Just like Zhang Ailing's Shanghai and Jia Ping's Shangzhou, sendai in Japan can also be preceded by an adjective - "Isaka Kotaro's". In my opinion, any writer whose name can be defined must have achieved a narrative style, and Kotaro Isaka is such a writer. It is hard to imagine that a middle-aged man who spends all day in a café, facing a notebook and writing a manuscript, with a cute baby face, is conceiving a warm story of a small person. To paraphrase his fictional characters, this life doesn't rock at all, but it doesn't affect you from shaking and swaying in his story. Looking at his awards, the stars shine brightly: "Gravity Clown" won the Naoki Prize as a candidate, "Death's Precision" won the 57th Japan Mystery Writers Association Award, and in 2008 he won the Japan Bookstore Award for "Golden Dreams".
Interestingly, the up-and-coming writer has always maintained an "ambiguous" relationship with reasoning. "Are you writing a mystery novel?" This question was also asked by our Heavenly King Keigo Higashino. It's just that Higashino seems to be silently thinking in his heart, of course, not. Isaka's answer, a sweeping monk's indifference. "I've loved speculative fiction since I was a kid, and I started writing it with the mood of wanting to write speculative fiction. But when it comes to writing speculative fiction, others think there will be a timetable. So I'm not quite sure what a mystery novel is. On the surface, these words are eight words: Although they cannot be reached, their hearts yearn for them. However, these few "tai chi words" that are not salty and not light are also password prompts for understanding Isaka's writing. Behind the "timetable" is the process, the routine, and Isaka is dissatisfied with the traditional card of speculative fiction. Secondly, modest ignorance weakens the factional boundaries of speculative fiction and wins over more readers.
Obviously, although Kotaro Isaka is a different flower in the soil of Japanese reasoning, the literary fruit is far beyond the world of reasoning. It's like a successful pop singer, you can't be like bel canto, folk music, always a thousand sides of the singing voice, you have to rely on the "recognition" of the voice line to win. Isaka's "singing voice" is: the intersection of slow lyricism, sadness and joy after healing and healing. Behind the brain hole is the imagination that explodes and collapses, the cool and white humor and the philosophy of life that comes to hand. He professes to admire shoji Shimada of the Benguet school, but escapes the intense brain-burning pure reasoning and goes to his opposite.
This is the sincerity of casualness, the novel does not seek to drip or leak, but to seek emotions. Isaka knows that speculative fiction does not lack a "integrated circuit-like" sophisticated brain, nor does it lack absurd catharsis divorced from reality, but also a lot of violence, death and sexual display, and what is missing may be "a clear stream". Isaka's escape is perhaps the greatest wisdom: he strives to get rid of the thinking of solving puzzles for the sake of truth and reasoning; using the scenes of life that are intimate with the curtain, the tangible texture of everyday life resists the reasoning story detached from reality, and the space is gloomy and terrifying.
In my opinion, this escape from traditional reasoning objectively creates an Isaka style: when a bat character, it is both transcendent of genre literature and can be in harmony with pure literature. This "non-bird, non-beast" escape route obviously put him in an awkward situation. "I've always considered myself a speculative novelist, and I also think I'm writing speculative fiction. But unfortunately, others don't seem to think so all the time, and it's a bit of a feeling of not letting me into this circle. So I also tried to write something that was a little different from the traditional speculative fiction. But I always considered myself a speculative novelist, and I hope people see me that way. ”
Speaking of which, we all feel sorry for Isaka. It turned out that his "escape" tradition was forced out by the "circle". A person who originally only wanted to write a speculative novel was thus broken into "non-mainstream". However, as long as the audience buys it, a thousand reservations in the reasoning circle are difficult to buy a reader's "willingness". I think he wrote a "speculative flavor" novel. Why? Because he is embedded with elements of reasoning, suspense and puzzle solving, but he does not play cards according to the genre novel routine. In other words, the thinking of reasoning gives way to "emotional" depiction. But you can't say that Isaka has no routine, narrating tricks, cold and hard factions, and Blizzard Mountain Villa, which people have played again. It's like a flavored milk drink that's not pure milk, but it tastes better.
Who's to say that this escape from writing isn't a crooked punch? Isn't it a reversal of the narrowing and rigidity of genre fiction? In "Gravity Clown", the writer emotionally expresses his boredom and sarcasm of reasoning routines, and even directly names the chapter "The Boring Process of Detective Works". You can feel the irony of "I don't want to write this, but I have to jump in." The traditional reasoning character structure is often a "god detective" who does not smile and plays a cool role, showing a "sense of intellectual superiority"; a "small question mark" that will only be led by the phenomenon, reflecting the protagonist.
"Gravity Clown" writes about a "three-person group" in which they participate: Father, Haru, and Spring Water. Among them, there is no absolute center and helper figures. The writer has a pair of eyes that find detective potential and reasoning abilities in the personality of everyday characters. In other words, most speculative fiction gives you a ready-made "god detective," and Kotaro Isaka will tell you how this kind of person becomes a god. The name Quanshui itself is a metaphor for the personality trait of "searching for the source of everything". Quan Shui has been addicted to crossword puzzles since childhood, and all the quirks of life show that he has to start from the beginning of things and find the truth of the answer. This is the "Gestalt personality" that is born to solve puzzles.
Isaka cleverly laid the groundwork for a "coming-of-age novel" that aims to unearth the warmth of ordinary families after suffering misfortune and pain (mother raped, father suffering from cancer). Younger brother Chun was born after his mother was raped by a rapist, and his antipathy to "sex" seems to suffer from "misogyny". Even, you can't help but wonder if Isaka's family warmth has a brotherly "basic affection"? But the writer wrote this "genetic original sin" to the shadow of the younger brother Chun: behind sex is sin. He deliberately removed his painting talent that did not match his family members, until he found a satisfactory explanation that convinced him that he was the reincarnation of Picasso and had a painting genius.
Is the father the "Joker"? I think so. Give birth to spring, acknowledge spring, and accept it safely. "Just like the heavier something you carry, the lighter your steps should be." The clown "constantly attracted laughter from the audience, but his expression did not change in the slightest." Father also got rid of a kind of "gravity" (society's habitual gaze on ugly things) and reached the freedom and lightness of human nature. I never thought that Isaka was peddling cheap positive energy just to deliberately heal the wounds. Rather, it is a strong humanitarian glow, as in Camus's Plague of The Plague, with a firm sense of morality that brooks no rebuttal. He tends to have a slight uptick at the end, warming up the whole story. But he holds the "precision", and he does not want to make the turn too steep and too pretentious.
Some people say that Isaka Kotaro's brain hole is difficult to make up, a bit of "middle two", beautiful comfort, but also childish. Is this really the case? I think that's really rare. What others can't learn is the alertness in this "stay" and the joy in "cuteness". Is it childish? It should be a "childlike heart" permeated with the wisdom of life. He always pokes you coldly with golden sentences, and you inevitably laugh and drink a lot of chicken soup. Sometimes I wonder, why do we love to drink Isaka's chicken soup? Because, people's chicken soup does not have the greasy "oil flowers", will not preach, is not experience. Philosophy is always in the trivial scenes of the novel, and wisdom is always hidden in the humorous gossip of the characters.
From this point of view, Isaka escapes the "emotional atmosphere" of reasoning, infusing it with a rich "pyrotechnic gas", and you can't find the terrible rendering of suffocation and oppression. It's like a person who is lucky, constantly disturbed by humor and ridicule, laughing and out of breath. Isaka is the one who breaks up the atmosphere of reasoning with different breaths. The Precision of Death is undoubtedly a kind of life and death experiment, placing characters in impossible situations to explore various possibilities. Death spends seven days with six little people only on rainy days, deciding whether they live or die. This in itself presupposes the breaking of the causal logic of reality by supernatural forces. "I like to create a situation where the character doesn't know certain facts and the reader knows." Obviously, this is like self-destruction martial arts for reasoning routines.
Interestingly, Death is a cold "routine" "civil servant" who also likes human music. He always "carries out missions" on rainy days, perhaps symbolizing the darkness of day and night, and the god of death does not understand human sorrow? Isaka does not want to write about the Netherworld of Death and sympathize with humanity, but insists on being cold and hard, highlighting a kind of loneliness in the "parallel world" that can talk. On the surface, this precision is a shift in the relationship between death and man, a swing of choice or decision. In essence, it is Isaka's own measure: a struggle between fiction and reality. "Personally, I prefer the feeling that is somewhat incredible in real life." In the words of Zhang Ailing, it is to find "legends" in ordinary people.
In "Golden Dreams", Masaharu Aoyagi, who embarked on the road of escape, and the writer who escaped from the reasoning routine, are not a little sorry for each other? A courier guy (a bit dull, a little handsome) saves the female star, channels the media, is harassed, quits his job; is falsely accused of being a wolf, and eventually becomes a "scapegoat" for assassinating the prime minister, and begins to flee. The story looks "Hollywood" and is full of camera scenes, but the writer is reluctant to write a "straight ball of entertainment novels". Isaka wants an aesthetic of tonal light and shadow: if the background is pessimistic and cool ,big and deep," the characters want to be warm and bright ,small shimmers.' This is "the story of trying to survive on a pessimistic stage".
If you look at it as a "fugitive novel", you can't help but miss a lot of excitement. Because, "Golden Dreamland" is like half a fable of the sea, half a fairy tale flame. Whether it is multi-perspective transformation, multi-time series interspersing, multi-clue parallel, or the careful burial of the details of the volt line, it is aimed at unifying the criticism of reality and the comfort of human nature. Isn't the novel a parable of the survival of ordinary people in surveillance society, bureaucratic machines, and political intrigues? Isaka's writing thoughts once again escape from reasoning, because he doesn't care about the omnipresent evil shady scene, he only tells us the "power of trust": Aoyagi is not the real murderer.
At the same time, it is a fairy tale world: old classmates, old lovers believe in him, even the goon killer helps him, and even pays for his life. Although, Aoyagi must become someone else (undergo facial surgery) in order to survive. However, Isaka is a warm man who is good at "psychological massage", and can always press the acupuncture points that make you shiver slightly. In my opinion, the "angel" can write such an ending: although Aoyagi's face is already someone else, Higuchi Haruko recognizes Aoyagi through "habit" and asks her daughter to put a small flower stamp on the back of his hand - there is also the word "very well done" in the middle. This emotional orgasm is like you eating a "slow release tablet", the emotion gradually strengthens, the loops back and forth, and the tears and laughter.
We will quickly "flashback", reminiscent of all the memory moments of the two people: Haruko said that Aoyagi's chocolate is not casual and heroic; love cannot just be content with the status quo and "do well", but "do very well"... To paraphrase the famous phrase in the novel, the love between Aoyagi and Haruko is also due to habit and trust. Reading Kotaro Isaka, sometimes you can't describe the softness of your feelings. Because, his golden sentence metaphor is as profound as the "philosopher of life", and "the baggage is hanging" is like drinking cold boiled water at will. The brain hole is full of care, and the sorrow is full of childlike heart. Kotaro Isaka, like a superb perfume, really has his taste in every dan.