Even under the influence of blockbusters, the Japanese mystery movie "When the Prayer Ends" has received good box office and word-of-mouth. In Japan, the film grossed 1.5 billion yen and in China more than 60 million.
"When the Prayer Ends" received a high score of 8.0 in Douban Movie.
"Detective Conan" is even more well-known. There are already 22 Conan movies, just as prolific as the Marvel series. The media said that Conan's IP was worth tens of billions of yen.
In fact, it is very difficult to adapt movies from speculative fiction, and with the exception of Sherlock Holmes and the work of Agatha Christie, few mystery novels have made it to the big screen. This is probably because speculative fiction needs to peel back the cocoon to find the truth, need to describe the emotional entanglement, and need to pay attention to the author who has been hanging in the heart to follow the author deep into the story. Therefore, TV dramas are more suitable for reasoning themes, such as "Detective Charlotte" and so on.
Even Hollywood movies are mainly thrillers, suspense films, crime films, and rare reasoning movies.
Korean movies are widely and stunningly diverse, but there are not many mystery stories.
But Japan is thriving, and excellent reasoning movies have come out many times, so to speak, in Japanese reasoning movies like Pikachu are as popular.
The model of the Japanese reasoning industry is also very clear, the novel is on fire to shoot TV series, and the TV series is to shoot the theater version. After layers of screening, eventually iron powder will appear in front of the big screen.
Today, we don't talk about the Japanese reasoning industry, but about how the IP of speculative fiction was created.
To be honest, I don't read much speculative fiction. In my early years, I read Chandler's "The Long Farewell" and "Long Sleep", only to feel that the narrative was sophisticated, the reasoning was intertwined, and the stock market could withstand scrutiny, but that was all.
Later reading Agatha Christie's Sin in the Sun was a bit disappointing. In this story, the characters are confined to a small island, and various disputes are caused by the murder of an offensive woman. All characters have the potential to kill, and detectives must look for pieces in every detail of each person's behavior and then piece it together into a complete picture.
In the end, the ending of the story is not particularly unexpected, but rather a bit of a top-heavy one. So, in the not very long years of my life, I have not built up a passion for speculative fiction.
Later, I began to read Keigo Higashino by chance, and began to pay limited attention to Japanese speculative fiction. The first keigo Higashino to read should be "White Night", right? The story is extremely elaborate, telling not the story of tough guy reasoning, but a story about the sense of distance between people.
Although "Phantom Night" is not as tense as "White Night", it is still an unexpected work of reasoning. The theme is still the fate we can't get rid of, the teasing of love.
A brief history of reasoning
So as a novel, what are the characteristics of speculative fiction? This brings us to the source of the novel.
To put it simply, the rise of the novel was due to the rise of civic culture. For example, after the Song Dynasty in China, novels began to be widely popular, and novels in the Ming and Qing dynasties shined, all thanks to the rapid development of civic culture. The world feels that "Jin Ping Mei" is pornographic, in fact, the greatness of "Jin Ping Mei" is that it outlines the life of the citizens of the Ming Dynasty, full of fireworks, just like the "Qingming River Map" of that dynasty.
Speculative fiction, originally called detective novels. Detective, the word existed in 1194, meaning footprints, trails, can refer to people, but also refers to animal tracks. It was not until the 19th century that the term evolved into what it is today, meaning investigation and search.
Now, detectives refer to a person or a profession whose mission and goal is to find the truth of the case. And the truth, there is only one.
In 1841, the American writer Ellen Poe proposed the concept of speculative fiction. Interestingly, he wrote five speculative novels in his lifetime, but almost all the speculative fiction after that escaped his setting of speculative fiction. In the late 19th century, detective fiction spread to Japan and became widely popular.
In the 1920s, the Japanese writer Jun Mizutani first proposed the concept of reasoning, but few people paid attention to it, and everyone still called novels with this genre detective novels. It was not until the 1950s, when detective novels written by Japanese became the most important part of the world's detective fiction scene, that the concept of speculative fiction began to be widely recognized.
The greatest pleasure of speculative fiction is to find the truth through the constantly emerging or intermittent clues.
In speculative fiction, there will always be a detective or policeman, and the detective and/or policeman will investigate the case according to the author's rhythm and rhythm, and the role of this rhythm is to lead the reader to go deeper into it. This is probably the charm of speculative fiction.
If we focus on Japanese speculative fiction, we can divide it into two genres, one is called Benge speculative fiction, and the rest is one. We can understand benguet speculative fiction in this way, and give up the charm of the novel to a certain extent in order to reasoning. The mission of the novel is to reveal some unknown meaning in our lives, and the Benguet speculative novel often has some transcendent meaning in order to design a delicate criminal closed loop. Even more than the limits of reasonableness.
By the end of the 1950s, Kiyoharu Matsumoto had come out and changed the narrative of speculative fiction. In the past, Benguet speculative novels were romantic, heroic and beautiful, similar to 007. Kiyoharu Matsumoto pays more attention to the widespread social situation in Japan, injecting a realistic background into speculative fiction. Changed the understanding and creation of speculative fiction in later generations.
Kiyoharu Matsumoto was keenly aware of the magic and reality of postwar Japanese society. During this period, the Japanese people's thinking experienced countless destructions and blows, the collapse of the emperor's position, the belief in fighting for great ideals was destroyed to be useless... So, are there right or wrong in the values we have always believed in?
This idea influenced Kiyoharu Matsumoto's fiction writing. And most of his work asks a question: If someone commits such a crime for such a motive, how do you judge and how do you think about it?
If Benge's speculative fiction is revealing who the murderer is, then Matsumoto Kiyoharu, although it also casts a heavy fog, is ultimately to tell you why this person committed a crime and whether his crime is justified. In other words, is there a possibility that the criminal will choose again?
Kiyoharu Matsumoto had a great influence on later generations of speculative writers, such as Natsuo Kirino, who was also the main writer of social speculative fiction. He has a novel called "OUT" about the murder of a housewife, behind which is the bleak reality of the collapse of Japan's bubble economy.
The baton of reasoning passed to Keigo Higashino, and in the early days his creations were more like speculative fiction in the traditional sense, that is, Benge speculative fiction, after which his works were broad in subject matter, very broad in vision, and at the same time, elements of surrealism were added to many works.
Keigo Higashino was originally an engineer, and in 1985, his book "After School" won the Edogawa Rambling Prize, Japan's highest award for speculative fiction. This award is very popular in Japan, mainly to encourage those up-and-coming writers who have dreams of reasoning, and if you win the award, your work can be published by Kodansha.
"After School" is also a very distinctive speculative novel, and the plot is fascinating. Keigo Higashino was very happy after winning the award, and felt that I would be a professional writer in the future, so I would quit my job and write at home. However, after this, the response to his works was average, and he did not sweep the world of reasoning as he thought. This bland life lasted for a decade.
Ten years later, in 1996, Keigo Higashino's Code of Famous Detectives finally shone brightly, piercing the dark curtain of Keigo Higashino's life, and this genius of reasoning finally came to the world.
Since then, Keigo Higashino has been out of control, he has amazing creative ability, and the subject matter is also very diverse. Like "Relief Grocery Store" is not a mystery novel at all, more like a fantasy novel, but it does not matter.
Also , "The Secret" is also very surreal, the daughter's soul enters the mother's body, this story touches on human ethics and is worth pondering.
Less rigorously, Keigo Higashino's early works were mainly Benge speculative novels, and people's vision was on who the murderer was. Works such as "White Night" and "The Cross of Nothingness" began to explore social issues in depth, the inner struggle and despair of a group of alienated urbanites. They are all looking for a way to salvation, some will be born again, and some will still walk through the bitter darkness.
If we expand the context of reasoning, we may not be able to fully describe why reasoning is so popular in Japan, but we can briefly analyze the role of the literary environment in promoting the popularity of speculative fiction.
In addition, the awards for speculative fiction have also promoted the development of Japanese speculative fiction. Similar to the Edogawa Rambling Prize, it is the highest award for Japanese mystery novels. If you win an award, you can get the opportunity to publish your work, and you can also officially debut as a speculative novelist.
Of course, under the conditions of the popularity of speculative fiction, speculative comics have also turned out, Conan is proof of this; and speculative TV dramas have repeatedly dominated tv screens...
Personally, Benguet reasoning naturally has its charm, but social speculative fiction seems to have more tension and resonate with us. In a word, the Japanese love reasoning, you see, even Pikachu has become a "great detective".