Tokyo: The life of a literary giant begins with home self-defense!

Chapter 367: Possibility of winning
Banville's "The Dead" can be said to be the biggest obstacle to this year's Frank Short Story Award, but Joyce did not seem to care much.
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He fell asleep listening to the faint sound of snowflakes falling, which fell gently across the universe, like their end, falling on all the living and the dead.

Banville wrote a snowstorm that revealed the emptiness of human beings, and from beginning to end, it reflected the eternal dilemma of human beings.

Each snowflake is a lonely individual, falling freely in the void, and even death is inevitable.

This is what Banville wanted to express.

“I will directly recommend the work “The Dead” to be included in the shortlist.”

Every main reviewer has a direct recommendation spot, and Colm is no exception.

He gave it to John Banville without hesitation and looked at Joyce.

This woman has a great influence on the jury, and sometimes the works she selects can almost become the benchmark for winning awards.

Joyce's descendant is himself an academic expert at Trinity College.

“How does it compare to The Ghost of Lexington?”

In order to prevent things from sliding into that extremely unlikely possibility, Colm decided to let people see the difference between "The Ghost of Lexington" and "The Dead".

"The two narrative techniques are different and cannot be compared together."

Joyce frowned with some dissatisfaction. Colm's grievances against Longchuan Che now involved himself.

She watched the little man take The Ghost of Lexington and place it with The Dead.

It is often difficult to tell the difference between good and bad literary works, but it is difficult to put two works with the same theme of "loneliness" together.

"'The Dead' inherits the Joyce-style sentence structure, using heavy snow to describe the loneliness that cannot be escaped even by death."

Colm turned to the end of The Dead and then opened another one.

"Let's take a look at his."

What is Banville's place in Ireland?
He is almost the best creator of the middle-aged and young generation.

He became famous twenty years ago, and with each passing year he has been considered by many to be the successor of Irish literature.

He likes to use a precise, cold, and dialectical prose style, while also having Nabokovian innovation.

In Colm's eyes, the other party was almost certain to win the Frank Novel Prize, so he was willing to take the initiative to make friends with him during the salon.

With this thought in mind, Colm opened The Ghost of Lexington.
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Loneliness is not always something to play with.

Unexpectedly, the picture that opened was not the content of the article.

"Foreword?"

Some of the judges who had gathered together because of Banville expressed their curiosity.

These Irish people have no idea what level Ryukawa Che is at.

Most of the judges had never seen his work or spoken to him, and even if Colm hadn't mentioned him, they wouldn't have known him.

"waste time."

Colm sneered.

Some writers will write a preface, which contains some of their thoughts and feelings when creating the work.

Flipping through it casually, I found that the first article Longchuan Che put was "Blind Willow and Sleeping Girl".
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Close your eyes and you can smell the wind.
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The May wind brings with it a sense of expansion like fruit.
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The wind carries the rough peel, the sticky juice of the flesh, and the particles of the core.
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The flesh exploded in the air, and the core turned into soft shotgun shells that embedded into my bare arm, leaving slight pain.

“Your writing skills are pretty good.”

Some people walked away out of interest, while others stayed where they were.

Reviewing is a very boring process, and some people are curious about what kind of work would be the first to be recommended by Joyce to be included in the shortlist.

"It's a narrative method that extracts emotions, a bit like Beckett's absurd plays." Beckett's absurd plays extract the language from the theme, and sometimes just releasing a few keywords can make people think of other things.

"The wind in May and the bursting fruit flesh are very vivid. Although there is not much written, it allows people to imagine the details of the late spring scene in their own minds."

May is the month when plants and green leaves are in full bloom.

Someone was standing in the willow trees and spring breeze, looking at his watch.
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"Hey, what time is it now?" my cousin asked me.
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I glanced at my watch: "Ten twenty."

The novel written by Ryukawa Tetsu is a very plain story, about a man who accompanies his relatives and friends to the hospital and stands under a blind willow waiting for the bus.

What kind of creature is the blind willow? It looks very small, but its roots are very deep.
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It's like taking darkness as nutrition.

This is what Ryukawa Tetsu said in the book.

"very strange."

After reading the first novel, some people frowned.

This novel simply describes the protagonist accompanying his relatives and friends to the hospital, and it also contains a memory about a girl.

But the words are filled with a faint sense of alienation and estrangement.

Unlike Banville's bold and sweeping novel, it uses delicate words to reveal how the protagonist gets along with his relatives and friends.

"look here."

Someone clicked it.
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"Will this treatment be painful?" my cousin asked me.
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“Maybe?” I said, “I haven’t asked any specific questions yet.”

“The writing is plain, but every detail depicts the sense of alienation between the protagonist and his relatives and friends, or the sense of alienation between him and everyone.”

Both Ryukawa Toru and Banville's books are based on the theme of loneliness, but Ryukawa Toru's story seems to have nothing to do with this theme.

"It depicts an image of a person who isolates himself from the people around him, and feels like an isolated island in the bustling city."

The word loneliness is not mentioned in the entire novel, but this theme is portrayed in every aspect.

I took my cousin for a routine checkup, but I was actually indifferent.

“The wonderful thing is that although it seems like a plain story, the words reveal people’s loneliness, alienation, and indifference to others.”
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Care that is not received when it is needed will be like a blind willow, making people fall asleep.
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Every man is an island.
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Everything became dry, except time, which settled almost perfectly.

The first story received a good response, and Colm's face darkened.

In fact, he could see that the first novel had more to offer than that.

The blind willow symbolizes darkness.

There are also some seemingly nonsensical plots such as a sleeping woman and a fly crawling into an ear.

The pollen of the blind willow symbolizes drugs, and the flies flying into the ears symbolize a woman being raped.

The female friend in the memory was also in the hospital. She told the protagonist her story, but the protagonist described everything as a boring story about pollen making the woman sleepy and flies seeming to have crawled into the woman's ears.

They put up walls between themselves and others, and the feeling of indifference is ingrained in their bones.

But is it really indifference?
At the beginning of the article, the May wind cracked the fruits, and the abundant fruits brought pain to the skin.

Whether it was my cousin’s illness or the girl who was raped.

The protagonists all have a sense of powerlessness.

Unable to change, so I shut myself off.

"It's an Eastern kind of loneliness."

Looking at the first manuscript, Colm suddenly felt a little afraid to turn the page.

(End of this chapter)