" of determination to protect her friends.
For Aoki, it is love, and when lovers choose the former between ballet and love, he gives up life and allows himself to die in illness and poverty.
The most unfortunate kazema, bent on painting as good as Aoki, decided to self-exile and return to New York, immersing himself in a bad environment like Aoki, "forcing" artistic inspiration.
Trapped by their own "obsessions," they trigger a barrage of lies and murders, and tragedies unfold again and again.
Another core figure, The Kaga Criminal Police, in the process of reasoning and investigation, discovered the truth hidden in the deepest depths through the "persistence" in people's hearts.
Criminal police kaga
At the end of the story, when Unso will be tried fairly, Kaga gently says to her, "I will protect you because I like you." This kind of faint warmth and love dilutes the sad color that pervades the story, and also allows the righteous value in human nature to return.
To Kaga Police, takayanagi ballet is like a sleeping forest, with dancers immersed in the world of ballet, with the illusion of closure and calm.
Several deaths are like a bird that has swept in, awakening the undercurrents of human nature that are surging in them: justice and protection, lies and murder, jealousy and anger, love and hatred, and countless emotions are intertwined.
When the curtain falls, the curse is lifted, and the truth is revealed to the world, it is also the moment when the sun shines into this lush forest. Those forgotten goodnesses will also be rediscovered.