White Night's Walk was the first novel I read from Keigo Higashino, and I have been obsessed with his work ever since. Higashino is an extremely prolific writer and is very fortunate as his readers. But the process of reading his works is painful, his novels are full of cold tones, even under the sun there are clouds and shadows wandering, and the gray story is covered with huge shades, which make people feel suffocating gloom and depression.
Although "White Night" is a speculative suspense novel, the reader can easily guess the truth, as if deliberately, step by step in the direction of his own imagination, little by little to snuff out the reader's inner fluke hope - yes, as you don't want to believe, this is the truth. The chill is not the crime itself described in the novel, but the malice that constantly permeates after the incident, which is the despair of the White Night.
Light and shadow
Climbing around the blood vessel-like crisscrossing ventilation ducts of abandoned buildings is a game that children Ryoji Kirihara often plays alone. This is a child who has never felt the warmth of the family, and behind the marriage of the parents and the separation of the gods has its own unbearable: the father has a pedophile, and the mother has an affair with the employees in the store. Ryoji walked through the dark pipes, feeling a sense of security wrapped up.
If Ryoji hadn't come from the ventilation duct to the room where his father bullied Yukiho, wouldn't his life have been completely different? From the moment he stabbed into his father's body with the scissors he had cut paper in the library to show Snow Spike, he completely lost himself and became the shadow of Snow Spike, lurking in the darkness, and could no longer be exposed to the sun.
Snow Spike's childhood is undoubtedly tragic, the poor family let the exhausted mother use snow spike as a tool to make money, snow spike beauty like a bright delicate flower blooming on a pile of rubble ruins, too eye-catching. Ryoji's father was one of the people who watched. Her mother and these unbearable adults caused indelible damage to her, and the little girl in her heart was long dead, and all that survived was a shell.
Lin Yihan wrote in "Fang Siqi's First Love Paradise": "A child who is so exquisite cannot be said, because it is too dirty, and self-esteem is often a needle that hurts people. But here, self-esteem would sew up her mouth. "Snow Spike is an angel-like delicate and beautiful girl in the eyes of others, the most important thing in her life has been taken away, and at the same time, the innocence and happiness of a girl have been taken away." She lives with a striking selfishness and coldness, and the sense of loss of being taken away from her childhood is like a shadow, eroding a dark hole in her heart, and something must be filled into the black hole to get rid of this sense of vacancy.
Yukiho designed to kill her mother, was adopted by a well-off aunt, and has since changed her humble birth to become a rich lady who looks the most decent. Yukiho deliberately pretends to be beautiful herself, and only Ryoji knows the black hole in her heart and becomes a hurtful sword in Yukiho's hand, waiting for an opportunity in the darkness.
Victims and perpetrators
Ryoji hates his father's aggression against Yukiho, so he kills him. Yukiho hates those who hurt her, so she kills her mother and gets rid of her original family, and keeps her past secret. They were originally victims of unfortunate childhoods, and their common misfortunes and secrets made them inseparable symbiotes, and they could have comforted each other and warmed each other, but every time they met, it was the beginning of a conspiracy and a crime! They use the hurt they have experienced to hurt others as they have, and this kind of violent acquisition makes people both angry and sad, but they can only watch evil take root, sprout, and thrive from within them, and this deep sense of powerlessness is what makes people's backs chill.
Because the female classmates knew Yukiho's origins and publicized it, Yukiho let Ryoji rape her, and the girl was deeply shocked and transferred away, and no one will ever know the true birth of Yukiho. The girlfriend is mediocre in appearance, but she is in love with an excellent senior she admires, and Yukiho treats her best friend in the same way. After marrying The Desired Langjun by means, the husband and the daughter of the ex-wife, Jiali, refused to accept her, and Xuesui repeated the trick, and came out to comfort Her when She was most vulnerable and helpless after being hurt, and unexpectedly received Jiali's acceptance.
Again and again, Yukiho inflicts the pain he has suffered so much on others, and Ryoji repeats his father's actions against Yukiho again and again, and the original victim becomes the perpetrator and is even worse, because they deeply believe that "this practice can easily take away the soul of the other party".
There is a term in psychology called the "kicking cat effect", when a person's emotions collapse, they will vent their dissatisfaction to groups that are weaker than themselves, and so on. As a victim, Snow Spike could not eliminate the established fact of the harm, and the black hole that had been eroded by the shadows in her heart opened its pleading mouth and greedily waited for her to feed. She became the inheritor of evil, invincible and invincible, Ryoji was her most loyal and reliable practitioner, exchanging every evil idea she had for reality, and she got everything she wanted: a decent birth, excellent education, considerable wealth, and a strong husband who loved her deeply. But the black hole in Xuesui's heart will never be filled, and all the obstacles in front of her will be invisible, and what she needs is this feeling of controlling her destiny, not only her own destiny, but also the fate of her "prey". Sin has become nourishing her soul!
It's not love
Many people interpret "White Night" as the ultimate love. It even renders the warmth of the snow spike and Ryoji to a touching depth. I tried to find warmth and discover the places that struck me in this completely deformed symbiotic relationship, but I only saw the moments of young Yukiho and Ryoji cutting paper in the library.
Yukiho and Ryoji are not so dark and cold by nature, as the most vulnerable children, they should be innocent and pure, enjoying the warmth and love brought to them by their families. Yukiho and Ryoji are beyond their age, and it is precisely because of the lack of love in the original family that the closest person becomes the one who pushes them into the abyss. The sins of adults have destroyed their carefree childhood, and the flower of life has withered before it has time to irrigate employment.
The only time Yukiho confided in her heart was to Natsumi, an employee in the store: "A person's life, day and night, but it will not be like the real sun, there are regular sunrises and sunsets." Some people live their whole lives under the sun, and some people have to live in the dark of night all the time. "It's not so much about Natsumi as it is about describing her and Ryoji's life." They are deprived of their childhood during the day, and those who are deprived are the root of all evil.
Keigo Higashino repeatedly let Yukiho and Ryoji succeed in their crimes, and the police inspector In the book, Junzo Sasagaki is like a bystander, constantly restoring their mental journey for more than twenty years, and every time they are about to touch the truth, the clues are cut off, and through his review and reproduction, it is like a connection, and the piles of evil deeds are inextricably intertwined into the childhood experiences of Yukiho and Ryoji.
Higashino does not express the deep love between them in a simple way, but a kind of compassionate revelation: look at the roots planted on that evil source, the fruits, even after more than twenty years, can not be dissolved, the wounded Snow Spike and Ryoji never came out, they dormant in the dark and merged with the darkness, and extended this hurt all the way out, destroying more people's lives. This is the place that deserves the most attention and needs to be prevented.
I kept wondering, what was Snow Spike asking for? What exactly is Ryoji guarding? Yukiho's life can change from the moment she is adopted by her kind and loving aunt, and Ryoji's murder of her father can be put to rest more than a decade later. They could have chosen a life that looked normal. Xuesui's later actions did not have to be like this, why did he have to push himself into the shadows? In the final analysis, she wants to get rid of the helplessness of childhood, she wants to control her life, to incorporate all people and things into her own presuppositions, just like a child with materialistic scarcity in childhood grows up with special material desires, so as to fill in this sense of childhood lack. Snow Spike's materialism is a sense of control, and in the world she controls, she is the safest and most egotistical.
Ryoji's protection of Yukiho is more like a kind of self-redemption. What his father did to Yukiho completely changed his and Yukiho's lives, and that instinctive compensation and sense of responsibility was Ryoji's original intention to protect Yukiho. For more than twenty years, he was lonely and indifferent, hiding from all the warmth of people, just to make a sharp blade of snow spike in the darkness, in fact, he had been waiting for the day when he was found, until snow spike had a successful career and married a rich man, he dared to be freed from this self-redemption. When Sasagaki Junzo found him, he did not have to die, but he did not hesitate to jump from the upper floor of the mall, and the scissors that had been inserted into his father's heart had pierced into his own heart, in this world, he had never really lived, and the final death was a relief.
Yukiho looked at Ryoji, who was lying on the ground, and then left without turning his head. Her back was like a white shadow, Ryoji was originally her shadow, and now she became her own shadow. As she once exclaimed: "The night in Osaka has just begun"...