<h1 class="pgc-h-arrow-right" data-track="7" > preamble</h1>
This was 1989, this is the First Year of The Heisei era.
The heavy metal band X-Japan officially debuted as X at the time, and later changed its name to X-Japan in 1992.
In 1989, the band released their first official album "BLUE BLOOD" at Sony Records, which caused a blue storm in the music scene at that time, and became one of the most representative records in the first year of Heisei.
Cover of BLUE BLOOD
Today, the Heisei era has become a thing of the past, leaving too many memories, beautiful, sad, touching, helpless...
The book we are going to talk about today, called "BLUE", is also a story of the Heisei era, and the protagonist "BLUE" is a peer of the Heisei era, and he also died at the end of the Heisei era.
<h1 class="pgc-h-arrow-right" data-track="67" >, a bloody case caused by family conflicts</h1>
In 2004, in 2004, a massacre occurred in Ome, Japan, in which a family of four was killed, and the murderer was suspected to be the family's youngest daughter, Natsuki, who died suddenly after taking an overdose of drugs after the killing.
The police found that the girl was full of comics, and the record player was still playing the song "The Only Flower in the World" by the popular group SAM. A photograph of a blue lake hung on the wall of her room — a photograph that later became a key clue to solving the case.
At first, the police believed that Xia Xi had been squatting at home after graduation and had a conflict with her parents and sister, and that she herself had died in an accident after killing the whole family.
As the investigation deepened, police officer Fujisaki discovered that the actual situation was not what they had speculated at the beginning, that Xia Xi was not a "squatter at home", that she had not only gone out over the years, but had also done many jaw-dropping things, that she was out in a profession that could not be seen, and that she had given birth to a boy named "BLUE" to a politician. Most importantly – the child was already a strong teenager and had become her accomplice.
Blue Chinese Simplified cover
In the first part of the novel, police officer Fujisaki finds many clues, and also determines the existence of Natsuki's illegitimate son, and also finds that their mother and son are also related to several other cases, but it is difficult to continue to investigate, and finally the police end the case with the death of the murderer.
At that time, Japanese society was superficially prosperous, but in fact it was full of hidden dangers, and the bloody cases caused by family conflicts appeared in an endless stream, and the killing of children's parents was of course a great rebellion, it was "a slap on the wrist that could not be sounded", and the parents' indifferent attitude towards her was also an important reason for the tragedy.
<h1 class="pgc-h-arrow-right" data-track="68" > second, the pity of the hateful</h1>
The author does not directly describe the murderer in the book, and even his appearance, personality, preferences, etc., are only a few strokes, and there is no excessive rendering of his criminal process, but narrated by the police investigation process and the perspective of the personnel related to the murderer. Through these "fragmented" narratives, the trajectory of the murderer's life is fully revealed.
A bustling night view of Tokyo, Japan
In his short life, he did not have a hukou and lived a life of upheaval and displacement. He had lived with his mother's girlfriends, women in assistive socializing or other fringe occupations, and in general they were shady, but they were very nice to him.
Later, he followed his mother's lover to live a family-like life, however, the good times did not last long, in order to survive, he killed the man again, and returned to the original family with his mother, asked for money from his grandmother, was refused, and he went on a killing spree...
Throughout the story, he kills a total of seven people, but the motives are not exactly the same.
Cover of the Taiwanese edition
The police officer in charge of the case, Fujisaki, retired, and his daughter also became a policeman, taking over a case in which a man and a woman were killed, and their children were abandoned.
After some investigation, the daughter stepped on the footprints of her father and finally found the murderer "BLUE".
"BLUE" is certainly a murderer, but his family is broken, there is no warmth, after the death of his mother, he fled alone, found one of his mother's girlfriends, and got her shelter, met a black friend, got a brief feeling of "home", but in order to survive, they had to continue to commit crimes.
<h1 class="pgc-h-arrow-right" data-track="69" > third, self-redemption in a special way</h1>
In the first part of the novel, there are children who kill their parents. In the second part of the novel, there are parents who abuse their children and take pictures to sell.
The child abuse incident was discovered by "BLUE", evoking painful memories of his childhood, and in a fit of rage, he killed the bad parents.
Not everyone can become a good parent unconditionally, and some people just can't love their children well.
The police solved the case quickly, the whereabouts of "BLUE" were exposed, the police laid a net, he accidentally had a car accident when he fled, the rescue was ineffective and died, and he did not even leave a single word.
In a sense, the two children of the bad parents were really saved, which is also a kind of self-redemption of "BLUE".
The author Ye Zhenzhongxian
<h1 class="pgc-h-arrow-right" data-track="70" > elegy of the Heisei era</h1>
This novel mentions a lot of things that happened in the Heisei era, such as troubled children, strange parents, foreign laborers, national idols, great earthquakes... It has a sense of age, and it can be called a picture of customs in the thirty years of Heisei.
Idol group SAM led by Takuya Kimura
The novel adopts a multi-perspective narrative method to more fully show the protagonist's bumpy life experience.
This narrative style has also been used throughout Milan Kundera's novel Joke and Orhan Pamuk's novel My Name Is Red, making the story more three-dimensional and vivid and evocative.
The life of the protagonist "BLUE" ends with the end of the Heisei era. The whole story is full of sadness, so that the reader hates the murderer at the same time, but also a little more sympathy, more thinking.
The novel "BLUE" is an elegy of the Heisei era.
<h1 class="pgc-h-arrow-right" data-track="71" > conclusion</h1>
BLUE is a masterpiece of this year's social speculative fiction that is worth reading. Some commentators even say that the author, Ye Zhen Zhongxian, is another master of socialist speculative fiction after Matsumoto Kiyoharu.
Personally, I think there is still a certain gap between his works and the classic works of Kiyoharu Matsumoto and Seiichi Morimura.
However, Ye Zhenzhongxian is currently in the rising stage of creation, constantly launching new works, and there is still a lot of room for development, can he become the leader of a new generation of social reasoning? Let's wait and see.