Chapter 124 Every Person Walking Alone in the White Night
This isn't a joke, it's a recommendation for the treasure book "Tokyo Literary Masters: Starting from the Late 1980s":
Police quickly identified the suspect.
However, before the case could be fully investigated, several key suspects died one after another due to "accidents".
With the trail completely broken, the case was hastily closed. The bloodstained file was shoved into a metal cabinet at the bottom of the Osaka Prefectural Police archives, where it slowly gathered dust.
No one pursued the matter further. Nor did anyone feel it necessary to waste police resources on an old case in a slum.
But Kitahara Iwa's pen stopped coldly and precisely in a place where everyone chose to forget.
He pointed the camera at the two children who were just eleven years old.
The victim's son—Ryoji Kirihara.
The suspect's daughter, Yukiho Nishimoto.
Two children who grew up in the dark corners of an abandoned building.
Since the murder case was closed, the two never appeared in the same scene again in the 800-page document.
This was the first thing that sent chills down Sato’s spine when he finished reading the first thirty pages.
At first, he thought this was just a dual-narrative technique used by Kitahara Iwao—setting up the story separately and then bringing them together at the climax.
But he was wrong.
Because Kitahara Iwa never intended for them to meet in the sunlight.
Then time began to relentlessly grind forward, measured in years.
1975, 1978, 1981, 1984...
Each chapter that turns marks a break in time, spanning several years. Kitahara Iwao uses an almost visceral use of blank space to stretch the narrative's timeline to a despairing extent.
What horrified Kenichi Sato even more was that the two children's life trajectories never intersected in the slightest after they grew up.
Nishimoto Yukiho was adopted by a well-off middle-class family and renamed Karasawa Yukiho.
From the first day she stepped into her new home, she began a flawless transformation.
She presented herself with a flawless mask—gentle, intellectual, and poised.
At school, she was the teacher's proudest top student; in social situations, she was the focus of everyone's admiration.
No one knew she came from the dirtiest slum in the West End, and no one knew that her birth mother was a suspect in a murder case.
She burned the past to ashes and then built a brand new, radiant Karasawa Yukiho from the ashes.
She got into a prestigious university, married into a wealthy family, and even founded her own fashion brand. Every step she took was glamorous and flawless.
Her smile was as warm as the gentlest spring dawn, making everyone who came near her feel as if they were bathed in a spring breeze.
But upon reading this, Editor-in-Chief Sato felt a chill run down his spine.
Because Kitahara Iwa never wrote about her expressions when she was alone.
This character, who is the absolute female protagonist, was not given even a single subjective psychological description in the entire 800 pages!
Readers can only ever see her through the eyes of others—seeing her flawless smile and her perfectly timed tears.
Meanwhile, Kirihara Ryoji has completely fallen into the abyss.
Starting in a certain year, he disappeared from everyone's sight.
There are no proper school records, no transparent work experience, no registered address, and no tax declarations.
In Japan during the 1970s and 80s, it was not difficult for a person to "disappear" from society—as long as you were willing to sever all social ties and give up your dignity and rights as a "normal person," you could sink into the mire of the black market or the slums at the bottom of society.
But the reason why Kirihara Ryoji's disappearance is so chilling is that he was not escaping reality, but rather carrying out an extremely cruel self-sacrifice.
He deliberately cut off all his escape routes in the sunlight, making himself a non-existent person.
He willingly became a ghost lurking in the city's sewers and dark alleys.
They had no face, no identity, as if they had never been born into this world.
When Kenichi Sato read this part, he began to have a vague feeling that something was wrong.
It's not that the wording is wrong, nor is the plot wrong.
Rather, after these two people separated, their contrasting life trajectories, one bright and one dark, were filled with too many "coincidences" that were impossible to ignore.
Sato's professional instincts as a top editor caused his brain to spin like a high-speed projector, frantically replaying the chapters he had previously read.
At this moment, those marginal cases that were originally scattered across different years and glossed over as social background now fit together perfectly in his suddenly constricted pupils, like bloodstained puzzle pieces.
Page 100.
A rival who was hindering Xuehui's advancement to higher education is suddenly embroiled in a mysterious scandal and forced to drop out of school.
Page 180.
A wealthy young man who harbors ill intentions towards Xuehui is robbed in his home late at night and is severely injured and paralyzed.
Page 250.
A crucial document in Xuehui's husband's company was mysteriously altered, which conveniently cleared the final obstacle for her to launch her own brand.
Page 320.
The body of an unidentified man appeared in the corner of a social news article—the victim happened to be the person who had threatened to expose Xuehui's past three months earlier.
If these events are viewed individually, each one is an independent, accidental event that has nothing to do with Xuehui.
But when Kenichi Sato arranged them on the timeline—his fingers froze.
Every time Xuehui encounters an obstacle in her life, the obstacle is cleared away in some "accidental" way within a very short time.
every time.
with no exceptions.
The methods behind those "accidents"—eavesdropping, forgery, coercion, and intrusion—while none of them have been formally linked to any one person by the police, if you look closely at the technical characteristics of those criminal methods, there is an extremely subtle imprint that belongs to the same person.
A ghost that operates in the shadows, leaving no trace.
It was Kirihara Ryoji!
Seeing this, Kenichi Sato placed the manuscript paper on his lap and closed his eyes.
At this moment, he finally realized what Kitahara Iwa was doing.
Kitahara Iwao never wrote a single scene of the two plotting together.
There was never a scheduled conversation between them in the shadows.
There wasn't even a single shot of them appearing in the same space at the same time.
But among these fragments scattered across different years, cities, and perspectives from different supporting characters, once you have enough patience to piece them together, a complete picture will suddenly emerge.
Below the flower-strewn staircase leading up to Yukiho, Kirihara Ryoji crawled forward through the dark, sunless ventilation ducts.
He used eavesdropping to discover the weaknesses of Xuehui's enemies.
He used forgery to create a perfect alibi for Xuehui.
He used coercion to shut up those who were in his way.
He destroyed the will of Xuehui's competitors.
He used murder to eliminate any living witnesses who might expose the truth.
Every step that Yukiho took was paved with Ryoji's blood, flesh, and sins.
The two of them never walked side by side in the sunlight.
But the bond between them is a thousand times stronger than any other relationship that is out in the open.
This is a symbiosis that grows in absolute darkness, is watered with sin, and is twisted to the extreme.
It's something that can't be defined by the word "love," yet there's no more accurate word to describe it.
On the coffee table, two cups of Shizuoka sencha, which the secretary had carefully brewed earlier, had long since gone cold.
The color of the tea soup changed from the initial emerald green to a deep dark brown, and a layer of fine water droplets condensed on the cup wall.
The delicate yokan next to it hadn't been touched at all; the sugar on the cut surface had begun to seep out slightly, reflecting a sticky sheen under the light.
The two people in the president's office never changed their posture from the moment they sat down.
President Murata leaned back on the left side of the sofa, his back ramrod straight, holding the manuscript paper in both hands, his gaze slowly moving line by line.
Editor-in-Chief Sato sat on the right, leaning forward with his elbows on his knees, his eyes fixed on the manuscript being read in the president's hand.
The light outside the window gradually changed from the warm yellow of the afternoon to the dark orange of the evening, and then slowly sank into the night.
It was six o'clock in the evening.
Six o'clock in the evening.
As usual, the secretary gently pushed open the walnut door with a polite professional smile.
Carrying a delicate bento box she'd just brought back from a nearby upscale restaurant, she asked softly, "President, Editor-in-Chief Sato, dinner is ready. Would you like to order?"
But there was no response in the huge president's office.
The air was thick with a suffocatingly low pressure. There was no rustling of paper turning, no conversation about the plot, and even breathing was suppressed to a minimum.
The two people at opposite ends of the sofa seemed to have had the surrounding air sucked away by some invisible force, turning them into two stiff sculptures.
President Murata's once straight back hunched slightly as his gaze was fixed intently on the words.
Editor-in-Chief Sato's face, which had been flushed with excitement when he first entered, had completely faded to a ashen, sickly look, as if he were recovering from a serious illness.
Faced with the secretary's clear questioning, they didn't even lift their eyelids, as if the eight hundred pages of manuscript had severed all their connection with the real world, making them completely lose their perception of external sounds.
The secretary stood there for more than ten seconds, watching this strange and oppressive scene, and did not dare to make a sound to disturb it.
So she tiptoed over and carefully placed the lunchbox full of food on the coffee table next to her.
8 PM.
The other departments in the Shinchosha building had already left work one after another, and the lights in the corridor were dimmed, making it appear empty and deep.
At the secretary's workstation in the outer room, the secretary sighed helplessly and glanced up at the clock on the wall.
According to the rules, she could clock out at 6:30. She had originally planned to meet up with friends at an izakaya near Ginza tonight, but it seems that the gathering is now canceled.
The president hadn't spoken, and the boss hadn't left, so as his personal secretary, she naturally couldn't slip away beforehand; after all, that was an ironclad rule in the Japanese workplace.
"What kind of obsessive novel could make these two forget to eat and even leave work?"
While inwardly cursing this undeserved overtime work, she tiptoed closer to the walnut door of the president's office.
She intended to go in and remind them of the time, and also turn on the overhead lights for them.
But the sight she saw through the slightly ajar door made her stop in her tracks.
The ceiling lights inside were still off.
The only light sources are the neon night view of Jimbocho outside the floor-to-ceiling windows and the floor lamp next to the sofa.
In that dim, yellowish light, President Murata sat on the sofa, his eyes glued to the manuscript in front of him, completely oblivious to everything around him.
Meanwhile, Editor-in-Chief Sato unconsciously raised one hand and gripped his tie tightly at his chest, his knuckles turning pale from the force, as if futilely resisting some bottomless despair emanating from the words.
Seeing that the two were completely absorbed in their papers, the secretary ultimately did not dare to knock on the door. Instead, she held her breath and remained silently waiting outside.
It's 10 p.m.
The secretary, who had already been forced to work three and a half hours of extra work, rubbed her sore neck and decided to conduct the last routine check of the evening.
When she came to the door again, her gaze passed through the crack in the door. The two high-end bento boxes that had been delivered at six o'clock in the evening were still untouched on the coffee table, not even the angle of their placement had changed.
The manuscript, which was eight hundred pages thick, was now reduced to a thin, small stack.
The secretary stood outside the door, quietly watching the two men inside who wielded immense influence in the Japanese publishing industry, and couldn't help but inwardly rant: What earth-shattering manuscript did Mr. Kitahara write?
The fact that these two seasoned business leaders were so engrossed in watching that they forgot to eat forced her to stay up late as well. The working class really has it tough.
Even though he was inwardly complaining, the secretary had no intention of saying anything to remind him.
Instead, he silently closed the wooden door again, retreated into the dark corridor, and returned to his workstation.
As the secretary returned to her workstation, the story of White Night transitioned into the 1980s.
The economic bubble began to inflate, and Japanese society as a whole was like a balloon being constantly inflated, its surface smooth and shiny, but the internal pressure was accumulating at an irreversible rate.
Meanwhile, Xuehui's climbing speed was also increasing.
She went from being an adopted daughter of a middle-class family to the most dazzling socialite on campus, from a socialite to the wife of a tycoon, and from a wife to the founder of a fashion brand.
Every leap forward was magnificent, and every turn left behind a trail of flowers and applause.
Meanwhile, in the shadows behind her, Ryoji's crimes were escalating at a breathtaking pace.
From the initial wiretapping and fabrication of evidence, to the later kidnapping, intentional injury, and forced humiliation, and finally—murder.
More than once. Many times.
Kitahara Iwao's writing style in depicting these crimes changed Sato Kenichi's mindset.
It doesn't sensationalize or evoke emotions, and it doesn't give you any outlet for your feelings.
When someone died, Kitahara Iwa only mentioned it lightly through the voice of a minor character: "A new resident moved into the room next door. I heard something happened to the previous resident."
A body was discovered, and Kitahara Iwao only listed the deceased's age, occupation, and cause of death as unknown at the end of one chapter in the form of a news clipping.
That's it.
There are no bloody scene descriptions, no struggles of the deceased before their death, and no inner monologue of the murderer when committing the crime.
Everything was omitted in an extremely cold and ruthless manner.
And it is precisely this omission that is truly fatal.
Because when readers only see the result and not the process, their brains will automatically fill in the gaps.
I can imagine how Ryoji approached that person, how he made his move, and what that person saw in the last few seconds before dying.
I can only imagine Xuehui's expression after she learned all this—or perhaps, she had no expression at all.
These scenes, filled in by the readers themselves, are more terrifying than any scene depicted by the author.
Because the darkness in everyone's mind is tailor-made for themselves.
As the story progresses into the mid-1980s, Editor-in-Chief Sato's psychological defenses completely crumble.
The initial three-minute wait was a pure anxiety of "eagerly wanting to see the next page".
And this anxiety is a kind of happiness.
It is the most instinctive thirst of an editor facing a masterpiece, the excitement of "hurry up and let me see what's inside" when unwrapping a gift.
But now, the nature of things has completely changed.
These three minutes have now become an extremely oppressive form of psychological torture.
Each time he finished reading a page of extremely brutal content in about forty seconds, he had no new text to read for the remaining two minutes or so.
But the images he had just swallowed did not stop running after he finished reading them.
On the contrary, they began to reproduce wildly in the vacuum of waiting.
The image of Ryoji crawling inside the ventilation duct replayed countless times in his mind.
Xuehui's perfect smiling face in the sunlight was magnified into a suffocating high wall, and behind the wall was a bottomless black hole.
The nameless corpses scattered across different years lined up in a row, falling one after another like dominoes.
With each fall, Xuehui took a step forward.
These three minutes of blank time, ironically, became the most terrifying amplifier of Kitahara Iwa's writing.
It infused the psychological destructive power of "Journey Under the Midnight Sun" into every nerve ending of editor-in-chief Sato indiscriminately and exponentially.
At this moment, Editor-in-Chief Sato even felt that he was not waiting to turn the page, but was being buried alive inch by inch by this book.
Meanwhile, President Murata, sitting at the other end of the sofa, slowed down his page-turning.
Furthermore, Sato clearly noticed that when President Murata handed him the manuscript, his withered fingertips trembled uncontrollably.
This old-school publisher, who had read countless books throughout his life and was known for remaining calm even in the face of a collapsing mountain, had his breathing rhythm completely disrupted, becoming increasingly heavy, with each exhale carrying a sluggish, chronic feeling.
It was as if he wasn't inhaling the oxygen filtered by the constant temperature air conditioning in the office, but rather the dust and blood that had accumulated in an abandoned building in Osaka for twenty years.
As the time passed to five in the morning, the Tokyo sky outside the window began to lighten.
The night was not the hopeful orange-red of a clear dawn, but a hazy, lifeless, pale white. (I was reading Chapter 124, "Everyone Walking Alone in the White Night," completely absorbed in it.)
This whiteness is like a piece of skin that has been drained of all its color, like the base color that remains on a person's face after a long period of blood loss.
The floor-to-ceiling windows of the president's office let in the pale sunlight intact, which fell on the shoulders and knees of the two people.
Editor-in-Chief Sato glanced at the sky outside the window, then at the page he was reading.
A wonderfully strange, yet incredibly ironic feeling welled up inside him.
The false light outside the window, neither night nor day, forms a striking intertextuality with the "White Night" in the book's title.
In the real white night, they witnessed the end of "Journey Under the Midnight Sun".
President Murata read through the penultimate page with great difficulty, then handed the manuscript to Editor-in-Chief Sato, who was sitting next to him.
Then, President Murata picked up the last page of the book.
All sound in the president's office disappeared.
The sounds of the air conditioner running, the elevator going up and down in the distance, and the cleaning lady mopping the floor downstairs were all blocked outside the walls of this room by some extremely heavy, invisible force field.
Only the second hand of the Swiss watch on the wall remained, making an extremely faint ticking sound.
Tick.
Tick.
Tick.
President Murata's gaze lingered on the last page.
But it was incredibly slow.
It was slower than any page in the previous dozen or so hours.
At that moment, Murata Taro witnessed Ryoji's final fall.
The ghost boy, who had been crawling in the dark ventilation ducts for twenty years, chose to end his life in the most decisive way at the last moment, sealing all the evil and truth inside his chest.
Later, Murata Taro saw what Yukiho said when the detective asked her about her relationship with Ryoji.
"There is no sun in my sky, so it is always a white night."
Finally, he saw the last line of text.
She never looked back.
Murata Taro's hand, still clutching the last sheet of paper, remained suspended in mid-air.
I didn't put it down.
He held it there stiffly, frozen for more than a minute.
There were no sighs, no tears, and no outward expression of emotion.
It was as if he was waiting for something to slowly seep out from those seven words, through the fibers of the paper, and into his body, which had been completely drained by reading all night.
Finally, like an old machine that had been unplugged, he slowly handed the last page to Sato beside him.
Then he sank deep into the sofa and closed his eyes.
A few dozen seconds later, Editor-in-Chief Sato also finished reading the last page.
He gently placed the manuscript on his knees, his hands hanging at his sides, remaining motionless.
A long silence fell over the entire president's office.
This silence is neither an awkward silence nor a blank space where nothing can be said.
These are two people who have spent most of their lives in the publishing industry. After personally experiencing a soul-searching session that lasted more than ten hours, their bodies and minds reacted in a way that was similar to a "shutdown".
The despair infused into this book is immense and chilling.
It is so vast that it will take them a long time to reboot their collapsed cognitive system.
The dim, gray sunlight streaming in through the French windows cast the hunched shadows of the two people onto the carpet.
The two shadows were hazy and gray, like two specimens whose internal organs had been hollowed out by words.
A long time passed.
So long that Sato could no longer tell whether five minutes or fifteen minutes had passed.
Taro Murata made a move.
He raised his hand very slowly, took off his reading glasses, took out a silk handkerchief from his breast pocket, and then meticulously wiped the cold sweat from his forehead.
The wiping motion was extremely slow, almost like a ritual.
After wiping, he folded the handkerchief again, put it back in his pocket, and then opened his eyes.
These eyes, which had been closed all night, were bloodshot, but the pupils were extremely clear.
At this moment, Editor-in-Chief Sato broke the silence: "President."
His voice was hoarse, like sandpaper scraping. The intense tension of more than ten hours had made his throat dry and sore even when he swallowed.
"That's terrifying."
Sato stared intently at the stack of tattered pages on the coffee table, his gaze a complex mix of shock and awe.
"A full eight hundred pages, spanning nearly twenty years."
Editor-in-Chief Sato swallowed hard, his Adam's apple bobbing as he said, "From beginning to end, from the first page to the last line, Professor Kitahara never once used any description of the protagonist's subjective thoughts."
"What is Xuehui thinking? I don't know."
"What is Ryoji thinking? I don't know."
"Kitahara-sensei completely welded the inner worlds of these two people shut, leaving the reader no gap to even peek through."
President Murata slowly turned his head, his old eyes, bloodshot from staying up all night, burning with the same fear and fervor.
"Not only that, Sato."
Murata Taro's voice was low and trembling slightly as he said, "He not only deprived the protagonist of his perspective, but also handed the scalpel to the bystanders."
Murata Taro tapped the table lightly with his withered knuckles as he explained, "Detectives, neighbors, colleagues, ex-boyfriends, even a convenience store clerk I only met once..."
"With the cold observation of these marginalized people, Professor Kitahara pieced together a huge mosaic mural, revealing the criminal trajectory of these two people over twenty years."
"And they've never been seen together in a photo!"
Sato followed the president's words closely, his fingers unconsciously gripping the leather of the sofa armrest tightly.
"We never saw Ryoji and Yukiho together from beginning to end. They didn't eat a single meal together, nor did they exchange a single phone call. On a textual level, you can't even confirm whether they actually met after the incident!"
"That's precisely what makes Kitahara-sensei so terrifying."
Murata Taro took a deep breath of the cold morning air, his aged chest rising and falling slightly, and said, "They never walked a single step side by side in the sunlight."
"But this bond of mutual devouring and symbiosis in the shadows, of being willing to kill everything for each other—is so intense that it's suffocating."
"Never spoken aloud, yet a thousand times heavier than any emotion that is loudly proclaimed in the world."
Sato closed his eyes, and the cold words "never looked back" were once again etched onto his retina.
"The word 'like' never appears once in the entire 800-page book, let alone 'love'."
"But Kitahara-sensei used his hands full of blood, countless corpses, and twenty years of silence and destruction to write the most desperate pure love I have read so far."
Upon hearing the words "desperate pure love," Murata Taro fell silent.
After a while, he put his reading glasses back on, stared intently at the manuscript on the table through the lenses, and gave the final tone to this shocking journey that lasted more than ten hours: "Completely seal off the protagonist's inner world, forcing the reader to fill those bloody blanks with their own fears."
"No author's writing can be more terrifying than the abyss imagined by the reader."
Murata Taro let out a long breath, his tone full of admiration, and said, "This kind of narrative technique is truly the highest level."
After this statement set the tone, a brief silence fell over the office.
He dragged his somewhat unsteady steps to the French windows.
Tokyo at five in the morning unfolded before his feet without reservation.
The distant horizon was a hazy, lifeless, pale white. From the street below, the low rumble of the early morning trams starting up could already be faintly heard.
The convenience store's pale lights looked particularly desolate in the morning light.
Meanwhile, in the distance towards Shinjuku, the top floors of several skyscrapers were still brightly lit—those were probably the finance departments of some companies, frantically dealing with the mess that could never be filled after the bubble burst.
With his back to Editor-in-Chief Sato, Murata Taro stared for a long time at the slowly sinking steel jungle.
"Sato."
Murata Taro's voice was deep and hoarse, but every word he uttered was resounding.
"Your analysis of the narrative structure was extremely accurate and impeccable."
He paused, took a deep breath of the morning air, and said, "But the true greatness of this work lies not in its structure."
He turned around, raised his withered finger, and gently pointed to the vast, gray city outside the window.
This is not a crime novel.
Murata Taro walked back to the coffee table and slowly explained, "This is an autopsy report."
Editor-in-Chief Sato was slightly taken aback.
"A living, breathing report about our time."
At this moment, Murata Taro has shed the shell of a publishing house leader and is more like a wise man who has experienced many vicissitudes, giving the younger generation a cruel dissection lesson.
"Think about what Xuehui represents?"
Murata Taro's tone suddenly turned somber as he said, "Her appearance is flawless and dazzling. Her smile is like a spring breeze to everyone who gets close to her. Her resume is as splendid as a top-notch public relations press release that has been polished countless times."
"But what about inside?"
Taro Murata continued, "She's completely hollow inside! All the glamour is an illusion, all the warmth is just acting."
"What keeps this empty shell standing and continues to create the illusion of 'all prosperity' is those things hidden underground, things that can't see the light of day, things stained with blood and filth."
At this point, Murata Taro suddenly raised his head, his bloodshot old eyes fixed on Editor-in-Chief Sato, and said, "Doesn't this resemble our recently crumbled economy?"
Upon hearing this, Editor-in-Chief Sato's breath caught in his throat for a moment, and his pupils contracted sharply.
"Xuehui is the bubble economy itself."
Every word of Taro Murata's writing seemed to be carved out of stone with a hammer, heavy as a ton.
"A facade of prosperity masking internal decay, maintaining a false sense of euphoria through unsustainable overspending."
"Land prices have doubled, the stock market has broken through 38,000 points, and land prices in Ginza are more expensive than in Manhattan—everyone is laughing, everyone is arrogantly thinking that the Japanese sun will never set."
"But the sun doesn't exist. It never existed."
As he finished speaking, Murata Taro turned to look at the pale skyline outside the window. "What exists is only a man-made, false, and morbid prosperity."
"It's just another kind of 'white night'."
"And when the underground pillar supporting this illusion, namely Ryoji, finally breaks, the entire massive empty shell can only collapse with a crash."
Upon hearing this, Editor-in-Chief Sato asked in a trembling voice, "Then who is Ryoji?"
"He is one of the most ruthlessly abandoned members of this country."
Murata Taro took out a handkerchief from his breast pocket and wiped his forehead.
"They are the ants lurking in the sewers, on illegal construction sites, and in filthy ventilation ducts, silently bearing all the sins and costs of this false prosperity."
"When society needs to gloss over problems, it squeezes them dry; when it doesn't need them anymore, it flushes them down the drain like garbage. Their only purpose is to make the world above look spotless."
President Murata clenched the handkerchief tightly in his palm, his voice deep and resonant, as if it came from the depths of the earth: "Sato, now go back and savor the words 'White Night'."
"It is a desperate picture of the entire Japanese society, after the collective suppression of the sun of morality during more than a decade of capitalist revelry, being left only in a pale, false light that is neither day nor night, where they devour each other like lonely ghosts."
Listening to this resounding analysis of the times, Editor-in-Chief Sato was completely speechless. Involuntarily, that last line of text resurfaced in his mind once again.
It wasn't because she didn't care, but because she simply couldn't turn back.
Looking back means admitting it.
To acknowledge that her flawless beauty, her booming career, and every breath she takes in the sunlight are all bought with the bones and blood of another person.
Once she looked back, she was forced to confront the devastating truth: she had never truly lived in those twenty years.
This is not life, but a carefully crafted, long death.
Thinking of this, a chill, even more biting than the winter night wind, ran down Sato's spine.
Although the ending only has seven words.
But the destructive power of these seven words is enough to shatter the psychological defenses of any reader who has finished reading the first 799 pages.
Because this is never a simply sad ending.
The moment you close the book, it won't leave you trapped in your emotions; instead, it will push you to look up and re-examine the world around you.
It leaves readers with not cheap sorrow, but a mirror—a mirror that forces you to face reality and re-examine everything around you.
The moment I close the book, I can't help but wonder: Is Yukiho by my side? Is there a Ryoji I can't see beneath the steps I'm standing on?
Is the prosperity of this era real, or merely a pale illusion?
"President."
Editor-in-Chief Sato's voice was hoarse and dry as he said, "After this book is published, it will bring peace to the whole of Japan."
"It will leave everyone who reads to the last page, at the moment of closing the book, suddenly at a loss for words."
"It's not because they're sad. It's because they see the darkness in their own hearts reflected in the books."
Upon hearing this, Murata Taro turned around and looked at the neatly stacked manuscripts on the table. His bloodshot, aged eyes were now burning with an extremely intense light.
It wasn't the businessmen who saw the greed in the gold mine.
Rather, it is the pure fervor that only a believer who has dedicated his life to words could reveal when he witnesses the birth of a great work destined to be recorded in publishing history and become a milestone in Heisei literature.
"Sato."
Murata Taro walked to the desk, carefully straightened the manuscript paper, placed his hands on it, and gently pressed his fingertips against the paper.
The last vestiges of darkness were fading, and a thin layer of pale light appeared on the Tokyo skyline outside the window.
"With this novel, 'Journey Under the Midnight Sun,' Kitahara has forged a path that no one has ever trod before in the realm of popular literature and social mystery, reaching a depth that is difficult for others to attain."
"He elevated the intellectual weight and emotional tension of genre fiction to a level that even those literary masters who cling to their ivory towers and always consider themselves superior can no longer belittle with prejudice."
At this point, Murata Taro raised his head, his gaze passing over the floor-to-ceiling window to the sky that was slowly brightening.
"Those old-fashioned people who stick to the old rules always feel that suspense and mystery deserve to be tucked away in the corner of the bookstore's rotating bookshelf, and that genre fiction is inherently inferior to pure literature."
Murata Taro shook his head slightly, his tone carrying a hint of relief, yet also an undeniable certainty.
"But with just these eight hundred pages of manuscript, Professor Kitahara drastically shook this hierarchy of highbrow and lowbrow that had been built up over decades by arrogance and prejudice, and even broke it down completely."
"This is not pure literature in the traditional sense."
When he said this, President Murata's voice was as steady as a rock, carrying a weight that left no room for argument.
"But he wrote suspenseful mystery into the abyss of human nature that only a true literary master could touch."
"This is a timeless masterpiece that transcends the boundaries between highbrow and popular culture, and belongs uniquely to our era."
After he finished speaking, the president's office fell silent again.
But this silence was completely different from the previous ones.
The previous silence was the exhaustion after being completely hollowed out by the abyss in the story, the shutdown of the soul after being dissected word by word.
The silence at this moment is the highest form of respect that two people who have spent most of their lives in the publishing industry can offer after witnessing the birth of a work destined to rewrite the literary landscape.
silence.
A silence more profound and sincere than any applause, any praise, or any flowery compliment.
By this time, the sky over Tokyo outside the window was completely bright.
The crisp morning light bathed the entire city, the collapsing buildings and the wealth that was evaporating overnight, and the faces of every ordinary person who got up early to catch the tram, unsure if they would keep their jobs tomorrow.
White nights.
This bustling yet empty city is walking through its own white night.
In the president's office in the Shinchosha building, this stack of eight hundred pages of manuscript paper lay quietly on the mahogany table.
It awaits to be sent to the printing press, awaits to be bound into a book, awaits to be delivered to each and every Japanese person who, too, is walking alone in the white night of their own life.
Read Kikiichi's masterpiece, "Tokyo Literary Masters: From the Late 1980s," now!