People who like Keigo Higashino know that in addition to the intellectual pleasure brought about by his ingenious suspenseful ideas, his speculative works also have observations of society and insights into human nature. Coupled with the Japanese scenery presented after the film and television, and the exquisite performance of the male uncle Abe Hiroshi, it has a classic that can be repeatedly tasted.
Wen | Chen Lingguo
Editor| Liu Bin
Picture | Douban movie
On April 12, the Japanese film "When the Prayer Ends", based on Keigo Higashino's novel, was released in China, which is the finale of the "Kaga Kyoichiro Series". The mystery that has plagued Detective Kaga for decades finally has an answer, and he finally knows why his mother suddenly ran away from home when he was a child. The mystery is not difficult to guess, can not escape Keigo Higashino's usual warm routine, but despite this, the real situation is still heartbreaking.
The film is not a new film, it was released in Japan last January, and many viewers have seen it through various channels. But that doesn't detract from the value of coming across the ocean to the big screen in China. People who like Keigo Higashino know that in addition to the intellectual pleasure brought about by his ingenious suspenseful ideas, his speculative works also have observations of society and insights into human nature. Coupled with the Japanese scenery presented after the film and television, and the exquisite performance of the male uncle Abe Hiroshi, it has a classic that can be repeatedly tasted.
And for viewers who don't know Keigo Higashino, it is also possible to enter the world of his reasoning at the end of the curtain and retrace kaga's journey all the way. This is exactly like the detective's case-solving procedure from the end to the starting point, the result is only the appearance, and the root is important.
"When the Prayer Ends" has been released in China
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Over the past decade, Keigo Higashino has been the most familiar Japanese writer Chinese besides Haruki Murakami. Since 2008, when the "New Classic Library" launched the Chinese edition of "The Dedication of Suspect X", sending readers a combination of appearance and INTELLIGENCE, Detective Yukawa Gaku, Higashino Keigo has become a hit. At present, his books have been imported more than seventy copies, and have become the big IP that the film and television industry is chasing, and in 2017 alone, two Chinese versions of the movie "The Dedication of Suspect X" and "Relief Grocery Store" were released. However, judging from the dismal score of Douban, it is obvious that the original work has not been authentic.
As a great power of speculative literature, Japan is not only a leading writer of Keigo Higashino, but also miyuki Miyabe, Kotaro Isaka and others. But apparently, the reason why he is the most sought after in China is that Keigo Higashino's novels like to tell stories of "self-sacrifice to protect their families" when constructing unsolved cases, and they contain a strong oriental concept of family, which is an emotion that we can understand and easily move. The Kaga Series epitomizes this style and also bears witness to the changes in Keigo Higashino's creative trajectory over the past three decades.
Don't look at Yukawa Gaku is the most popular character in Higashino's works, extremely intelligent and loved by everyone, but in front of Kaga, his qualifications are shallow.
In 1985, Keigo Higashino, a 27-year-old company employee, decided to take a career writing path after winning the Edogawa Ryubu Prize, a mystery literature award, for his novel "After School". In "Graduation", which was won the following year, Kaga began to appear. Since then, 10 works with him as the protagonist have been published intermittently until the end of this "When the Prayer Ends".
The most basic style of Japanese speculative literature has two major factions: one is the Benge school, which is good at creating mysterious criminal acts and exquisite case-solving processes; the other is the social school, which pays attention to the life of the murderer and reflects the social reality. If you make an analogy, Gulong is the Benge school, which is empty and freehand, and Jin Yong is a social school, taking history as a mirror. In the early days, Keigo Higashino followed the path of the Benge school, such as in the 1989 book "Sleeping Forest", Kaga's case to be solved revolved around the closed organization of the ballet, through multiple reversals, pointing to the last murderer, playing a blindfold.
But Benguet writes a lot, it is easy to walk into a dead end, the pursuit of suspenseful fabrication, virtual and unreal. Therefore, after Keigo Higashino made his debut because of the award, he soon found himself in a low ebb and had no reputation for a long time. It was not until the mid-1990s that he added a lot of socialized and life-oriented content to his work, and only then did he regain attention. At this time, Japan was in a period of economic bubbles, with an aging population, a midlife crisis, and juvenile housing problems becoming increasingly prominent, and it was inevitable that various strange crime cases would occur, and speculative fiction was suitable for reflecting these phenomena.
The 2006 "Kaga series" "Red Finger", which was adapted to the screen in 2014, begins with a direct account of the crime, the rebellious and violent son accidentally killed a girl, and the father tried to blame his mother who had Alzheimer's disease in order to cover up his crime. A single story shows the plight of three generations of Japanese families, and their encounters and psychological activities are the epitome of the whole society. While exposing the lie step by step, Kaga tore away the dark side of society, and the strong tragedy gave the work a heavy meaning.
But if it is only to expose the problem, it is at best a sense of responsibility, and it is difficult to say that it can be embraced by mass culture. Keigo Higashino's works are characterized by the warmth that often shows in bizarre cases. For the happiness of their loved ones, characters will be willing to hide their names, exile themselves and kill innocents, and there will always be love on the road of desperate danger. So that later, the weight of warmth became heavier and heavier, and reasoning became secondary. This is obviously a perfect fit for the Chinese market, which has poor cultural soil but prefers chicken soup for the soul, and it is no wonder that the Chinese edition of "Relief Grocery Store" has sold more than 10 million copies.
The movie "When the Prayer Ends" is the same, whether it is Kaga's own secrets or the secrets of the heroine Hiromi Asai played by Naoko Matsushima, they are related to their original family, with unforgettable experiences and helpless pains, allowing them to close themselves off and lick the grief alone. As the line goes, "Everyone lives with a wound, and in order to protect it, one closes the door of the heart."
"Kaga series" works
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Compared with Keigo Higashino's peak works such as "The Dedication of Suspect X" and "White Night", the narrative quality and influence of the "Kaga Series" are not outstanding in his creative genealogy. However, Detective Kaga himself became an iconic figure, and was listed as a "gemini" alongside Yukawa Gaku. An important contribution was made by actor Hiroshi Abe, whose acting skills and temperament gave Kaga a unique charm.
It is also fate that when Kaga first appeared in Keigo Higashino's pen and cracked the serial murder case on campus as a university student, Abe Hiroshi also happened to be in college, which can be described as a peer. Because of his angular European face, he successfully won the model competition held by NON-NO magazine, and appeared on the cover of the magazine for 43 consecutive issues, setting a Guinness book, and naturally entered the show business circle. But his height of 1 meter 89, being a model is an advantage, being an actor has become a disadvantage, once he plays with a girl, he becomes the "most cute height difference", so there are not many opportunities.
Since the 1990s, Abe Hiroshi has played homosexuals, costume dramas, funny roles, and tried his best to get rid of the positioning of "small fresh meat", and finally became popular with Japanese dramas such as "Trap" and "The Man Who Doesn't Marry". At this time, the years also left traces of vicissitudes on his face, making his temperament become resolute and calm. In 2010, when Keigo Higashino's "New Samurai" was adapted into a Japanese drama, he finally met Kaga. The depiction of Kaga's image in the novel is simply a reproduction of him: "Tall and thin, broad shoulders, obvious facial features, deep eyes, pointed chin." Because he doesn't smoke, his teeth are very white and his smile is cheerful, but his eyes are sharp at the search site."
After the success of this drama, Abe Hiroshi starred in "Sleeping Forest", "Red Finger", "Wings of the Kirin", and the current "When the Prayer Ends", he almost became one with Kaga. His height is matched with a cold appearance, there is a majesty that makes people look up, and the deep eyes seem to be able to penetrate your heart at a glance, which is exactly what a detective should look like. In these film and television dramas, he is always a black suit, a white shirt, no tie, stereotyped and casual. This is very different from Yukawa Gaku, played by another Masaharu Fukuyama, who teaches at the university, dressed in fashionable and handsome clothes, surrounded by women, and looks like a big star.
If Yukawa Gaku is a "school bully", with a very high IQ, who can think out the logic behind the complex and tangled clues, and the methods of solving cases are dazzling, then Kaga is a "labor model". In addition to working in the Metropolitan Police Department for a short time, he spent most of his time at the Nihonbashi Police Station in Tokyo, the equivalent of a police station officer. His method of solving the case is also very simple, that is, to conduct a large number of field investigations, repeated inquiries, repeated comparisons, until the last piece of the puzzle of the truth of the case is found. In the movie, the most common scene is that he walks on long legs in the streets of the city, with a prominent height, like a moving building.
Good detectives often just think one more layer and take one more step than others. Kaga used his own footsteps to measure the secrets of the murderer's heart, and gradually reached their hearts in the past of visiting the lives of the people involved. This also makes him a humane detective, believing that anyone who is wounded in the case is a victim, even a murderer. As he said, "The criminal police are not going to uncover the truth and do everything right, not only to catch the prisoners, but also to save the hearts and minds of those involved in the case."
But for his own family, Kaga seems unreasonable. In Red Finger, his father is seriously ill and hospitalized, and he does not visit him, even when he is dying, and he does not want to see him for the last time. The knot in his heart is that he thinks that his father only cares about work and neglects the family, which causes his mother to run away from home, so he has not forgiven him. When he was at the scene of the crime, he repeatedly gained insight into the kinship relationship of other families, and he did not seem to be enlightened. What really happened back then? This suspense runs through the Kaga series and becomes an important plot to shape his image until the final answer is given in "When the Prayer Ends".
One thing, like Yukawa Gaku, Kaga has a humorous quality. He often teased his cousin, who was a criminal policeman, and at the case analysis meeting, he was encouraged to stand up and say inconvenient things; when he went to see a ballet performance with his blind date, he fell asleep, snoring like thunder, no wonder he was in his forties, still a bachelor; queuing up on the street to buy snacks, every time he arrived at him, there was no one, which almost became his psychological shadow. These details of life have eased Abe's serious tough guy image, a little more cute and cute - he is still a warm person.
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Speculative fiction is a literary genre that is easy to be filmed, because its strong storytelling has laid a successful foundation, and film and television just turn it into an intuitive image, without much involvement in their own style. In this sense, "When the Prayer Ends" is a successful adaptation, not only restoring Keigo Higashino's novel, but also forming a stronger visual atmosphere.
Director Katsuo Fukuzawa is a veteran Japanese TV drama director, shooting more than 30 works, the representative work is the 2013 hit Japanese drama "Naoki Hanzawa", Douban has more than 130,000 reviews, the score is as high as 9.1. In his early days, he mainly shot romance films, and the idol stars who were different from the camera were Takuya Kimura, Takako Tokiwa, and Naoko Matsushima. After the rise of speculative dramas, he remade Kiyoharu Matsumoto's "Instrument of Sand", which is a classic of social speculative fiction and is also well received. It is reassuring enough to let such an "old driver" who is good at creating an emotional atmosphere and knows how to suspenseful narratives take the helm of Keigo Higashino's works.
The core of the suspense drama is to make the seemingly impossible event actually connect. At the beginning of "When the Prayer Ends", three unrelated clues are thrown out: Kaga's search for his mother's lover; the discovery of carrion in a Tokyo apartment; and the burning of corpses by the river. These finally point to the female director of the stage play, Hiromi Asakai, and she has an alibi. The superiority of the film over the text is that the camera can replace the eyes, through close-ups, close-ups and other scene changes, so that people can directly see the details, such as character portraits, relationship diagrams, props, etc. The director's skill is reflected in the mastery of the rhythm, Fukuzawa Katsuo's approach is to be steady and steady, not to make a mistake, and through the assistance of the monologue, he explains the whole case very neatly and clearly.
The first half of the film is about the clues of the suspicious case, the power that drives the audience's emotions is curiosity about the truth, and as the mystery becomes clearer, the atmosphere moves towards lyricism. This is naturally the best play of Katsuo Fukuzawa, who is accustomed to making TV dramas, and he uses the technique of telling the story to cut through the fog of the years, return to the starting point of the character's fate, and see through the pain behind the cruelty. In particular, the father played by the old drama bone Xiao Ri Xiang Wenshi made a father-daughter bitter love scene earn enough tears. However, as a film, restraint and blank space are the highest artistic standards, and excessive lyricism is suspected of sensationalism, so "When the Prayer Ends" can only be regarded as a commercial film success.
An important reason why Japanese films are widely respected is that the story itself and the scenes in which they are located can form a kind of aesthetic reflection. As a developed country, Japan has a good modern social governance, but also maintains the charm of traditional culture, forming a clean and orderly landscape of citizen life. Some stories, only when they take place in such an environment, are credible and considerable, and it is greatly lost in another place. For example, Shunji Iwai, who is known for his pure love style, came to China last year to shoot "Hello, Zhihua", and the dirty and desolate scenes in the film made the taste of the story much shallower.
Even in a dark reasoning film, the location itself can form a visual enjoyment. An important clue in "When the Prayer Ends" is that it writes a calendar of 12 bridges in Tokyo, Japan. In order to grasp this line, Kaga, who solved the case with his feet, of course needed a field visit. Therefore, the boat traveled on the water, through one bridge and hole after another, and he was also guided by a detective to lead the audience to explore the scenery of Tokyo. At the same time, because the narrative spans thirty years and the imprints of the characters are scattered everywhere, Kaga also needs to leave Tokyo, go to the lakeside, go to the seaside, and go to the mountains to track, expanding the beauty of the landscape to the japanese national range, which is also the place where this film is superior to the previous films in this series, and it has a broader atmosphere in time and space.
16 years ago, in order to know her mother's life after leaving home, Kaga looked for the lover who accompanied her in her last days, and took the initiative to work at the Nihonbashi Police Station, traveling to every corner of the jurisdiction. Even if there was an opportunity to be promoted to the Metropolitan Police Department, he refused to go.
After 16 years, this burden was finally put down, and Kaga's footsteps could go to a bigger stage. At this moment of departure, the director seems to be using the ending song of the film "Tokyo" as a farewell, looking forward to his next case:
Goodbye is not a word of separation,
That's the ultimate love convention,
No matter how far apart they are,
Every day I will smile and pray,
Until I meet you again.
Learn about The People Season 2 of the "Telling Advanced Stories in High Language" writing class series