Friends who are slightly interested in criminal cases and criminal history should know that there have been many vicious killings in Japan's modern history that shocked the whole country and even the world, such as the Tsuyama Incident, in which 30 people died in one night; the Homicide of Takayuki Fukuda, who was sentenced to death as soon as the main culprit was sentenced to death; the Ayase Cement Murder Case, which was adapted into a manga; the Kitakyushu Imprisonment Murder Incident in which lovers joined forces; and so on. Pick a random one to understand the details of the case and the details of the crime, and you will be surprised by the distortion of the murderer's personality and the loss of humanity.
(Here's Amway's "Japanese Crime Research" series of audio programs)
On the other hand, these appalling cases also provided a lot of inspiration and material for Japanese films, manga and novels: the above-mentioned Tsuyama Incident has been adapted into the movie "Doomsday Village" and the mystery novel "Dragon Wotei Murder Incident" and "Eight Tombs Village", the prototype of Yuan Ziwen's movie "Cold Tropical Fish" is the continuous killing of Saitama Dog's family, as for Oshima Nagisa's "Sensory World" and the famous Abetsuya Incident, everyone knows it, and I don't have to bother with it.
The inspiration for the 2019 Netflix movie "Shouting in the Forest of Lovelessness" is the homicide incarceration and murder in Kitakyushu, and the director is still Yuan Ziwen
Compared with real cases, movies and novels have more or less elements of artistic processing in them, and they cannot be fully trusted. But if it is the person involved in the incident, especially the memoir written by the murderer himself, then the nature of the work is completely different. The subject of today's book review, "The Song of Extinction", is the murderer of the drunken rose saint incident (kobe child serial killing incident) that caused a sensation in Japan, and the higashi Shinichiro (or translated Higashi Shinichiro) who is called "Boy A" by the media.
If you haven't heard of this case before, I'll give you a brief introduction based on the information on the wiki.
Between March and May 1997, Shinichiro Higashi, then 14 years old, attacked passing children with hammers and knives in Kobe City, killing an 11-year-old boy and a 10-year-old girl and seriously injuring two girls. One of the last incidents in May, the killing of 11-year-old boy Doshi Jun, has raised concerns throughout Japanese society. The reason is that the murderer not only cruelly cut off the boy's head, but also stuffed a criminal declaration into the mouth of the victim in the name of the drunkard Rose Saint Dou, openly provoking the police.
Even now, more than 20 years later, when discussing topics such as "Japan's most murderous murder case," the eight words "drunken rose saint incident" are still an existence that will not be absent.
Why is the impact of this case so far-reaching? In my opinion, there are several reasons:
1. The perpetrator is a juvenile offender who is only 14 years old. Out of the principle of protecting juvenile offenders, the real name of the murderer was deliberately concealed, and legal documents and the media always used the term "juvenile a" to refer to the suspect, and only issued a ruling that he was sent to a juvenile detention center for education.
Is the law protecting victims or criminals? Are juvenile offenders too lightly sentenced? The problems exposed by the case have sparked widespread discussion in Japanese society. It was not until three years after the crime that the Japanese Diet amended the statute on juvenile delinquency in this case, reducing the minimum applicable age for criminal liability from 16 to 14 years.
However, in 2004, there was another case of an 11-year-old girl killing a classmate in Japan, of course, that was the last word...
Second, the details of the crime are cruel, involving the separation of corpses and the humiliation of corpses. After killing the boy on May 24, Juvenile A cut off his head and took him away for hiding, then took him home until the early morning of May 27, when he placed the head and the challenge book at the entrance of the middle school. In a later psychiatric appraisal, juvenile a confessed that he had desecrated the victim's body and drank blood to obtain sexual pleasure from it.
3. Theatrical crimes. Juvenile A has left a challenge letter to the police, sent anonymous letters to the newspaper, and sent a criminal notice, causing social panic.
The distorted personality and mysterious identity of juvenile offenders, the impact of the case on the law, and the curious elements in the process of committing the crime, this incident itself has a lot of topicality. Coupled with the help of the media, it is not difficult to understand how great the impact of the drunken rose saint incident on Japanese society is so great that the impact is far.
However, no one expected that 18 years after the crime, the murderer who had returned to society had published his memoir under the pseudonym of "Yuan Juvenile A", named "Absolute Song". As soon as the book was published, it quickly ignited the fuse of public opinion: the media and the public denounced the juvenile a and the publishing house for malicious consumption of the deceased, and the families of the victims expressed anger and disappointment. At the same time, sales of "The Song" have been rising steadily, reprinted twice a year, and sales of at least 250,000 copies have started.
This scene is like the movie "Confessions after 22 Years"
The more fiercely you scold, the better you sell, and the strength of the melon-eating masses cannot be underestimated. I believe that the vast majority of people are like me, with a curious mentality to open this book.
The copy I had in hand was a translation of Taiwan Times Culture Publishing, which I bought for more than 20 yuan on a treasure, and the rudimentary packaging and rough paper told me that it was definitely a pirated book—at best, at least without contributing additional royalties to the author.
The book is divided into 25 chapters, from the day he was taken away by the police for investigation, to the time he returned to society in anonymity, the teenager a wrote about the mental journey of the past 18 years from a first-person perspective, interspersed with memories of childhood, life at home and school, the process and details of the crime...
And everyone is most curious, the teenager a killing motives and inner thoughts.
Anyone who reads this book for the first time should be shocked by the gorgeous writing of the teenager. If it were not for the ghostwriting of others behind his back, the teenager in reality would definitely be a precocious person with a delicate heart and outstanding literary talent.
For example, when observing tadpoles by the pond, he described the scene he saw as follows:
Under the illumination of the summer sun, Liang Huanhuan swung his tail and moved in the water with countless golden spheres, like sperm emitted by the sun. I kept fantasizing that a sperm would dive into the depths of the pool, and that eventually the mysterious pond would be pregnant with a huge light fetus. I stood alone by the pool, peering into the secret affairs between heaven and earth, as sinful as peeking into my parents' bedrooms, and could watch them in a trance for hours without getting bored.
For example, when he was on the way to transfer the boy's head, he encountered heavy rain:
The rain turned into the tongue of the sky and licked the earth. I looked up and stuck out my tongue and kissed the sky affectionately. Suddenly, the tongue turned into a sensitive tuning fork, and the irregular vibrations bouncing towards the tip of the tongue spread throughout the body, up to the soles of the feet and to the ground. A solemn concerto resonates with the stones on the ground, the foliage on the trees, and the rain on the surface of the small pond. The hunger and thirst I felt after licking the sweet candy of death with all my life, and the heavy rain gave me a gentle hug and moisturize...
When the teenager A put his head at the school gate in the night, the world in his eyes was like this:
The leaves of the two date palm trees, which are side by side on the south wall of the schoolhouse, silently rub against each other like sieves the falling moonlight into shards. Curses and blessings merged into one, gathering at my feet at the head of the Chunjun whom I loved so much that I could not help myself. My most hated and my favorite, at this moment, are combined into one, and on this stage of my choice, my swollen and almost broken hatred and love for this world, I did not expect that at this moment it was ending. I'll be honest, I think that look is very "beautiful".
It's hard to believe that an ordinary person, at least an ordinary person of normal mind, can write such a sentence. If this were a fictional crime novel, I would rate it highly. But "The Song" is not a literary work like that, but the inner monologue of a real murderer, which makes me very uncomfortable and confused: why would the heart of a 14-year-old teenager be distorted and alienated like this?
The answer lies in the author's childhood experience.
Teenager a grew up in an ordinary Japanese family, and has not experienced childhood trauma such as domestic violence and sexual assault. Although his mother confessed in her memoirs published afterwards that she was too strict with the teenager as the eldest man, in this book, her mother did not do anything excessive to him, but rather a little too doting. What causes the teenager to fall into the abyss step by step is the wrong sexual desire and the psychological state of self-isolation.
For the teenager A, Grandma is the person who loves herself the most in the world, and she is also the anchor for maintaining her normal life. His grandmother's sudden death shattered his spiritual world, and to some extent prompted him to commit what he later perverted: in his grandmother's room, he used her relics to desecrate himself.
I think at that time I was trying to force myself to bear the heavy grief that I could never bear by the spiritual strength of a person alone, through this intense pleasure that almost tore my bones apart, but I did not expect that it was such a happy poison that was easily poisoned, and my body and mind had been corroded to the point of being indispensable to it.
From that day on, this ritual of mixing pleasure and guilt, mixing sex and death, became the ulterior habit of juvenile a teenager and the beginning of sexual sadism. From self-desecration and dissecting slugs, to later torturing and killing wildcats to obtain sexual pleasure, the juvenile a sexual perversion is deepening step by step.
Animal cruelty is often associated with other crimes
It only took teenager a little over two years to change the object of abuse from an animal to a real person. Whether it is attacking a strange girl passing by with a hammer and a knife, or beating a classmate with a fist, all kinds of evil deeds are presented to the reader in an understated way. Lack of empathy, inability to understand the feelings of others, hurting others only to satisfy their own fantasies, or "deliberate action" for no reason.
The victim described the scene of the attack to reporters
Afterwards, teenager A fell into a deep self-loathing because of the estrangement of his classmates and teachers and the guilt in his heart.
I didn't think there was anything remarkable about hurting Ada, and I didn't even think about how it felt like for him to be beaten like that by me. I can't feel the mood of others at all, I am the most inferior human being. I felt that at the time of the incident, it seemed that the life and death of myself and others were just words and marks of "alive" and "dead", without touch, without taste, as if they were fake.
This ambivalent psychology is also reflected in a series of perverted behaviors after the teenager killed Chunjun. In the book, The teenager avoids talking about why he killed Chunjun, but we can find the answer to his state of mind at that time and the analysis of professionals.
Professor Li Maosheng of the Faculty of Law of National Taiwan University wrote in the introduction at the beginning of the book:
Perhaps because of his stunting, the boy he knows is pure enough not to be stained by the world, so he is regarded by the teenager as a sacred land that is absolutely not allowed to be violated by others. But at the same time, the boy A saw the ugly self in the Sacred Domain, so he would kill the boy to eliminate the possibility of self-destruction of the Sacred Domain, and cut the X-shaped wound with a knife in the eye area of the boy's head. This is nothing more than the reflection of the boy's eyes, and the teenager A sees the evil of the self and wants to deny the declaration of the self in a negative way.
Killing boys to protect their fragile hearts is cruel to the extreme, but also selfish to the extreme. Placing his head at the door of a school that he hates and symbolizes the education system is even more full of shirking responsibility.
I moved my gaze to the bottom of the school emblem and saw the glass door in the front entrance. That's right, it was this huge cyclops who swallowed and spit and swallowed and swallowed This building is the crystallization of my hatred, the symbol of the world that has always rejected me.
In juvenile a's self-report, his mother had negotiated with the school and intended to take him to a children's counseling center for counseling. However, just ten days later, Chunjun met the teenager A on the road and became his next target.
But there is no "if" in reality.
The second half of "The Song of Extinction" mainly records the experience of teenager A in a juvenile a who thinks behind closed doors in a juvenile detention center and other institutions, receives counseling and evaluation, and finally reintegrates into society. Under the meticulous care of the support groups and staff, the teenager developed a hobby (jogging, doing handicrafts), read a lot of books, and even went to the surrounding area for sightseeing. Although most of the jobs I look for are temporary workers, I have also worked hard to save a lot of money, enough to move out and live independently.
Teenager A's self is completely a face of change, a new look, and even the previously missing empathy seems to have been found by him.
When I learned that they were teaching someone who was trying so hard to learn Japanese and desperately wanted to fit into the workplace early, I was so angry that I wanted to punch someone. I don't want to hurt anyone again, I want to face up to the pain of others, and I want to be better to the people around me, including the victims and those who have been hurt by me in the past.
But is that really the case?
When reading confessions of parties to such incidents, there is one of the biggest pitfalls, that is, tacitly substitute the identity and feelings of the perpetrator. Taking this "Absolute Song" as an example, Teenager A uses flowery rhetoric and self-reflection to try to make the reader "understand" his inner pain and accept the later repentance and apology.
Not to mention the narcissistic psychology revealed in the psychological depictions after the killing, even this apology is extremely selfish: without the prior consent of the victim's family, the pleasure and "aesthetics" in the process of committing the crime are hyped up, which is undoubtedly a kind of ridicule and torture of the person concerned.
Is Teenage A's repentance genuine? Is he now fully back to normal? Only the teenager a himself who wrote these words knows the answer.
Before and after the publication of "Absolute Song" in 2015, Boy A had set up a personal website "の奈えられない透明さ" (now closed). He posted many eerie paintings and selfies of unknown significance here, which were once seen as proof of mental instability.
In 2016, a reporter from the weekly Wenchun took a photo of the teenager A on the street. When the teenager found out, he yelled at the reporter:
"Don't you want to live anymore?" I remember your face! ”
Is this high-profile and aggressive teenager a in reality really the same person as the gentle and introspective teenager a in the book? Having returned to society in anonymity, will he still do harm to others?
This may be a question that will never be answered.
The former president of the juvenile hospital was interviewed by the NHK reporter
"The Song" is not an easy book to read, and I don't recommend most people reading it or giving it a rating. On Douban and Riya, criticism of juvenile a and publishing houses is overwhelming. Although the behavior of the deceased and their families should be scolded in order to consume the money just right, does the content of the book have no reference and warning significance? I don't think so.
Keep thinking independently and make your own judgments.
Writing is the only self-salvation I can have now. My only remaining "way to survive". I really went out of writing this book and couldn't find any way to get my life back.
In the last chapter of "The Song of Despair", "To the Families of the Victims", Boy A confessed that the only reason he wrote the book was "self-redemption". For me, the reason for reading this book and writing this post-reading feeling is to warn myself: don't let yourself become a teenager A, but beware of the "juvenile a" in reality.
In this complex and changeable world, the "teenager a" who has no voice may be around you and me. To understand juvenile a is to not have the next juvenile b.
After the publication of "The Song of Extinction", there were imitators who abused and killed cats in Kobe City, where the crime occurred that year
Citations & References:
【Magic Moon Subtitle Group】【nnn Documentary】Juvenile a ~ Kobe Child Serial Murders 20 years of experience of victims and prisoners ~, https://www.bilibili.com/video/bv1nx411z7ra
20170526 the 20th anniversary of the "Miyoneya" drunkard Rose Shengdou Incident: Family concerns and the subject of change, https://www.bilibili.com/video/bv18x411z7yf
Cat carcass in Moritomo, Nishi-ku, Kobe City - Cut corpse of neck and body torn to the park or https://breaking-news.jp/2015/07/19/020811
The official homepage of former boy a is identified! "Unbearable transparency of existence," https://nowkoko.com/2015/09/10/shounena0910/
Former boy a (Sakaki Rose Seito = Higashi Shinichiro) Current face photo and address are https://sochyo.com/266.html