On the first day of summer vacation, Xiaochun was kidnapped by her father!
Dad has no money, no patience, and can not be relied on, with Xiaochun on the way to "escape", he often worries about food and accommodation expenses, and sometimes has unreliable travel arrangements. Dad was so embarrassed and childish, but he still did everything he could to make Koharu experience the joy of travel: going to the countryside to set off fireworks, floating on the sea at night, staying at the mountaintop temple...
The end of the journey is coming, the introverted, love to make the sex of Koharu grow up, but also fell in love with this dirty T-shirt, tanned father, even if he is so ordinary.
"I Was Kidnapped by My Dad"
Author:[Japan] Mitsuyo Tsunoda
Translator: Gong Qun
Yilin Publishing House
On the eve of Children's Day, Yilin Publishing House launched "I Was Kidnapped by Daddy" by Mitsuyo Kakuda, a famous contemporary female writer and best-selling novelist in Japan, which is about a happy "escape" between father and daughter, a journey of enlightenment to re-understand the difficult life.
The family, which has always been stubbornly defined as an intimate space, creates alienation; without it, it is easy for people to experience intimacy. Through creative ideas, interesting plots and good imagery, the author allows us to join this kidnapping journey without stress and pleasure. Koharu narrated quietly, with delicate and powerful sensual power in it.
In the eyes of outsiders, such a disgraced father may be irresponsible... But he's also full of imagination. His imagination, and the ideas behind it, allow life to appear in new permutations and combinations, so that reality is easy to bear and even worth enjoying.
"I Was Kidnapped by Daddy" reflects on the parent-child relationship that has been kidnapped by materialism and success, and it reminds us how difficult it is to define a person and eliminate a person in a rapid way today, and how difficult it is for every parent to maintain a "successful" status in front of their children.
Cao Wenxuan, winner of the International Hans Christian Andersen Prize and a well-known writer of children's literature, commented that the story of the book is very simple, but the topics touched are heavy and complex: broken and troubled families, fathers and daughters who often cannot meet, daughters trying to understand their parents' positions in ignorance, fathers do not give up their adherence to responsibility in their frustrations... The book is short, but the issues mentioned are intriguing.
【Author】
Kakuda Mitsuyo, along with Banana Yoshimoto and Kaori Ekoku, is known as one of the three most important female writers in the Japanese literary scene today. Graduated from Waseda University, he won the Haiyan Newcomer Literature Award for his debut novel "The Game of Finding Happiness". Since then, he has been shortlisted for the Wasagawa Award three times. In 1996, "UFO at Night" won the Noma Literary Newcomer Award. In the late 1990s, Mitsuyo Kakuda created some children's literature. In 1998, "I Am Your Brother" won the Hirata Rangji Literary Award; in 1999, "I Was Kidnapped by My Father" won the Sankei Children's Publishing Culture Award, and in 2000, it won the Roadside Stone Literature Award. The creation of children's literature brought a new turning point to Mitsuyo Kakuda's writing career. In 2002, "The Garden in the Sky" was nominated for the Naoki Prize, the highest award in Japanese popular literature; in 2005, "She on the Other Side" won the Naoki Prize; in 2007, "The Cicada of the Eighth Day" won the 2nd Central Public Literature and Art Award.
【Preamble】
Double redemption in kidnapping
SouthBridge/Text
"On the first day of summer vacation, I was kidnapped." That's how the book "I Was Kidnapped by My Dad" began. The "kidnapper" is the narrator Koharu's father. Koharu has not seen her father for a long time, and her mother uses all kinds of lies to cover up the reality that the husband and wife have been separated. "Only people who meet every day can talk about 'like' or 'dislike'. I don't know exactly if I like Dad or not. At the end of the story, Dad "radiated unbelievably in my eyes, as if wrapped in a golden capsule." It is a story about growing up and parent-child relationship, written by the famous contemporary Japanese writer Mitsuyo Kakuda. The book won the Japan Roadside Stone Literature Award, the Sankei Children's Publishing Culture Award, and later the Taiwan Times Open Book Award. This recognition is due to the book's excellent description of a coming-of-age story that is both unique and universal.
Growing up is an endless topic, and it can even be said that it is the only story worth writing about human beings. Everyone has to go through the transformation of slow motion, get rid of the influence of the previous generation, and become an independent person. No matter what kind of family we come from, growth happens. The process is not as simple as planting melons and melons and growing beans to get beans. Happy families produce unhappy children, and unhappy families produce happy and successful children. This is the complexity and weirdness of life.
The book describes the growth of a broken family. A child, at the beginning of his life, grabbed a bad hand and had to continue to play. Later, either the relationship with the parents is broken, or the parents reach a tacit understanding. Children have to choose between reconciling with the other person or reconciling alone, and sometimes this double reconciliation happens at the same time. Oscar? Wilde once said: "Children begin to love their parents, and when they grow up, they judge their parents; sometimes they forgive their parents." In the novel, Koharu finally understands his father, reconciles with him, and even says that he hopes for more "kidnapping". The child himself, in the process, has stepped out of the comfort zone and broadened the realm of life, and it can be said that this kidnapping brings double redemption.
In a broken family, the parent-child relationship is more delicate. The breakdown of a family can make everyone a victim, and children are usually the most hurt. Parents are also limited people, in the confrontation, sometimes forget that the child is the crystallization of the love of the two people, is the object of common cultivation and care, not the property of one party. After a breakup, the child may be raised by one party. In this case, mishandling – such as poor communication between husband and wife, using the child as a messenger to listen to the news, or instigating the child to hate each other – can cause greater harm to the child's psyche. Children do not understand, slowly to understand the ugliness of the adult world, still a little fantasy, maybe better. If you understand things too early, bearing the emotional and psychological burdens that are not commensurate with the needs of childhood, although it is a forced consequence, not deliberately done by anyone, but it is very unfair to the child.
Children are embarrassed between parents, usually because the values and living habits of both parents are too different. After the kidnapping, the first thing that came to Dad's mind was to ask, "Where does Koharu want to go?" On the mountain? seaside? hot spring? pasture? And Koharu spent a long time with her mother, two aunts and grandmother and other women, and she thought of going to the big shopping malls Ofrk and Spencer. Both husband and wife are very poor, two people live together, and the pressure is not so great. Broken up, the same income to support two families, poverty naturally followed. Mom's values are kidnapped by materialism, expecting a lot of things, but can't afford to buy them. Children have a lot of hopes, and they can't be realized when they get to their fathers. Dad was also poor, staying in a hotel with an open-air bath, and seeing the open-air bath and sauna, he was "excited like a child".
Faced with the same reality, our trade-offs show how high and low we are. This father is not ashamed of himself before embarrassing reality, he is concerned with how to let children learn to face. "You always think that there are taxis everywhere, restaurants everywhere, that when you believe that you are powerless, someone will immediately come to the rescue, that when you are hungry, you will always have food to eat, and when you are thirsty, you will go to the vending machine. From his own background, he gave his daughter fresh and beneficial enlightenment: "You have to remember that there will be such things. There are no taxis, you can't sit in an air-conditioned restaurant and wait for food, you can't turn back if you want to, you can only keep moving forward. ”
In the eyes of outsiders, such a disgraced father may be irresponsible. The novel shows us the crudeness of this assertion. We see his difficulties and entanglements, his struggles and efforts. The wealth he brought to his daughter's life may be more than that of the children in other "fighting father" families: "But if anything does not obey your wishes, you blame others, and everything about you may become unsatisfactory in Xiaochun." ”
He is also full of imagination. His imagination, and the ideas behind it, allow life to appear in new permutations and combinations, so that reality is easy to bear and even worth enjoying. The father and daughter lay in the warm waters of "jelly-soft", in the boundless darkness, looking at the stars in the sky. They ran to the temple to stay and listen to the hunchback grandmother tell ghost stories. Such an experience is an endless memory of the future, how many children of "normal" families can enjoy it?
At this point, perhaps I should correct myself: no family is "normal." Every family has its own problems. Koharu's grandmother's family seems to be happy, but aunt Hiroko, who has received less love, is wrapped in sadness in her heart. Even relatively "normal" families sometimes curse children in sugar coatings. "Grandma's house is not at all in such a miserable situation, so I am happy to go there." Adults often gather in the living room to focus on their small talk, and I am thrown aside, but I am not troubled by this. "The mother who grew up in this environment, without being beaten, her love is shallow. She only knows how to preach to her children, not to take the initiative to understand. "At least I wish my mother had asked me, Xiao Chun, are you happy now?" Where is it? Is it okay? It doesn't matter, right? Add the phrase 'Happy' after each question? This mother loves her children, but she cannot step out of her own limitations, cannot "cross" to the child's perspective, and care for them in the way of the child. In the past, her parents only instinctively loved, and did not have the ability to cultivate love. Coron? In McCain's book "Turn, This Great World", Gloria recalls that when her parents loved each other and her marriage failed repeatedly, she said: "I always thought that parents love each other, it is actually difficult for children, it is difficult to go beyond this layer of love cocoon, because sometimes, under such love." 」
It's so comfortable that you're too lazy to nurture your love. ”
In turn, the father's hometown in the book is very complicated and chaotic, there are many relatives, and the father "often quarrels with his father, has a big voice, and throws things at each other... In short, Dad's hometown was a hell. I hated myself as a child from the bottom of my heart because I had to stay in that harsh environment. "Interestingly, dads who grew up in this environment were kind and more empathetic. Updike once said that people who grew up in complex families tended to be more mentally mature and more mature in coping with the world. Updike came from a complex extended family, and his home was like a cross-section of the United States. Many problems and coping methods in the world have been rehearsed in advance in the big family, and children may not be able to understand, nor is there any need to fully understand, but such a family is an "archetype" of the future world, laying the groundwork for the children's future life.
Nor should a broken family be a reason for a person to abandon himself. With tears as beads, people can turn the misfortunes in their growth into the wealth of life. No one wants to experience this painful process, but the "wishful thinking" life is ultimately a blessing in the mail. The environment is smooth, and it is not worth a person to boast about. Whether there is glory in life depends on how much we have moved forward from our respective starting points. This involves our ability to run our own lives and improve ourselves. Such growth is a personal matter, but it is also inseparable from the help and guidance of adults. Adults themselves are sometimes entangled in their own contradictions, forgetting the needs of children, such as the desire for love and attention. Like other children, Xiaochun pursues love and attention at all costs, and when climbing the mountain, she plays a small temper and deliberately pulls behind her: "If you encounter misfortune here and are bitten by poisonous insects and snakes, and are eaten by bears and wolves and lose your life, Dad will definitely reflect deeply." Introspection provoked me to abandon me again, and introspection kidnapped me. In this way, even if my father has fallen in love with someone other than my mother in this life, even if he has many children who are cuter than me, he will not forget me. Such a childlike narrative makes people read it movingly.
"I Was Kidnapped by My Dad" uses bland words to reflect on the growing pains and relationships of generations. The story in the book is worthy of the principle of sweat and cattle. It's a little book of warmth. Although there are many contradictions in the book, there is no deliberate "bad guy" in the book. There are conflicts between mothers and fathers, but mothers' concern for children and fathers is overflowing. Even if Dad left Mom, when he and his children discussed and ordered food, all they thought about was mom's past meat rolls, croquettes, summer cold wontons and special milk roasted kimchi.
In a weight-lifting way, this book inspires us to think about the eternal topic of family relationships. Communication and understanding between people and people is difficult and requires a lifetime of thinking. Brothers and sisters who grow up in the same environment will also clash constantly, not to mention the couple formed by strangers. Even if people are as close as father and daughter, if they do not manage the relationship well, they can only create a deep estrangement. How to get along with differences and how to make children cope reasonably is a skill that needs to be honed for a long time. In some countries where psychology is developed, such as the United States, many of these contradictions and conflicts are expressed by psychologists in clear words. Psychologists and various professionals help children and even adults cope with relationship problems in different situations. Orientals are more subtle in this regard, and many things are not so thorough. The problems faced in growth are interconnected and also require ways to deal with them.
The book is a bizarre kidnapping journey, the plot does not have many ups and downs, the style is flat, but it is worth revisiting again and again. The most dramatic scene in the book is that Koharu calls the police and his father is arrested by the police. In a panic, Dad asked the police to take a blood test to identify DNA, which was humorous. After the poor "kidnapper" was released, he did not blame his daughter for false reporting, but was upset that he had not eaten the pork chop rice in the police interrogation room as described on TV.
The novel touches on many truths in growth, and the language is full of poetry, such as "We floating between the stars, before we know, are neither fathers nor daughters, mothers and daughters, nor brothers and sisters, or even do not know each other, but are just a group of people who are separated, completely unaware of each other's existence, floating gently in the night sky." "The part about the truth is usually the point to the point, like Hemingway said about the iceberg, the novel only writes about the part above the water, or even only from the perspective of Koharu alone.
But this is a very necessary perspective. How many times can we stop, lean down, listen to what the children are saying, ask them what they think?
【Trial Reading】
I got off the bus with my dad, and the station was dyed orange in the setting sun. The green hills surrounding the platform are orange, the station signs with the name of the station are orange, and the ticket gates are orange, and it seems that everything is packed into orange fruit candy. The left and right ears are filled with the cries of cicadas. Dad turned his head and said, "We're going to walk," and even his face was orange.
"We're going to walk", this is no joke. We walked out of the ticket gates, crossed the roundabout, walked through the quiet shopping street lined with shops in pairs, and walked along the road that happened to be only driven by cars. Gradually, there were no people on both sides of the road, only green fields. We walked on a path in the field that we couldn't see, and the sun had long since set, until the sky turned pale blue and we were still walking.
"I'm hungry." My voice was hoarse. His clothes were soaked with sweat, his mouth was dry, his stomach was hungry, and his legs and feet were weak and weak.
"Me too." Dad, who was walking ahead, answered, his voice equally hoarse.
"Where are you going?"
Dad stopped, pointed his left finger at a dense hill and said weakly, "That's up there." He put his bag on his back and turned left along the path toward the hill.
"Dad, we're going to die on the road." I stood where I was and said. I'm serious. Exhausted and hungry, it will soon darken, and it will be impossible to walk to the top of the mountain.
"Take a taxi."
My dad, who was a few steps ahead of me, slowly turned back and asked in frustration, "Where are the taxis?" ”
"You can call a car."
"What's it called?"
I looked around and tried to find a public telephone, but I didn't see any public telephone, or even a car, and all I could see was the green ocean in the fields.
"Let's eat first." I said wearily.
"Where?" Dad asked wearily, too.
Of course, there are no family restaurants, no McDonald's, no KFC, just fields and hills towering in front of you.
"Let's go." Dad looked me in the eye and said, "Or shall we walk back to the station for dinner?" ”
I stood dazed, my mind racing with the route I had just taken, shivering.
"Let's go." I grunted quietly and dragged my heavy feet forward.
Luckily, we found a tattered vending machine standing alone at a small intersection into the mountains. I knew it was a vending machine selling drinks, but the labels of the samples had faded and I had no idea what drinks were being sold. Dad took out the change and bought two cans of drinks, and I was still worried about whether there would be drinks coming out, and when there was a bang, two cans of frozen drinks actually fell out. Dad took the iced coffee, I took the orange juice, sat at the intersection of the mountain and drank it in one gulp, before I could discern the taste, the cold liquid slid down my throat, only to feel very happy.
The pale cyan that covered the sky grew thicker, and the hills that had just been green turned into hazy silhouettes. We walked silently on the path that could accommodate only one person, our feet dark, and when we looked up, we could only see the dark blue sky through the gaps in the trees. I was so scared I almost wanted to crouch down and cry. However, I knew that even so, no one would help me think of a way, so I had to stare at Dad's white T-shirt in front of me and walk intently on the steep mountain road.
"There will be such a thing." Dad suddenly said without looking back, "You have to remember that there will be such things." There are no taxis, you can't sit in an air-conditioned restaurant and wait for food, you can't turn back if you want to, you can only keep moving forward. ”
Dad said breathlessly: "You always think that there are taxis everywhere, restaurants everywhere, believe that when you are powerless, someone will immediately come to the rescue, there will always be food to eat when you are hungry, and when you are thirsty, you will go to the vending machine. ”
The sound of branches being trampled on by Dad, the sound of the wind blowing the leaves overhead, the intermittent sound of Dad's voice.
"So no matter what you do, you won't be genuinely happy." You wait and see, and when you reach the top of the mountain, you will be relaxed. The thought of being hungry and exhausted, but still accomplishing something, you feel quite remarkable. ”
"Old man." I interrupted dad with my voice as low as possible, "Don't go too far. ”
Dad didn't look back. I stopped, too lazy to speak, but I couldn't be silent. I opened my mouth with all my strength: "I'll make it clear first." Who do 'you' mean me and me? Also, isn't it natural that hungry people find a place to eat, and throat thirst for drinks? If you're going to starve to death, you'll starve yourself. If you say that, you won't eat, drink, ride in a car, or go into a restaurant for the rest of your life. Say what is happy, sincerely happy, feel that you have done a thing, these are very simple, there is no need to be hungry, stumbling through this kind of desolate mountains. Let me eat a little in the morning without lunch, how can you not say that you are stingy, you will preach like an old man! ”
I said a lot of things, and I didn't say what I wanted to say, and I was quite anxious inside. I don't want to say you're going to starve to death, I don't want to say that you've failed to eat a full meal and two meals. I would like to say that I feel genuinely happy to set off fireworks with you; the first time I was in front of the station, I made such a loud scream to make you caught, and this incident gave me a sense of accomplishment. Even if none of the hundred children you know have ever been happy from the bottom of your heart, you should not say such things in front of me, in front of me who is different from those hundred.
Dad didn't look back, didn't say anything, and walked forward calmly at the same pace, the white T-shirt almost disappearing among the dense foliage. If I want to throw it down, I will throw it down, and I will stand still. The white back vanished as if engulfed in darkness. I squatted down and slapped my legs and feet like lead, adjusting my breathing. When I looked up, all I saw were leaves, hanging low or outstretched branches, and shadows turned into dark shadows in the darkness. The sound of Dad's footsteps on the leaves, the sound of branches breaking, could no longer be heard.
I squatted on the ground, fiddling with my fingertips at the dusty rubber-soled sneakers, wondering what to do next. Curiously, I was neither timid nor nervous. Sleeping in the mountains? Although I haven't done it, I can just lie here and fall asleep, maybe it's very simple. Will there be mosquito bites? Will there be big grizzly bears or something around to roar? Even then it doesn't matter.
If you are unfortunate enough to be bitten by poisonous insects and snakes here, and if you are eaten by bears and wolves and lose your life, Dad will definitely reflect deeply. Introspection provoked me to abandon me again, and introspection kidnapped me. In this way, even if my father has fallen in love with someone other than my mother in this life, even if he has many children who are cuter than me, he will not forget me.
I was fiddling with my sneakers as I thought about it, and footsteps slowly approached me. I looked up and faintly saw the white T-shirt in the darkness, like the light of a candle.
"It's my bad, I'm sorry." Dad stood in front of me and said. I stood up with my dad's outstretched hand and dusted off the mud that was stuck in the butt of my shorts. I wasn't expecting a luxury hotel or a villa with a spa, swimming pool, and game center on top of this nobody's hilltop, but I was disappointed when I got to the top. There was a very small temple on it, and on the other side of the hill we went up was a silent cemetery, nothing more, nothing more than that.
"It's a temple." I blurted out, panting hard as my shoulders rose and fell.
"Yeah, it doesn't look like an amusement park."
Dad finished talking and walked into the temple door. The courtyard is quiet, the front is the main hall with closed doors and windows, next to a very small family, and an orange round lamp is lit at the gate, which vaguely illuminates the surroundings.
"Who are you going to sweep the grave for?" I asked jokingly, trying to suppress my feelings of extreme loss. However, after saying the words, I found that it was not funny at all, but even more depressed.
"No, we live here today." Dad walked toward the orange light.
"Do you know anyone?"
"Nothing. Do you know the Zen room in the temple? Some monasteries can provide accommodation for tourists, and here it is. The cost of accommodation in the monastery is quite cheap, and there are quite solemn religious activities. ”
Whatever. I felt a pang of sadness in my heart. Just to live in such a cheap place, to come here with full of morale? And there was a fight. Maybe, no, no, dad is either amazingly poor or incredibly miserly. Either way, I'm sad that the purpose of his deal with his mom may really be ransom.
After Dad rang the bell by the door, a hunchbacked grandmother came out. "That, I saw in the book that this place can be stayed, just for one night."
Hearing Dad say this, Grandma was embarrassed to say, "Ah, we're out of business, by the way, we stopped providing accommodation two years ago." book? That must have been a very old book. Two years ago I called the publisher and said we were out of business and asked them not to put it on the books..."
When Grandma said this, she opened her mouth and looked at us, and the expressions of my father and I must have been able to understand at a glance. The grandmother laughed and said, "Forget it, you came here on purpose, even if I said I couldn't stay, it would be midnight for you to walk back to the city from here." Let's stay this time, keep it a secret. How much does that book cost for one night? Five hundred pieces. Well, that's the price. ”
Grandma's tone was kind.
"Thank you, really helped a lot. That, we ate nothing after breakfast..." Dad spoke incoherently and his voice hoarse. Grandma looked at us intently—from head to toe—and let out a loud laugh.
Inside the entrance is a corridor with a dark and shiny floor. On the right was a very small Japanese room, on the left was the kitchen and canteen, and we were taken to the canteen, which was messy with a lot of things. Mountains of old books, small cardboard boxes, wooden boxes, wine bottles, in the middle of this pile of things there is a low table, the table is very clean. My dad and I sat down at the table.
"I'm sorry, we've already had dinner and there are only two of us, so very little is done. I hate leftovers, and I cook with a pinch of quantity, so there's really nothing ready to bring out, sorry. ”
Grandma said with her back to us in the kitchen and started cooking. The kitchen is also full of stuff, full of seasonings, recipe magazines, kneaded plastic bags from supermarkets, empty snack boxes, and more. For some reason, this situation put my mind at ease.
Grandma served rice balls, rice noodle steamed cakes and miso soup. My dad and I couldn't talk and eat heavily. This rice ball was so delicious that I felt that it was not an onigee ball, but something that had never been eaten before that was similar to the rice ball. delicious! I almost cried out, but I swallowed it quickly because I didn't want my dad to say, "Yeah, that's what I said." I secretly felt like a nasty child, and eventually I whispered, "It's delicious." Grandma narrowed her eyes and smiled. Really tasty, never eaten such a delicious rice ball. Dad said.
When we were eating, a bald uncle came to the canteen and showed his face, slightly bowed his head and said hello. My dad and I bowed our heads, and when we looked up, he was gone.
Yangzi Evening News/Yang Eye reporter Cai Zhen