Tokyo Literary Masters: Starting from the Late 1980s

Chapter 208 The Soul of National Literature

As the studio signal switched, a rough-quality street video simultaneously appeared on countless television screens across Japan.

All background music used to evoke emotions was deliberately cut off by the director.

What reaches every household through the screen is only the raw, unfiltered sound from the videotape:

This is the whooshing noise of the early winter wind whistling through the microphone, the ear-piercing metallic whistle of a tram rolling over the tracks during rush hour, and the heavy, suppressed breaths of the interviewee as they hurriedly turned their backs to the camera.

In the guest seats of the studio, the psychologist and book reviewer who were invited to the show at the last minute seemed to be fidgeting.

At the start of the live stream, the psychologist, as usual, adopted an expert's demeanor, speaking eloquently to the camera: "From a clinical psychology perspective, this is a typical case of 'post-bubble syndrome' and 'compensation for collective trauma.'"

"The public felt an intense sense of social loss of control in reality, and therefore sought psychological solace in the post-apocalyptic world created by Kitahara-sensei, a way to escape reality —"

The book reviewer next to him pushed up his glasses and nodded repeatedly in agreement, saying, "Yes, literature serves as a refuge here."

When the real financial system collapses, desperate readers need to use the extreme predicaments in novels to alleviate the pressure on their own bodies.

But before they could finish speaking, the monitors in the studio began playing a loop of images of ordinary people wiping away tears as they turned the pages of a book in the cold wind.

Looking at the man in a suit crying on the tram platform, and the bankrupt man burying his face in his rough hands, the psychologist's fluent analysis suddenly stalled.

His hand holding the water glass froze in mid-air. His lips moved, but it felt like there was a sponge stuck in his throat, and he couldn't say anything.

Faced with this real existential predicament where even breathing feels exhausting, the vague notions of "compensation," "release," and "aftereffects" sound like utter nonsense like "Why don't they eat meat porridge?"

What truly silenced the guests and made viewers hold their breath was an anonymous interview that was hastily recorded in a corner of the park during the latter half of the episode.

The camera shook twice as the interviewee refused to show his face, forcing the camera to pan down to focus on his hands resting on his knees.

Those were hands with large joints from years of hard labor, and fingers filled with indelible machine oil grime.

On the ring finger of her left hand, a slightly deformed diamond wedding ring was still tightly fastened.

Off-screen, a young reporter gasped for breath and cautiously asked him why he had gone to queue up to buy "The Long Road" today.

The man remained silent for a long time.

In the background, the only sound is the rustling of wind blowing through dry leaves.

"I originally thought that I had reached the end of my road."

The man finally spoke, his voice hoarse with weariness from the hardships of life: "The company went bankrupt, and loan sharks came to my daughter's school yesterday."

"This morning I pretended to go to work, but actually I wanted to see how Kitahara-sensei would give those bloodsucking bastards a good dressing down before I found a place to hang myself—"

At this point, he let out a dry, bitter laugh and said, "In the end, there were no vampires in the book at all."

"There was only one father, worse off than me, who couldn't even find food for tomorrow. He had no money, no dignity, no house—"

But he still held the child's hand tightly as they walked down the street.

His grime-covered hands slowly clenched the fabric of the old coat.

I closed the book and sat on the bench for half an hour —

The man's voice began to tremble, thick with a nasal tone, as if he were talking to himself, or perhaps confessing: "As I was reading the book, I kept thinking, what am I? — Why do I think it's difficult? Why do I dare to abandon my wife and children to those beasts who collect debts, and run off to die alone? —"

After the video finished playing, the studio fell into a silence that lasted for more than ten seconds.

The psychologist awkwardly lowered his head to organize the papers in front of him, while the book reviewer awkwardly looked away. Neither of them made any further attempts to analyze anything.

The camera cuts back to the studio. Kume Hiroshi is silent for a few seconds, then puts down the ballpoint pen he has been unconsciously rubbing in his hand. His eyes, which are usually sharp and shrewd, look tired and moist at this moment.

He didn't look at the prepared official closing remarks on the teleprompter, but relied on his intuition to speak to the camera in a slightly hoarse voice: "This little gray booklet, which only cost the price of a lunchbox, can't pay off any family's high-interest loans, nor can it conjure up a job offer letter out of thin air."

"But it forcefully pulled back those who already had one foot on the edge of the rooftop."

"It makes these desperate people feel that they can't die tonight, they have to live one more night and see what happens."

"In Japan today, these words carry far more weight than a hundred bows of apology from a Ministry of Finance official in front of the camera."

That evening, before the program had even finished airing, the twelve landlines in TV Asahi's hotline room began to light up red call notification lights one after another.

In the past, whenever such major social news was broadcast, the hotline would be filled with politicians' furious questions or large corporations' aggressive public relations pressure.

But tonight in the call center, instead of the roars of those powerful figures, there were suppressed, heavy breaths and uncontrollable sobs coming from the other end of the line.

A dozen or so newly hired young interns, clutching the scalding microphones, were unable to utter a single comforting word in the face of this heavy, real hardship. They could only helplessly let their eyes well up with tears.

On the other end of the phone, someone was crying and laughing incoherently, talking about her unemployed, alcoholic, and irritable husband, kneeling on the tatami mat, holding her child and weeping bitterly.

Someone was sobbing uncontrollably, saying that while tidying up her husband's briefcase, she found a hemp rope with a knot already tied in the deepest part of the compartment.

Some people remained silent for a long time after the call connected, only saying into the microphone after a half-minute of choked sobs, "Thank you, Kitahara-sensei, I'm not going to die," before hastily hanging up.

The next morning, the Asahi Shimbun pushed the usual political scandal off the front page, replacing it with a striking headline in bold black font:

From Anger to Silence: Why "The Long Road" Resonated with Post-Earthquake Japan

The article did not shy away from sharp social criticism.

It incisively points out that if "The Collapsed Tower" is a scalpel that peels back the structural evils of the bubble era, it exposes the greedy chain of interests between banks, housing companies, and real estate companies to the light of day.

Then "The Long Road" is a dusty mirror, reflecting the ordinary people who were ruthlessly thrown into the spiritual ruins after the structure collapsed.

The reporter handed the recording pen to an ordinary citizen on the street.

In their writings, there are stories of wives from bankrupt families recounting with red eyes how their unemployed husbands sit in the living room every day, staring intently at the same newspaper, reading all day without ever turning a single page.

One laid-off employee chuckled bitterly and said that what was most chilling about "The Long Road" wasn't the man-eating monsters, but the messed-up world that made people feel that "eating people" was the most reasonable rule of survival.

A weary bookstore clerk quietly recalled that the bookstore had been unusually quiet these past few days. Everyone who received "The Long Road" treated it as if it were a fragile item. No one spoke loudly, and there was no impatient urging.

In contrast, the Yomiuri Shimbun takes a more in-depth approach to literature.

Their culture section headline reads: "Kitahara Iwao's New Work 'The Long Road': A Father-Son Allegory for an Era of Ruins"

The critics in the article praised Kitahara Iwao without reservation, saying that he could no longer be simply categorized as a literary giant.

"The Collapsed Tower" made him a chronicler of the bubble era, while "The Long Road" pushed his writing to a broader and more compassionate realm.

This novel no longer clings to a particular country, a particular crisis, or a particular group of criminals, but instead places the blade against the very bones of civilization.

When all social rules are stripped away, can people still hold onto that most basic sense of goodness?

The Yomiuri editorial concluded with a weighty statement: "A writer who merely records the scandals of his time is, at best, a competent witness."

"But a writer who can depict the struggles of ordinary people after a scandal has truly come close to the soul of national literature."

Amidst these deafening social reactions, the Nikkei, known for its stern and hard-line approach, found itself in an awkward position.

Over the past few months, their pages have been filled with precipitous data, bad bank loans, frozen real estate, and corporate bankruptcies and restructurings.

As professional financial media, they are not as emotional as the cultural sections, but they cannot avoid the huge impact of "The Long Road" on the public.

Ultimately, they responded with an editorial, as always:

Literature cannot repair bad debts, but it may mend hearts after a collapse of confidence.

The first half of the article is still data analysis by economists.

The editorial bluntly stated that current employment pressures are still widening, the real estate market shows no signs of thawing, the failure rate of small and medium-sized enterprises continues to rise, and the process of clearing up non-performing bank loans will be very lengthy.

But behind the cold data, this editorial also made a rare mention of the connection between literature and public psychology.

They pointed out that the phenomenal sales of "Long Road" reflect that after the bursting of the bubble economy, the Japanese people, who are in a downward cycle, urgently need a psychological support to "survive".

The entire article abandons superfluous emotional rhetoric, and uses precise and plain language.

Many business professionals in suits, accustomed to quickly reading market indices and financial reports on their commuter trains, found their gazes lingering for a long time when they came across the last sentence: "When the myth of perpetual economic growth is shattered, what a country needs to relearn may no longer be how to continue its rapid expansion, but rather how to preserve the dignity of being human during a long and painful contraction."

Compared to the dignified restraint of the three major newspapers, the tabloids and sensational weekly magazines on the streets, which rely on attracting attention, have completely fallen into a chaotic frenzy.

Inside the newsstand, headlines in bold, garish colors and exaggerated language practically slapped at pedestrians' faces from the cheap paper:

The suicide rate in Tokyo Bay plummeted last night! Did a dark novel actually put all of Japan's gallows out of work?

The lament of a yakuza debt collector: "After reading 'The Long Road,' debtors aren't even afraid of having their fingers chopped off!"

Bizarre Scenes in a Nightlife Street: A male escort finds a grey Bible in his briefcase, prompting a hostess to tearfully urge him to go home! Is Kitahara Iwa comparable to a modern-day deity?

Those paparazzi reporters who used to focus on politicians' sex lives and celebrities' affairs have now all turned into hyenas that go mad at the smell of blood.

They not only guarded the entrances to mental health clinics and suicide prevention hotlines, but also acted with extreme ferocity and ruthlessness.

Some people went out in the middle of the night with flashlights to search through the trash cans next to benches in various parks in Tokyo, trying to piece together the fragments of suicide notes stained with snot and tears, and take them back to the editorial department as "sacred relics of salvation" to take close-up photos.

Someone brought a recording pen and waited for the conductor of the last tram, shamelessly asking how many desperate bankrupts had been "pulled back inside the yellow line by a book a second before jumping onto the tracks" in the past few days.

Shinchosha was furious about this kind of frenzied hype.

Kenichi Sato stared at the colorful magazine covers, his face so dark it seemed to drip water. He slammed the magazines onto his desk and shouted at the door, "Where are the legal department staff? Send lawyer's letters to these third-rate magazines immediately!"

How dare they tarnish the reputation of Kitahara-sensei's work with such a vulgar title!

Murata Taro, standing nearby, rubbed his temples in frustration and immediately grabbed his landline, ready to use Shinchosha's distribution channels to put direct pressure on these tabloids.

In the eyes of their traditional publishing elites, such crude titles are simply greedily sucking the readers' pain, forcibly tearing open the bloody wounds of ordinary people, and turning them into cheap gimmicks sold on the street.

However, just as Shincho Publishing House was cracking down on these unscrupulous hype, the real sales feedback coming in from grassroots bookstores across the country made them feel the impact of "The Long Road" on the nation.

With its genuine despair and compassion, "The Long Road" is like a silent avalanche, single-handedly shattering the hard barrier between "pure literature" and "the lower class".

Like an unstoppable torrent, it seeped into the narrowest cracks of Japanese society, truly falling into the hands of those who were exhausted from making a living.

They reeked of smoke and lay on the passenger seat of a late-night taxi driver.

Their edges curled up, they were stuffed into the briefcases of low-level employees in small companies, and even replaced cheap adult comics, lying next to the cash registers of night shift convenience store clerks.

Those marginalized people at the bottom of society who may not have been to a bookstore for more than a decade and who roll in the mud every day to pay off their debts originally didn't care about literary awards at all.

But when they opened this book at their wits' end, they were caught off guard and had their hearts gripped tightly by Kitahara Iwao's words.

When they turned to the last page, the pent-up anger and resentment from life had long been washed away, leaving only a long sigh in the cold wind.

It seems that the whole of Japan is digesting this book, "The Long Road," in its own way.

The high-and-mighty television stations and mainstream newspapers define it in terms of social responsibility, economists measure it with dry data, and tabloids consume it with the noisiest revelry.

Despite the uproar from the outside world, Kitahara Iwa, at the center of the storm, declined all media interview invitations.

In the study of the apartment in the port area, it was so quiet that only the ticking of the wall clock could be heard.

The solid wood desk was covered with various newspaper clippings sent by the New Trend Society.

Serious editorials, weighty investigative reports, and sensational headlines are all haphazardly interwoven.

Izumi Sakai walked in carrying two cups of hot tea and gently placed one of them on the corner of the table.

Her gaze then fell on a report about an anonymous unemployed father tearing up his suicide note.

Izumi Sakai stared at it for a long time, and her eyes slowly reddened.

"Kitahara————"

Izumi Sakai pointed to the words on the newspaper and said in a slightly hoarse voice, "This person said he went home to see his child tonight, and he doesn't plan to die."

However, Kitahara Iwa didn't reply immediately, because he knew better than anyone how cruel reality was.

Even if this man doesn't walk onto the train tracks tonight, when he wakes up tomorrow morning, the bank's bad debts will still weigh on his head, and the debt collection calls will still ring on time.

After a long while, Kitahara Iwa picked up the hot tea, feeling the scalding heat from the cup, and said, "I can't save him."

"A book cannot shield a person from wind and snow."

"I was just using the father in the book to tell him that no matter how cold it is outside, never let go of your family's hand."

"What truly kept him alive wasn't me, but the little fire in his heart that he couldn't bear to extinguish."

Kitahara Iwa looked away and closed the thick stack of newspaper clippings on the table.

Beside the desk, the first edition of "The Long Road" lay quietly under the warm light of the desk lamp.

On the rough gray cover, a long road stretches into the unknown distance.

At the end of that road, there was no sun, no victory, and no savior to descend from the heavens and clear their debts.

But as long as there are people willing to grit their teeth and keep going on this muddy road.

That was enough to keep the temperature in the early winter of 1991.

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