Almost all of Matsumoto Kiyoharu's short stories are related to life and death. The present, which should be satisfied, and the tangled past, are always delicately intertwined. Among them, it is reversed by chance and coincidence, so that the daily life of satisfaction is transformed into a day of terror and uneasiness.
Kiyoharu Matsumoto 1909-1992
<h1 class="pgc-h-arrow-right" > the charm of Matsumoto Kiyoharu's short stories</h1>
Critics · Kwonda Manji
Kiyoharu Matsumoto's greatest charm of short stories is that he can intercept a section of his life and express it with vivid novel techniques. Seemingly unchanged daily life, one day suddenly because of a trivial and trivial shift, leading to a dramatic ending - such a short story can be reminiscent of the work of the short story master O. Henry, but Matsumoto's work does not have the extreme situation setting or artificial far-fetched ending in O.Henry's work. Therefore, the impression of the work is always fresh and strong to a surprising degree.
Almost all of Matsumoto Kiyoharu's short stories are related to life and death. The present, which should be satisfied, and the tangled past, are always delicately intertwined. Among them, it is reversed by chance and coincidence, so that the daily life of satisfaction is transformed into a day of terror and uneasiness. The smooth everyday life and dark past are presented in a creepy posture – a setting seen in Matsumoto's excellent short stories such as "Face" and "The Voice". The short story of the same name, "Accomplices" (Weekly Yomiuri, Showa 31 [1956] November 18), has something in common with it.
The film "Accomplice", released in 2015, is the sixth time that the novel has been adapted into a film and television drama
In general, the fewer people who commit crimes, the lower the probability of the crime being discovered. With the exception of the Kim Dae-jung incident or the Matsukawa incident, which used power to cover up crimes, such as state conspiracies, certain political beliefs, or organized crimes that were bound by blood, crimes that satisfy general desires are more and more advantageous the individual.
The reason for this is that the crimes of most people are easy to attract attention, and even if the crime itself is successful for a while, the uneven sharing of the spoils can easily lead to the breakdown of the relationship. Even if there is no problem of sharing the loot, it is difficult to live after obtaining a huge amount of money without being suspected and difficult to maintain for a long time.
However, crimes such as bank robbery are difficult to commit alone. Therefore, in speculative fiction, this kind of large-scale criminal plan that requires several people to carry out will always have a stereotypical bridge section that eventually leads to the suicide of the criminal because of the accomplice or the persistent search of the police. James Hadley Chase's The World in My Pocket, for example, falls into this genre.
However, Matsumoto's Accomplice has the fun of breaking this stereotype. The protagonist of this work has the same "black history" of bank robbery as another man, Machida Takeshi. Five years later, his furniture business is booming, allowing him to live the life of a successful person. However, once he lived comfortably, he began to fear losing his existing happiness. So he was very concerned about the movement of accomplices to Machida. He chose to hide himself while inquiring into machida's life...
The protagonist of "Accomplice" self-destructs because of his uneasiness without any basis in reality. Therefore, although this work depicts bad people, there is also a part that makes people sympathize with the protagonist, and the ending part exudes a kind of sadness that is unpredictable in life. There is also the Karl Theodor Jaspers-esque reversal of the impunity that is the greatest punishment.
Kiyoharu Matsumoto once described the work: "The beginning of this novel is very similar to my own experience. For some time after the war, I had a similar business experience. What he calls "business-like" here, according to the Half-Life Chronicle, refers to the part-time job of selling brooms every Sunday after the birth of three men and the birth of eight family members in the 21st year of Showa [1946].
Kiyoharu Matsumoto also mentioned at the beginning of the above-mentioned self-description: "At that time, I lived in a small town in Nara. Opposite is a high-end hotel where the upstart lives, and the tune of the lively shamisen is heard. I looked out from the dirty, lice-like house. In the same room lives a seller selling chopsticks – to say experience, but that's it. At this time, he had a feeling that the mood of Mo Ami's Cast Hanging Pine is quite similar, even if he runs the streets of Edo and his legs are weak, relying solely on the sale of 'Cast Hanging', his daily life is still embarrassing. Seriously working people do not know what a comfortable life is. No, it should be said that the more serious the person who works, the less likely he is to live comfortably. The gap between rich and poor in front of us makes people despair and can't help but want to curse life. ”
Matsumoto Kiyoharu short story classic "Accomplice", People's Literature Publishing House, 99 Readers, published in 2020
The beginning of Edogawa's rambling short story "Two Coins and Copper Coins" reads: "Two people have been embarrassed to the point where they often say' that they really envy that thief. Behind this text is the real mood of the chaotic pace after losing my job and not even having money to buy cigarettes. The living sense of reality in Kiyoharu Matsumoto's "Accomplice" is inseparable from his own hard life experience.
Kiyoharu Matsumoto is a writer who strongly opposes the depiction of personal experiences as works intact, i.e., against the so-called "private novels" of the Japanese tradition. However, in Matsumoto's works, which attach importance to storytelling, from time to time, he is cleverly arranged into his personal experience. In this sense, "Accomplice" is also a work worth paying attention to.
The Intimidator (All Books, September 1954) tells the story of a man who escaped from the Chikugo riverside detention center after meeting the housewife he had saved at the time on the dam site after meeting the housewife he had saved at the time after flooding caused by heavy rain.
The interesting thing about this work is that it is nothing more than the wishful thinking of the housewife whose life has been saved, and the unique plot of one intimidation triggering another.
Readers may wonder how the fugitives in the detention center were not caught in the first place. That's the way it is. Hiroo Murata's Crime and Detective gives several examples — for example, it took the police eleven days to catch a fugitive under the extremely unfavorable condition of "escaping from the detention center"; Otsu in the carbine incident also escaped to Oita with his mistress, and the police took twenty days to catch him. "In general, mass society is characterized by drastic change, a high degree of mobility, and anonymity," Murata said. It is these characteristics that give fugitives an excellent hiding place. Therefore, it is really very difficult to search and arrest fugitives in modern ways. ”
"The Conspiracy of Love and Blankness" ("Women Themselves", Showa 33 [1958] December 12, 2012) belongs to the speculative and romantic genre in Matsumoto Kiyoharu's works. A series of long works such as "Tower of Waves", "Salt of the Desert", and "Sight of the Wind" all depict the subtle forms of love between modern men and women with rich reasoning. In this short work, the woman who has lost her husband has a male-female relationship with her husband's colleagues, and in the process of vaguely feeling that her husband has a hidden lover, the husband's unknown past is also exposed. The kind of egoism that men want to be decent is well portrayed. Among the women described by Kiyoharu Matsumoto are the evil girls in "Strong Ants" and "Black Corridor", and there are also women such as Zhang Zi in "The Conspiracy of Love and Blankness".
"Seizure" ("New Wave" Showa 32 [1964] September issue) describes a story of a wife's illness, gambling and borrowing money, lover's imminent departure, work mistakes and many other reasons led to dissatisfaction, tension accumulated day by day, and eventually led to impulsive killing. Since Albert Camus's The Alien, unmotivated killing has become synonymous with "irrational literature." From Matsumoto Kiyoharu's works, we can find the reasons behind the seemingly unmotivated impulsive killing. Impulse killings in recent years, such as the piano killings, have attracted much attention, and this work can be described as prescient.
The Wandering of Youth (Weekly Asahi Bibliography: Masterpieces of The Period Novels 6, Showa 28 [1953]) was originally titled Death. Regarding the work, the author himself recalls: "'The Wandering of Youth' is the work I thought of when I was walking in Kyushu. Because I was in Kokura at the time, the range of action was relatively large in northern Kyushu. One summer, I used to live in a place where I could see the view of the deep Yema Creek and the eight views of Ichimoku. The owner and wife of the shop where I stayed at the time were from Osaka, and they heard that they had worked as cooks in the Asahi newspaper dormitory in Osaka. So I know a lot of newspaper executives. They didn't say much about why they came to Kyushu from Osaka, and seeing how they kept smiling, I guess they eloped. That night, the boss told me about the martyrdom. The mountains are deep, the scenery is beautiful, there are many martyrs, and many more people who die in the mountains are not found at all. ”
Death at a young age is always easily glorified. But death is not a beautiful thing. Arthur Schopenhauer was negative about suicide, arguing that because the desire to live is always suppressed, life is bound to be a distress, but even if the individual chooses to commit suicide, the suffering of the whole human race will never disappear. "The Wandering of Youth", from another point of view, also has a denial of death and an affirmation of life.
Matsumoto Kiyoharu Short Story Classics Third Series, newly published
Although the plot of "Point" ("Central Public Treatise" Showa Thirty-three Years [1958] January Issue) and "Specimens" ("Central Public Treatise • Literary and Art Special Edition" Showa Thirty-four Years [1959]) January, although the storyline is completely different, there are similarities in the aspects that ruthlessly shape the nostalgic and uninvited. The protagonist of "Point" once went undercover as a policeman into the Japanese Communist Party, but after being abandoned by the police organization, his life was depressed, and he barely made a living by peddling his so-called insider information everywhere. This deserted portrait of a figure has a sense of urgency. The bird-calling celebrity in "Specimen" is a kind of fictitious character image, which overlaps with the high posture of the lonely art critic who has a hard time writing articles with the help of writers, forming a kind of relief work. Kiyoharu Matsumoto hated such vain people.
"The Potential Situation" (Women's Tales, Showa 36 [1961] April Issue) is one of the short series "Shadow Car", which was also well received by director Yoshitaro Nomura after making it into a movie, and most people learned about it through movies. The theme of "killing children" was addressed in Ellery Queen's The Tragedy of Y, and in Japan, Yukio Mishima and other writers have criticized it as very unnatural. But recently, because of the many incidents of children killing people in reality, this criticism has disappeared. In "Potential Light and Shadow", in the intersection of two events, the dark childhood experience is highlighted, and this plot setting makes the "unnatural" component much less. This work can definitely be said to be one of Matsumoto Kiyoharu's excellent short reasoning stories.
The Elegant Brother and Sister (Women's Tales, Showa 36 [1961] May Issue) tells the story of the murders that take place between the two brothers and sisters who look eerie and the process of the murderer's alibi being overthrown. Momoshi, who likes reptiles such as lizards and frogs, and his younger brother Tseijiro, who hates these animals very much, although they usually have a good relationship, but the quarrel will be fierce, and the two figures who live a high life are portrayed very well. The trick of using telegrams to make alibis is also interesting. In Matsumoto Kiyoharu's novels, such as "Points and Lines" and "Dangerous Slopes", there are many excellent works that depict the alibi and are overturned. This short story is also one of them.
The original title of "The Female Prisoner at a Distance" ("ALL Reader", Showa 29 [1954] March Issue) was "Female Prisoner Copy". The work takes the form of a letter from his imprisoned wife to Hideo Fujikawa, who is now known for archaeology and a university professor. In the letter emerges a lonely scholar, Ishii, who is not accepted by mainstream scholarship, abandoning everything devoted to archaeology and having an absolute passion for scholarship. I think this is Kiyoharu Matsumoto's self-portrait. Works such as "The Ancient Doubts" and "Japanese History Fans and Keys" can also see Matsumoto's amazing curiosity about archaeology and ancient history. These works have surpassed the amateur category and reached the level of professional scholars. It can be said that this work is the crystallization of Matsumoto's dream of archaeology.
(March 31, 1980)
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