Theater Class (2)
Nashida thought the [Photographic Memory] was pretty good. Not bad. He had spent his life reading thousands of detective novels.
He’d probably read his share of Korean detective fiction too, though the problem was that none of it had left much of an impression.
Still, when it came to detective-novel theory, he was more than an expert.
That meant he could read quickly and grasp a work’s value just as fast. In the Korean detective-fiction scene, this would be top-tier. It was almost a shame.
If he had written a detective novel at this level in Japan, he could have aimed for at least a small prize. But the atmosphere doesn’t feel Japanese either. It’s closer to the English-speaking world—this crisp, unfussy detective, the brutal murders. Korean literature really does have more of a Western bent than Japan does. Nashida found that fascinating.
Korea, if one had to put it bluntly, seemed fixated on its particular Confucian culture, on things that were Asian.
Yet cultural content like novels leaned toward the West. Japan, by contrast, had long dreamed of detaching from Asia and entering Europe.
And yet its cultural content was created in a distinctly Japanese style. Wasn’t that interesting?
These neighboring countries had collided again and again throughout history.
You’d think they would have developed some resemblance, but their aims and their results always ended up so badly misaligned.
“Hoo….” He exhaled a long stream of cigarette smoke.
He had almost finished the manuscript of [Photographic Memory]. The assistant is the culprit, isn’t he? The wife was murdered at the bedroom door. Only the assistant would have opened that door so easily. He had already worked out the killer.
Was it because he’d devoured so many detective novels? The answer had come to him almost at once. And sure enough, the assistant was the culprit. Overall score: 80 points. Once the culprit had been spotted, [Photographic Memory] wasn’t quite as astonishing as he’d expected.
Of course, the deductive process leading to the answer had been decent enough. There’s still the critique. Do I really need to read it? Under ordinary circumstances, he wouldn’t have bothered.
He had already understood the novel; what use was a critique now?
Still, he reluctantly began reading it.
For Yamada’s sake, since he’d gone to the trouble of translating it.
Tap. He was about to light a fresh cigarette as he read the critique when—
“…Hm?”
He had to freeze.
With the cigarette still between his lips, he muttered in a clumsy murmur, “First person?”
This critique wasn’t analyzing the mystery at all; it was fixated on the first-person narration itself.
He had never seen a critique like this before.
It was new.
He forgot even to light the cigarette and kept reading. “…Oh?”
I knew what effect first-person narration could have in a detective novel. But explaining it in such close relation to this work makes it feel new again.
“…!”
Exactly. [Photographic Memory] had to be in first person. That was the essence of this novel. Knowing that, reading it again… [Photographic Memory] feels like the better novel now. Whoever this critic is, he’s remarkable.
And when his eyes slid down to the final paragraph, his cigarette fell from his mouth.
It rolled along the table, tumbled off the edge, and dropped into the gravel below.
“….”
He didn’t even think to pick it up.
Emotion is made more certain by what is not said….
He had never read a critique of a detective novel that carried such literary atmosphere and meaning.
Most critics were too busy explaining how ingenious and surprising the puzzle was.
But this one was different.
It understood the heart of [Photographic Memory] with absolute precision,
connected that to literary value,
and then proved it in painstaking detail through its own logic. And what writing it was.
Not only did it find the exact right words,
it even carried the emotional resonance of the detective and his wife’s love all the way to the end, leaving an aftertaste that lingered. But the most impressive part was this: How could someone invade the novel this deeply without spoiling the identity of the culprit?
Gulp. Nashida swallowed hard.
With his arms folded, he stared at the critique as if he meant to bore a hole through it. For once, he had lost his usual composure. He was genuinely anxious now.
“Yamada.”
At his low call, Yamada, who had been savoring the taste of tea, jumped. “Ah—yes, yes. You’ve already finished reading it?”
“Where was this published, and who wrote it?”
“It was written by Mok Hyunsun, a Korean star critic. And it was published in… Pyeong, the quarterly magazine where he serves as editor-in-chief.”
“A star critic and the editor-in-chief of a magazine? Then he must be about my age.”
“No. He’s in his late twenties.”
“Late twenties?!”
His shocked voice rang out across the courtyard.
“That’s impossible. Someone who can write like this can’t possibly be that young. And he’s the editor-in-chief, too?”
Yamada, thrilled by the intensity of the reaction, looked pleased with himself. “He’s the youngest editor-in-chief in history. What’s even more astonishing is that he wrote every single piece in the quarterly himself. And that quarterly—believe it or not—is devoted entirely to criticism.”
“…A quarterly dedicated to criticism.”
He had taken such a gamble in a book market as small as Korea’s?
What on earth kind of person was this young man named Mok Hyunsun?
“What did you think, sir?”
“I can sum it up in one sentence.” He pointed at the manuscript of [Photographic Memory]. “This novel is good.” Then he pointed at the critique. “But this critique is superior.”
“…Ah.”
“You read this critique first, didn’t you?”
“Yes.”
“That means you were drawn even more deeply into the novel because of it. This critique amplified the novel’s appeal by a hundred and twenty percent. Meeting a critic like this is… a stroke of luck for the writer. If this novel ever takes off,”
“It already has.”
“!”
“I heard that the sales of Weekly Genre Fiction, the magazine in which [Photographic Memory] ran, shot up dramatically.”
“…I see. Well, that makes sense. The work itself is excellent, but this critique delivered the decisive blow.” Then Nashida muttered under his breath, “…I’d like to receive a critique like that too.”
His blatant desire didn’t reach Yamada’s ears.
“Yamada. Where is this quarterly called Pyeong published? I’d like to contact them formally.”
“It’s published by Gyeongseong Publishing. A major house.”
“Gyeongseong Publishing!”
He clapped his hands once, sharply.
Yamada, who had no idea what was going on, looked baffled. “That’s the publisher handling the Korean edition of my new book, Theater Class! Perfect. Very perfect.” He jumped to his feet and crossed the gravel courtyard back into the living room.
Then he patted Yamada on the back a couple of times. “Good work bringing this to me, Yamada. I’ll make sure I repay this favor. If things go well with Gyeongseong Publishing, I’ll give you the exclusive interview.”
The reporter grinned from ear to ear.
His carefully laid plan had worked.
And that night, Nashida sent a direct email to Gyeongseong Publishing’s overseas literature department. It was a proposal asking whether Pyeong could run a critique to coincide with the Korean release of his new book, Theater Class. [“[…] I have been deeply impressed by the high level of your quarterly, Pyeong. If a critique of my new book could appear in your next issue, I believe it would make for excellent publicity. Should you grant this request, I am also willing to travel to Korea in person and carry out all tasks necessary for promotion […]”]
If they could place a critique of Theater Class in Pyeong, he was saying, he would even go to Korea himself.
For a writer who didn’t even bother attending most Japanese literary events, that was, in his own way, a substantial offer.
While he waited for a reply overnight, he wasn’t particularly worried.
After all, he was Nashida Ito, winner of the Japan Mystery Writers Association Award.
Surely Gyeongseong Publishing wouldn’t dare reject the proposal.
It was only a matter of writing one critique, after all.
And yet. “…What is this?”
The reply he checked the next day was far from what Nashida had expected. [“[…] We have submitted the manuscript provided by the writer to the official review process at Pyeong. Please wait for the result.”]
…They were asking him to wait.
They had put it through review. In other words…
“…It could have been rejected?”
Nashida lost the power of speech, stunned.
—┼
I didn’t read Theater Class immediately.
It wouldn’t have been fair to give one manuscript special treatment.
While I let Theater Class sit for about two weeks, another mountain of manuscripts piled up on my desk.
This time, even though I hadn’t exactly announced a submission drive, it seemed people had sent me manuscripts on their own anyway.
On top of that, I’d stacked the books and manuscripts I had brought in myself, and by then the situation had become this: “If I don’t start reading something now, this desk is going to explode.”
It was earlier than I expected, but I supposed I might as well begin.
Since it had been the first manuscript I received, I decided to start with Theater Class.
I couldn’t deny that I was a little curious.
It was the new work of a writer who had won the Japan Mystery Writers Association Award,
so there had to be something special about it.
[The curtain rises. From the very bottom, the velvet drape is lifted in successive folds. Beyond it, the stage begins to come into view. The children’s slender legs. The wrinkled curtain grows heavier. By now the curtain is half raised. The vertical cords sewn into the curtain’s middle tighten under its weight. The children’s arms, chests, necks, and faces become visible. The curtain is raised all the way to the top, where the audience cannot easily see it. Heavy. Strained.]
Theater Class began like that, and it was set in a high school.
That high school was famous for its theater club, to the point that professors from university departments of theater and film would come to scout students in advance.
And though the setup was a little “Japanese” in its own way, the female president of the theater club was found dead one day.
The police determined the cause of death to be a fall.
The club president, they said, had climbed onto the stage scaffolding to check the lights and then fallen by accident.
But the students knew better. The president had acrophobia and would never have been able to climb up there in the first place. So they gathered their heads together to deduce the culprit.
Thus Theater Class launched into a gloomy, tense mystery. As they investigated, they gradually came to realize one thing.
Given the circumstances, only the theater club members could have killed the president that day.
And on the night they reached that conclusion,
the club’s vice president was found hanged as well.
The police confirmed the cause of death as… suicide.
The students began to suspect one another more and more.
From that point on, they started scrutinizing each other’s alibis with ruthless intensity. The problem was that every single one of them was good at acting.
All their alibis were perfect, and with no one sure who the culprit was, they picked apart one another’s weaknesses one by one. “…It’s interesting.” It was, in fact, a good novel.
The writing was excellent at building a frightening atmosphere,
and the mystery was tightly constructed, with no loose seams, making it satisfying to read.
There was also something about the terror, or perhaps the uncanny unease, created by “students who are good at acting.”
It was a fine work, and that sort of staging came alive beautifully.
Then came the climax of any detective novel: the reveal of the culprit.
[“There is no one in this world who killed the club president. That’s because the vice president, who hanged herself, is the one who benefited most from the entrance exams once the president was gone. The person with the biggest advantage from the president’s death was the vice president.” “W-What? Then the vice president killed the president and, overcome with guilt, took her own life—?” “No. That can’t be it. If the president died, the vice president would be the one to receive the recommendation letter with the greatest boost to her admissions chances, wouldn’t she? Then what if the vice president were the one who died?” At that moment, everyone looked at one person.]
The entrance-exam issue that had only passed by in the background suddenly emerged as the decisive motive for murder.
Of course, the student in question denied it like a madman,
but the student leading the deductions calmly presented the evidence.
It was made up of objects and fragments of memory nobody else had paid attention to.
And that was how Theater Class ended. “…It’s decent enough, but…”
Was it really strong enough to become a bestseller?
To me, it felt too ordinary.
The mystery was good, but… it lacked a certain emotional force.
“Hold it for now.” I set the manuscript aside.
Though “hold it” was just a polite way of saying it had effectively been rejected.
So I spent the entire day reading manuscripts.
By the time I was leaving work with no real standout piece to show for it, a man called out to me. “Excuse me, Critic Mok Hyunsun!”
He was short and pudgy, wearing glasses. …?
Who was this again?
I had definitely seen him somewhere.
“Ah, um… My name is Song Man.”
“Ah.”
He was Song Man, the writer of [Photographic Memory].