Three inexperienced thieves formed a "criminal gang" that had been planned for several years and finally succeeded in kidnapping Japan's richest man, an old lady in her eighties. But when the kidnappers said what they expected from the ransom, the old lady angrily scolded: "Don't underestimate me, I'm not so worthless!" ”
Then, the old lady herself raised the ransom to 10 billion yen, and the case became a sensational case because of the terrible amount. Such a serious case has obviously broken through the abilities of the three little thieves, but the kidnapping plan is still proceeding in an orderly manner, because they already have a resourceful, experienced and incomparable "teammate" - the old lady who should be a hostage.
This is the story setting of Tendo's masterpiece "The Great Abduction", a classic published in Japan in 1979, which has just been introduced by Nova Press. Soon after the simplified version was listed, the Douban score was already approaching 9 points, and there was no downward trend.
The Great Abduction, by Makoto Tendo, translated by Zhao Weizhen, Nova Press, March 2022.
Generally speaking, speculative fiction is clearly distinguished between good and evil, with the case as the stage, representing the righteous detective and the evil offender to conduct a mental duel, and the author's main perspective and the reader's emotional mobilization are on the side of the detective.
However, in "The Great Abduction", the author puts the main perspective on the kidnapper who created the case, and the solver becomes the background board. The alternative is that while it is true that there are crimes in the story — and the kind that are sensational in the world — the perpetrators are not villains, and seeing the middle and later paragraphs, the reader even hopes that the case will be successfully executed.
This book directly puts the criminal process in front of the reader, clearly explains the perpetrator's every move, and the whole book does not have a villain of "The Great Abduction", what is the charm that can make the reader unable to release the volume and willingly score high?
Today, we're going to talk about this alternative mystery novel.
Written by 丨Lu Yehua (Member of Shanghai Writers Association)
The first place in the masterpiece of 20th century reasoning
In 1915, the father of Japanese reasoning, Edogawa, out of his love for speculative fiction, wrote a study work "Arquebus Gun", which was still in the embryonic period of childishness like the situation in the Japanese speculative literary world at that time. That same year, a child named Jin Endo was born.
Nearly fifty years later, Japanese reasoning has reached a prosperous scene through the efforts of many writers, and the social reasoning led by Kiyoharu Matsumoto was popular at that time. At this time, Endo Jin began to write speculative fiction under the pseudonym "Tendo Makoto".
In 1962, the not-so-young Tendo Ma was selected for the second prize for the "Gem" with a copy of "Relatives and Friends", although it did not receive the final prize, but Tendo Makoto was not discouraged, and handed over two works in one go the following year, of which "The Eagle and the Vulture" successfully won the second Gem Award, and another book with a relaxed and witty style, "The Suspect", was also selected as a candidate for the Edogawa Chaos Walk Award, and since then, the forty-eight-year-old Tendo has truly stepped into the world of reasoning literature.
Perhaps it was the age of the debut, or perhaps the reasoning literary circle at that time was shrouded in the "Matsumoto Kiyoharu curse", readers would prefer to see cruel and realistic detective stories, Tendo's witty and humorous style of work seemed out of place at the time, so in the following few years, Tendo did not publish more works. It was not until 1971 that he began to write and publish at a yearly pace, when the active in the speculative literary world were Seiichi Morimura, Kyotaro Nishimura and others, and although the influence of socialism gradually declined with the birth and growth of a new generation of readers, it was still the mainstream of the market at that time.
"Astrology Killing Magic", by Shoji Shimada, translated by Wang Pengfan, Nova Press, July 2019 edition.
This continued until the late 1970s, when the speculative literary world quietly began a new round of taste shifts. In 1978, Jiro Akagawa resigned from the company and began writing full-time, and this year his publication of "Sherlock Holmes the Tricolor Cat" became a super bestseller, and new-age readers were fascinated by this light-hearted and humorous style of fiction. In 1980, Shoji Shimada participated in the Edogawa Chaos Prize with a book called "Astrology Magic", and although it did not win the prize in the end, this strange book, which was later renamed "Astrology Killing Magic", has sown the seeds of a new honk in the hearts of many people.
Looking back now, the three years from 1978 to 1980 were a crucial transition period for the Japanese speculative literary scene, before which it was the world of socialism, and after that, it was a wave of new essences. Sandwiched between 1978 and 1980, the most important work was Tendo's The Great Abduction.
Stills from the movie The Great Abduction (1991).
"The Great Abduction" is Tendo's most important work, on the one hand, in addition to its really impeccable quality, on the other hand, it is "born at the right time". In 1979, The Great Abduction won the 32nd Mystery Writers Association Award, and we can even say that the book, like the "Tricolor Cat Series" and "Astrology Killing Magic", is a manifesto work, which represents the establishment of a new style of speculative literature in this market, and one of the common points of these works is that it is irresponsible romantic fantasy. Speculative fiction, back to the category of purely entertaining fiction.
Classics don't fade with the passage of time, but rather shine brighter. In the 2001 "Weekly Wenchun 20th Century Mystery Masterpiece BEST10" selection, "The Great Abduction" won the first place. You know, in 2001, the most elite writers and works of the new Benge have come out, and what can make modern readers vote for this is actually a 1979 work.
In fact, when I read this book, I always forgot the year of publication of the book, and I always forgot that the author was a person born in 1915.
Textbook character settings
In the speculative fiction after the evaluation of the new benguet, only one word is enough: "interesting".
"The Great Abduction" is precisely the most interesting kind of novel, and its fun is not like many mystery novels that have to be retained until the end, but at the beginning of the story, people can't help but be praised as "interesting".
There are not many characters in the story, and the main characters are only four: the three kidnapping gang "Rainbow Boys" and their hostages, an old lady.
The tension of the novel comes from the contradiction, how to create a natural contradiction in the character setting is the goal that all writers are pursuing, and the main setting technique of the contradiction is "reverse error". In my previous book reviews or activities, whenever I mentioned the contradictions and misalignments of the characters, I would always take "The Great Abduction" as an example, and in my mind, it seems that I can't find a second such textbook reasoning work.
Stills from the Japanese drama "The Great Abduction 2018".
In the pair of main characters of the "Rainbow Boy" trio and the old lady hostage, the author sets up two sets of contradictions and mistakes:
First, the kidnappers were three young men, and the hostage was an eighty-year-old man. In this way, the relationship between strength and weakness is extremely clear. Here, the author's mistake is that the three young people are relatively young and have no confidence in the crime plan, while the old man has "the courage of a lion, the shrewdness of a fox, and the kindness of a panda", and her intelligence is far above that of the kidnappers. With this setup, the strong-weak relationship is flipped.
Second, the relationship between the kidnappers and the hostages, the relationship between command and obedience is also very obvious, but the author subverts the relationship between command and obedience with only one sentence after the old lady is kidnapped. This quote is the quote "Don't underestimate me, I'm not so worthless!" After this sentence, the relationship between command and obedience took a sharp turn for the worse, and it was clear that the kidnappers had accepted the ransom demands made by the hostages, which meant that the initiative and management of the entire kidnapping plan had been transferred from the hands of the kidnappers to the hands of the hostages.
The above two points, seemingly opposite, but gain each other, because of such a complete and ingenious setting, so after two extreme reversals, the temperament of the whole story, although absurd, still has a very solid underlying logic. Readers don't feel "fake", they just feel "cute".
"The Great Abduction" is known as the pioneer of humorous reasoning, but when we read the whole book, we can't find a single laugh point, nor can we extract any baggage, and Tendo Ma gives the humor of the temperament of the work: there is no villain in the characters, and the ingenuity of the wrong setting. Even if the character is allowed to play, it will automatically expand into a very interesting scene.
This "sense of humor" that blends with the whole story is also the reason why "The Great Abduction" is so unique, humorous reasoning is very little, and Tendo's real humor is different from others, such as "creating humorous pictures through the funny words and deeds of characters" represented by Toshikawa Tokuya, or "creating humorous stories through the scheming baka (fool) represented by Kenichi Sube", if you must find a similar writer, perhaps Isaka Kotaro's style is the closest to Tendo Mae.
It's an inexplicable but slightly disconnected romantic story based on real life.
Popular kidnapping novels
Above, we deconstructed the basis for the popularity of "The Great Abduction" through the unique style of the work, the key era of the book, and the excellent character setting, but all this is just the beginning, and the subsequent development of the story and the core suspense are the reasons that support the work to become a classic.
As we mentioned earlier, This unique temperament of Tendo Makoto is quite rare in speculative fiction, and although Kotaro Isaka, a writer with a similar temperament, writes speculative fiction, he does not consider himself a speculative writer. The reason is because it is difficult to perfectly integrate the story of speculative fiction and this romantic warm temperament, because "crime" and "mystery" are the most fundamental foundation of speculative fiction, and the background of crime is undoubtedly black.
Therefore, the works of this temperament must make a trade-off, either not to be a big mystery, the importance of weakly resolving the mystery, or to change the mystery to a different way, hidden between the lines and the structural layout. The big mystery must be accompanied by serial killings and impossible crimes. And for this question, "The Great Abduction" made a very beautiful answer.
- No characters die in the work, and there is not a single bad guy, but this is a sensational case! Under the premise of having a relaxed temperament, it retains the heavy crime solving events.
When the title of the book, "The Great Abduction", is quite in place, and the author hides behind the protagonist of the book and says to the reader, "Don't underestimate me, I am not so worthless", the story dislocation begins to occur, and at the same time, the main suspense of the story is also about to come out.
Kidnapping, or abduction, is a very common story model in speculative fiction, especially Japanese reasoning. First of all, because it is not smaller than the murder case, it is worth the full attention of the detectives and the police; secondly, there is a "countdown switch" in the kidnapping case, "countdown" has a vital role in the suspense story, in general, this countdown needs to be created by the author himself, such as "the protagonist is suffering from cancer, only two months of life", such as "the serial killer kills one person a week, the later the case will be solved, the more victims", these are the classic authors artificially add countdown to the story, and the kidnapping case has a natural advantage; third, The most crucial mystery in the kidnapping case is how the kidnappers get the ransom, which is the climactic scene and core suspense that will inevitably be ushered in, and its realization is no less difficult than the impossible crime.
Stills from the movie The Great Abduction (1991).
In summary, kidnapping cases are naturally "very popular" in speculative fiction, and in modern Japan, there have been many excellent speculative novels with kidnapping as the core story. Such as Mikihiko Ryūjo's "Honey", Hozuki Ryutaro's "The Tragedy of One", Takao Tsuchiya's "The Temptation of needles", Keigo Higashino's "Kidnapping Game", Isaka Kotaro's "White Rabbit", Okashima's "99% Abduction", Seiichiro Oyama's "Abduction of Y", Higashikawa's "Never Kidnapped Again", etc., many of the variables of the kidnapping case have also been fully explored in these excellent works, and from this point of view, Tendo's "The Great Abduction" can also be regarded as the originator of kidnapping speculative fiction.
For the biggest suspense - how the kidnappers took the ransom, and it is a huge amount of cash of ten billion - "The Great Abduction" once again exerts the frank courage of the work, and does not use other small clever tricks, but faces this problem head-on.
Here, of course, you can't leak the bottom, but you can remind everyone that the implementation of the kidnapping plan in "The Great Abduction" makes full use of the modern media, especially the "live broadcast" form that is now popular.
Many people often ask the question, with the development of science and technology, the popularization of cameras, live broadcasting and other technologies, is the criminal ruse in classical Benge reasoning limited, and we can no longer write the excellent tricks of our predecessors?
"The Great Abduction" is the best answer to this question, and in the eyes of speculative writers, the development of science is not a limitation, but an extra material for conceiving tricks.
Finally, I hope that everyone can really open this cute and unique mystery novel and enjoy this "new book" from more than forty years ago.