"The Vessel of Sand": the charm of the old version of the renovation

On March 28 this year, Fuji Tv in Japan celebrated its 60th anniversary with the launch of "Sand Ware" SP (Special Bonus). Powerful actor Noriyuki Higashiyama, Ken Nakajima of the popular idol group Sexy Zone, and Taiho Tsuchiya, a new generation of Japanese actresses, and Hitomi Kuroki, who is very popular in the Chinese, all participate in the drama.

Reporter/Zhang Yuehan

At a fork in the road near Kamata Station in Japan, at night, an ordinary and affordable bar walked into two very fresh-looking male customers. One of them was young and one was older, and the conversation seemed very private, and they did not like the waiter to disturb them too much. After a long secret conversation, the two left.

At 4 o'clock in the morning of the next day, at the shunting yard of Kamata Station near the bar, the train quality inspector found a "reddened man's body" under the wheels of the seventh carriage. The face of the corpse was blurred with flesh and blood and was difficult to identify. "It looks like you've hit hard with something like a blunt object, and your eyeballs are popping up." The nose was smashed, the mouth was cracked, and the gray hair was stained with blood.

The police quickly set up a search headquarters. But at first, it was difficult to determine the identity of the deceased, and the only clue was that the bartender occasionally heard the victim and the young man, and "Kameda" appeared in the conversation. This word can be both a personal name and a place name in Japanese. "Kameda", the criminal police officer Imanishi Eitaro who participated in the case, could not help but think bitterly about this word...

Such a suspenseful beginning appeared in 1960 in Matsumoto Kiyoharu's novel The Instrument of Sand, serialized in the Yomiuri Shimbun. The moral of the title is, "a bunker made of sand", alluding to the middle-class climber and He Yingliang in the original work, although for a while it seems that the scenery is unique and is heading for the peak of his life, but this bustling bunker is actually composed of the most fragile and vulnerable sand. Once it collapses, he has nothing left, and the bunker built of "sand" will inevitably collapse.

The novel was serialized with great success, and the following year it was published as a one-shot version and adapted into a TV series by TBS Television.

After the beginning of the above suspense, detective Imami is painstakingly pursued by the word "Kameda" and finally discovers the secret of the Northeastern dialect, and then locks the victim's long residence. After determining the identity of the victim through a painstaking and tedious process, Imagi and his young colleague Hiroshi Yoshimura decided to reconstruct the victim's behavior on the day of the crime and even the months before the crime, and find the final clue - the movie theater. Then, step by step, the real murderer was locked, and the hot new composer and He Yingliang surfaced. He is about to visit abroad on behalf of the Japanese cultural community and marry the daughter of the minister when he returns.

That's the story. So, "The Instrument of Sand" has been continuously adapted for so many years, what is its charm?

The early adaptations that come to mind today, both in terms of audience evaluation and influence, the work that won the best Japanese film of the year in 1974 is a classic.

An important reason why the 74th edition has become a classic is first of all that it derives the tragic meaning of "fate" in the original work. At the end of the film, the symphony played specifically for this theme, mixed with the two-line advance of the tragic childhood experience of the murderer in the present west, shows a very strong artistic tension. The wandering scenes of his childhood Hideo (later He Yingliang) and his father crossing the mountains and the blank eyes of begging depict his unhappy childhood. Next, the camera travels back to the present, sitting in the middle of the stage with He Yingliang dressed in a bright outfit, playing under the attention of thousands of people. The language of the camera is very successful in telling this contrast, and in an instant, the murderer's motive for killing is self-evident. Hideo thought that by killing Kenichi Miki, his past would cease to exist, and he would be able to get rid of his lowly and poor fate. As a result, this two-line narrative has become a classic, and it has been repeated and paid tribute to in the 2004 TV series version and the 2019 TV series version.

Because it is adapted in the 70s, it is not too far from the original 60s, so many of the plots or background settings in the novel can be directly followed. For example, in Japan, where more people died in the war, survivors can register their household registration through self-reports and do not need any proof; detective Imagi likes to write haiku and read newspapers in his spare time, and many investigations are done by writing letters, and so on. Including the most important plot of the original book, the fragment of the murderous clothes thrown outside the train window, in the 70s, it is still reasonable and not abrupt. At that time, because the mass communication method was not so developed, Kenichi Miki, a victim who opened a grocery store in the countryside, could only find the famous photo of Wakasa Inryo in a movie theater when he traveled to Kansai.

The 74 version has a great influence on the people behind, and the theme of "fate" has been used in many versions, and the pilgrim shape of Xiufu and his father in the film, and the plot of the wandering of father and son, have been repeated in the 2004 version and the 2019 version.

The 2004 version of the TV series was sought after by many female audiences due to the invitation of Masahiro Nakai in the popular group SMAP at that time to play the protagonist and He Yingliang. This version sets the story of the 60s in the original book as contemporary, and has made major changes in many places.

Hideo's father, no longer a leper, became a murderer who set fire to more than 30 people in the village. The meaning of "fate" of He He Yingliang has also changed from "getting rid of the lowly fate of the past" to the murderous fate from father to son. Since then, his tragedy has become even stronger.

Due to the long narrative time of the TV series, the narrative volume of 11 episodes and more than 11 hours makes it more able to show the richness of each character than the movie. The most brilliant feature of this edition is the portrayal of He Yingliang, which shows the multi-faceted nature of the murderer, focusing on the fragility of his glamorous appearance and the constant fear of the collapse of the Sand Tower.

Due to the development of technology, the 2004 version also has a more perfect picture. Especially at the end, Hideo and the heroine are in the sunset, looking at the figure of the father and son of the pilgrims who represent his past, the sky suddenly clears, and the shadows of the father and son seem to have gone down the beach on the big seashore for a lifetime. According to a later interview with the TV series, it was originally cloudy when the shooting was made that day, and at the climax, the sky suddenly cleared, which inadvertently contributed to this classic picture.

The greatest charm of each adaptation is that it can integrate the characteristics of each era. Fuji TV's 2019 version of the screen is very modern, and some plot adaptations are more reasonable, such as changing the location of the body to the downtown area of Shibuya, Tokyo. It was no longer the quality inspector who found the body, but the young men and women who came out on Halloween to play wildly. But overall, this version does not surpass the core charm of the previous game.

A relatively bad change is that the new version completely changes the lonely self-struggle path with He Yingliang. In the original work and the 74th edition and the 2004 edition, he Yingliang's "identity" was earned by himself. In the original work, He Yingliang abandons his leper father, leaves the kind police officer who is ready to help him, and also leaves his own history. He used the population register to create a fictitious pair of parents for himself. Then, as an orphan whose parents died, he relied on his piano talent to emerge step by step. In the 2004 version, He Yingliang's identity was stolen by a classmate who died in the flood, and he also relied on talent as his first stepping stone. However, in the 2019 version, the creator set up and He Yingliang directly found the Japanese piano master's private residence in Karuizawa, and just at this time, the master's only son unfortunately died, so he was used as a "substitute" for his own son, directly giving him parent-child status. In this setting, He He Yingliang is no longer an "orphan" who broke out with his bare hands, but has become a "second generation of stars" who can quickly become famous with the help of his father's connections. In fact, this erases all the motivations in the original work and He Yingliang to kill people to maintain his hard-won entry into high society.

Another point is that the 2019 version will be "whitewashed" with He Yingliang's role too fiercely. The selfishness, hypocrisy, and narcissism of He Yingliang in the original work are not shown in the new version. Even after the secret mistress Naruse Nariko committed suicide for him, he felt guilty and nostalgic. This completely changed the image of a class climber created by Kiyoharu Matsumoto.

The latest version follows many of the classic plots of the previous game, but does not create more novelty. The 2019 edition also emphasizes fate, setting he AndHe Yingliang's brother as a murderer who kills four young girls in a row, and the father eventually brutally kills a small due to pressure and self-defense. However, the TV series did not explain the brother's motives for killing four young girls in a row. The subtext in the play seems to say that the blood of the "murderer" flows through the bodies of the three of them, but the father has always been a good father who cares for the family and is diligent before the tragedy, and only suddenly kills people because of pressure, which is also far-fetched.

"Hiding evidence of guilt" is Kiyoharu Matsumoto's usual method. In the original book of "The Weapon of Sand", the murderer gave the bloody clothes of the murder to his underground mistress, and the explanation given in the novel was because it was too eye-catching to burn a piece of clothing, so the mistress chose to cut the murder clothes into pieces, and took a train to let the fragments float out of the window. It's a moment of picture.

Writer Kiyoharu Matsumoto

In the latest 2019 edition, the plot remains as it is. Although the lens language is treated as a Japanese small freshness, it looks beautiful, but in today's 2019, there are cameras on the train station and train, is such a plot reasonable?

The moment the woman threw away her bloody clothes, she was seen by a writer on the train, written as an essay, published in a newspaper, and so coincidentally, she was seen by the police detective who was investigating the case. This is also a copy of the original. However, not to mention the decline of the print media in 2019, many people do not read the newspaper, and the 2019 edition does not pave the way for the emotional side of Imanishi's penchant for writing haiku in the original work. If there is this foreshadowing, then it may be more reasonable for a detective to read a literary essay in the newspaper.