Chapter 126, "Journey Under the Midnight Sun," is now available.

Soon, May 18th arrived, the release date of "White Night".

At seven o'clock in the morning, from century-old bookstores in Tokyo's Ginza district to community bookstores on street corners in Sapporo, the roller shutters of tens of thousands of bookstores across Japan suddenly swung up at the same time.

The most prominent gold display stand at the entrance of every store was completely occupied by "White Night".

The thick books, each 800 pages long, were stacked into neat piles, reaching shoulder height from the display stand, forming a striking black wall of white text.

The cover has no fancy design, only an extremely somber matte black background, with the three powerful white characters of "Journey Under the Midnight Sun" vertically placed in the center. At the same time, a bright silver dust jacket runs across the spine, printed with recommendations from literary giants Seicho Matsumoto and Kenzaburo Oe, which stand out against the pure black background.

Below the title, only the three characters "Kitahara Iwa" are printed, without any extra titles or introductions.

From a distance, these stacks of massive books, each eight hundred pages thick, resemble silent, nameless tombstones.

By this time, the queue had already stretched from the cashier to the street and even turned into the alley next door.

In the long line of thousands, all sorts of diametrically opposed guesses and debates clashed fiercely in the early summer morning mist.

"Since Mr. Oe calls it the Heisei era's 'Crime and Punishment,' Mr. Kitahara must have completely abandoned popular tricks this time and turned to a deeper narrative of soul redemption, right?"

A middle-aged man with a copy of "Bungei Shunju" tucked under his arm confidently speculated to his companion.

"impossible!"

The young mystery enthusiast in front of him, wearing a T-shirt with a diagram of a locked room, immediately turned around and retorted, "Didn't you read Matsumoto Seicho's original words? 'Tearing down the bottom line without mercy'! This is absolutely a serial murder case with extremely cruel methods and a chillingly critical tone! Maybe even the murderer is still at large!"

"But...the book 'Absolute Loss' that Haruki Murakami mentioned in his column a few days ago, it must be this one, right?"

From the back of the line, a college student carrying a canvas bag timidly interjected, "Not even qualified to 'search'... This doesn't sound like a crime novel at all; it sounds more like a desperate love story..."

Whether they are elites carrying briefcases or students carrying backpacks, everyone is desperately piecing together what this book might look like based on the part of "endorsements from leading figures" that they have seen.

The depth of literature, the cruelty of mystery, and the loss of youth—these three distinct expectations transformed the entire launch event into a boiling, suspenseful spectacle.

Everyone firmly believes they have glimpsed a corner of the truth, yet they are all eager to tear off the black-and-white cover to verify the final answer.

Similar strange collisions are happening simultaneously in bookstores of all sizes throughout Japan.

Pure literature enthusiasts and hardcore mystery fans, who usually look down on each other at opposite ends of the literary hierarchy, are now crowding together without any reservations, arguing heatedly about the plot of the same book.

The cashiers mechanically scanned the same barcode, listening to the clamor of discussion around them. For a moment, they felt as if they were distributing some kind of blind box that could answer the questions of the times, rather than selling a commercial novel.

Everyone who walked to the checkout counter, as they handed over their banknotes and received the heavy, black-and-white new book, had a gleam in their eyes of excitement at the prospect of "unveiling the mystery of the century."

Then they carefully stuffed the books into their briefcases or backpacks, and hurriedly pushed open the door and went out.

The initial print run of 600,000 copies was completed, and amidst the fervent anticipation and excitement, it was announced that all physical bookstores across Japan were sold out by noon that same day.

At 1 p.m., the president's office of Shinchosha bypassed all formalities and issued the highest-level red order directly to several major printing plants in the Kanto region: urgently print an additional 400,000 copies, with all machines running 24 hours a day, regardless of cost, to ensure supply.

Just when everyone thought the heated discussion would escalate in the coming days, even sparking a nationwide spoiler frenzy, something even stranger happened.

In the first three days after its release, the debate surrounding "Journey Under the Midnight Sun" swept across Japan like a repressed yet uncontrollable infectious disease.

The bookstore staff were the first to sense this unusual atmosphere.

When "The Ring" was released, readers expressed their horror directly, calling to complain that they were "too scared to sleep."

But the readers of "Journey Under the Midnight Sun" are quite different.

Those who stayed up all night to finish reading this book returned to the bookstore the next day with dark circles under their eyes and red eyes.

Without a word, they bought the second and third copies, then shoved them into the hands of their friends or colleagues, leaving them with a baffling statement: "Finish reading it tonight, and talk to me about it tomorrow. I'm going crazy from this ending."

Unprecedentedly fierce arguments are erupting in university dormitories, company smoking rooms during lunch breaks, and even on the streets late at night throughout Japan.

What ignited this fire was Kitahara Iwa's narrative omissions.

A full eight hundred pages, spanning a brutal twenty-year timeline, Kitahara Iwao never once depicted the protagonist's subjective psychological state.

When these million readers, their eyes bloodshot from staying up all night, finally focused on the seven words "she never looked back," the immense despair that had no way out completely enraged them and tore them apart into two irreconcilable factions.

An izakaya (Japanese pub) in Shinjuku, Tokyo, has become a true microcosm of this nationwide debate.

Several young white-collar workers who had just finished get off work were sitting around a low table covered in grease, arguing heatedly without even taking off their coats.

"Who exactly drove these two children to become monsters?!"

A slightly overweight employee wearing glasses slammed his hand on the table, making his wine glass rattle. His voice was filled with suppressed anger as he said, "It's that pedophile, Kirihara Yosuke! And Yukiho's biological mother, Nishi Fumiyo!"

"For such a small amount of money, he actually sold his own daughter to that pervert! The moment Ryoji saw his own father abusing Yukiho in the abandoned building, his life was ruined!"

"But Ryoji's house isn't much better."

The male colleague across from me crushed the edamame shells in his hand and picked up the conversation, saying, "His mother and that pawnshop employee named Matsuura Isamu are having an affair at home, and they don't even try to hide it."

"Ryoji was practically a ghost in that house. Later, when Matsuura Isamu tried to blackmail him with what happened back then, Ryoji buried him without batting an eye... When Kitahara-sensei wrote about the crimes of these adults, his cold-blooded writing style was absolutely chilling."

"Okay, even if your biological parents are scum, what about Tang Ze Li Zi?"

A short-haired girl bit her lip, her eyes reddening with emotion, and asked, "How did her adoptive mother, who took in Xuehui, taught her tea ceremony and flower arrangement, and raised her into a perfect young lady, die in the end?"

"Do you dare say Xuehui didn't tamper with things inside? To climb the social ladder, she even schemed against the only person who was kind to her!"

The fourth male employee, who had been keeping his head down and remaining silent, let out a long sigh: "But the one I feel most sorry for is the old policeman, Sasagaki Junzo."

Upon hearing the name, the other three people were stunned for a moment, and the anger in their eyes instantly turned into an indescribable bitterness.

"He pursued this case for a full twenty years."

The male employee's voice trembled noticeably as he said, "From a middle-aged detective to a retired old man with gray hair and frail legs. He even neglected his own family, relentlessly pursuing these two children like an old hunting dog."

"But what about the ending? In the mall, as he watched Ryoji plunge the same scissors he used years ago into his own chest and jump from the building, he rushed over and shouted 'Ryo!'"

The male employee tilted his head back and drank the remaining strong liquor in his glass in one gulp.

"Sasagaki isn't just catching criminals anymore. He's been investigating for twenty years, and he knows better than anyone what kind of hell these two kids went through. He wants to uncover the truth before they completely fall into the abyss of no return, to stop them from falling into it..."

These words were like a heavy lead ball thrown onto the table.

After a brief silence, the short-haired girl's tears finally fell onto the greasy table, and her emotions completely collapsed at that moment.

"So how desperate must Ryoji have been when he died!"

With a heavy sob in her voice, she slammed her glass down on the table and said, "Twenty years! He killed for her in those dark, drafty ventilation ducts, cleared all obstacles for her, and in the end, he even jumped to his death to protect her!"

"But what about Xuehui? She never loved him at all! She was just using him from beginning to end!"

"She turned around and said, 'I don't know her!' She didn't even turn her head! She's a heartless monster!"

"You didn't understand at all!"

The male colleague who had spoken earlier immediately raised his voice in rebuttal: "She can't turn around!"

"If he turns around even once, if a trace of sadness appears on his face, all of Ryoji's crimes of the past twenty years and the alibi he earned with his life will have been for nothing!"

"But why is it always Ryoji who has to sacrifice himself?!"

The girl retorted, not to be outdone: "A full eight hundred pages, and they don't even appear in one scene together! Not even once have they eaten a meal together!"

"Teacher Kitahara wouldn't even let Yukiho say 'I like you' through her own words. What kind of bond is that?"

"No need to say anything!"

The male employee shook his head and said, "Xuehui once said, 'There is no sun in my sky, it is always night, but it is not dark, because something has replaced the sun.'"

"So Ryoji is her sun, and she is Ryoji's shadow! Kitahara Iwao wrote them as a symbiotic entity. This is a hundred times heavier than any 'I love you'!"

Inside the izakaya, several people slumped back in their chairs, dejected. All the arguments had ultimately dissipated into a deep sense of powerlessness.

This is not just a microcosm of this izakaya.

For the next week, readers all over Japan were going crazy discussing every single character in the story.

In the reader mailbox of traditional literary magazines, Mu Qiyi sincerely presents "Tokyo Literary Masters: Starting from the Late 1980s", exclusively released for the first time! On the discussion boards of early computer communication networks such as NIFTY-Serve, two major camps were divided into "Xuehui's Cold-Blooded Theory" and "Two-Way Redemption Theory", and they clashed all night with thousands of words of letters and messages, neither of them able to convince the other.

But no matter how heated their arguments become, they eventually fall into a deep emotional state.

Because Kitahara Iwa showed no mercy to anyone, he simply laid bare the ills of this era and the abyss of human nature in the faces of all readers.

On the same day, in the Faculty of Letters at a university in Tokyo.

A gray-haired literature professor sat listlessly at his desk, with the well-worn copy of "Journey Under the Midnight Sun" open before him.

He was a staunch believer in pure literature.

For thirty years, he has instilled only one core doctrine in his students from the podium: "True literature exists only in pure literature, and genre fiction is always just second-rate entertainment."

He once openly ridiculed those "vulgar readers who were obsessed with serial killers" at a department seminar.

Even after Kitahara Iwa won both the Akutagawa and Naoki awards, he still made a sarcastic remark in his column, saying that the jury's aesthetic standards were "continuously declining."

But today.

He sat in the empty office, gazing at the hazy Tokyo sky outside the window, slowly took off his reading glasses, placed them on the table, clasped his hands together, and closed his eyes listlessly.

Kenzaburo Oe was right.

Deep down, he painfully acknowledged this fact.

In this quagmire of "genre fiction" that he had despised for thirty years, a flower of despair indeed grew—a flower that even an old relic from an ivory tower like him could never write in his entire life.

A disturbing phenomenon has begun to spread in bookstores.

There was no frenzy of buying – the first print run was already sold out, and the second print run had just been put on display.

However, some readers, after receiving the book, couldn't even wait to go home. They tore open the plastic wrap right next to the bookshelf and read it all the way to the last page in one go, leaning against the corner of the wall.

But when they finished reading the final chapter, they stood frozen in front of the bookshelf, motionless.

The book in my hand was still stuck on the last seven words, but my gaze had already lost focus.

The readers' eyes were completely empty.

It's like the feeling of being forcibly pulled out of an abyss, with half of your soul left permanently at the bottom.

They looked like stone sculptures that had been drained of their flesh and blood.

It was as if their own souls, along with Ryoji, were permanently trapped in a dark ventilation duct without the sun.

At first, the bookstore staff would approach and quietly ask, "Do you need any help?" But after encountering several equally distraught readers, they learned to remain silent.

Because some of the shop assistants also stayed up all night to finish reading this book, they understand this feeling all too well.

By the fifth day.

This emotional outburst has finally reached its full potential.

When readers, barely waking from their spiritual slump, try to recount their reading experiences to those around them, they encounter a strange thing: they become speechless.

It's not that I don't want to talk about it, but that I don't know how to start.

The weight this work carries on my heart cannot be contained by light words like "beautiful," "touching," or "shocking."

It's like an act of violence that forces you to completely dismantle your values ​​and then forcibly rebuild them on a bloody wasteland.

This experience is more difficult than any form of retelling.

So, they tacitly chose another, clumsy yet irresistible method of proselytizing: they bought the new books out of their own pockets, placed them directly in front of their relatives and friends who hadn't read them yet, and whispered, "Read them yourself."

This almost savage word-of-mouth explosion triggered a chain reaction more terrifying than any exorbitantly priced advertising campaign.

The second printing of 400,000 copies sold out by the evening of the following day.

On the same day, Shinchosha immediately started a third printing.

On the third day, the 300,000 copies of the third printing arrived at the bookstore and were immediately swallowed up by a flood of pre-orders.

This week, major media outlets across Japan experienced a collective voyage of disorientation.

Initially, they wanted to handle "White Night" in the same way as reporting on conventional best-selling books—street interviews, listing sales figures, and inviting a few critics to appear on television to give their opinions.

But they soon discovered, to their despair, that all conventional methods failed in the face of this book.

Because the readers' reactions when facing the camera exceeded all the understanding of journalism.

An NHK reporter stopped a middle-aged woman on the street near Shinjuku Station as she was leaving a bookstore and began his routine questioning about her thoughts on "Journey Under the Midnight Sun".

However, the woman stopped, looked at the dark camera lens, opened her mouth as if to say something, but then closed it again.

She remained silent in front of the camera for a full five seconds before finally shaking her head wearily and uttering in a hoarse voice, as if all her strength had been drained, "I don't know how to describe it." Then she turned and left.

That afternoon, the reporter stopped eleven people in total, and eight of them gave the same deathly silence.

Ultimately, the media completely abandoned deconstructing the plot and instead focused their cameras on the collective emotional collapse of the nation as they appeared on the streets, on trams, and in bookstores.

They placed these silent close-ups alongside the final letters of Kenzaburo Oe and Seicho Matsumoto on the front page.

Next, major media outlets completely abandoned deconstructing the plot and stopped listing those cold, still-skyrocketing sales figures.

Instead, the author shifted focus, unusually turning to the nationwide phenomenon of "massive aphasia."

The culture section of the Yomiuri Shimbun used an entire double-page spread to slam down a highly oppressive bold headline: "The Prophecies of Oe and Matsumoto Converge: Kitahara Iwao Completes a Living Dissection of the Bubble Era with 800 Pages of Sin."

The front-page lead of the Asahi Shimbun exudes the detached detachment and compassion characteristic of intellectuals: "A Silent Carnival and a Silent Reader—How 'Journey Under the Midnight Sun' Accurately Depicts the Spiritual Emptiness of Modern Japanese People."

And this is just the beginning.

This upheaval, triggered by a novel, has crossed the boundaries of the publishing industry at an incredible speed, spreading wildly into economics, sociology, and even the film and art world.

Today, "Journey Under the Midnight Sun" is no longer just a literary work, but has become a painful diagnosis of our times.

The authoritative financial magazine "Weekly Toyo Keizai" unprecedentedly featured a completely black illustration on its cover, accompanied by striking white text: "The End of the Land Myth and the Ghost in the White Night: Yukiho is not a person, she is our crumbling economic mirage."

In an interview with the Mainichi Shimbun, Chizuko Ueno, a renowned sociology professor at the University of Tokyo, commented: "Please don't simply define Yukiho Nishimoto as a 'femme fatale.' She wasn't a monster born out of thin air; she was the most distorted and extreme survivor in this capitalist society that worships the strong, pursues profit, and devours people. Professor Iwao Kitahara, under the guise of a crime novel, has written a report on the underprivileged that would make all sociologists feel ashamed."

Kinji Fukasaku, a legendary director known for his depictions of gangster violence and aesthetics, remarked in his characteristically hard-edged style during an interview with Kinema Junpo: "I've spent most of my life filming gangsters and bloodshed, and I always felt that my lens was cold enough."

"But after staying up all night to finish reading Kitahara-sensei's 'Journey Under the Midnight Sun,' I felt like I'd been a child playing house with a toy gun for the past few decades. He didn't describe a single drop of blood, yet he cut the throat of an entire era."

Yutaka Ozaki, a rock prodigy hailed as a "spiritual leader of Japanese youth," left an extremely depressing reflection on the book during his late-night radio program: "The moment I closed the book, I tried to pick up my acoustic guitar and write a song of resistance for that boy crawling in the ventilation duct."

"But I gave up after playing a few chords. Because I found that any screams and resistance seemed too warm and presumptuous in the face of this book. This is a story that has even been deprived of the right to 'struggle'; its underlying tone is only absolute silence."

Scholars' deep sorrow, veteran directors' admiration, rock godfather's helplessness... endorsements from the top of various circles have pushed the social prestige of "White Night" to a terrifying height.

What truly propelled this crossover storm to its absolute peak was the prime-time slot on TV Asahi that night.

In the News Station live broadcast studio, which boasts the highest viewership ratings across Japan, Hiroshi Kume did not tap the news display behind him with his baton as usual.

He also refrained from using his signature scathing tone to make any commercial jokes about the novel that broke multiple sales records.

In the last two minutes of the program, the background noise in the studio was slowly pulled away by the director.

Hiroshi Kume silently picked up the black-and-white copy of "Journey Under the Midnight Sun" from the broadcasting station.

Through the lens of the camera, his eyes were fixed on the millions of viewers across the country watching on television.

Kume Hiroshi's voice was unusually calm, even carrying a hint of hoarseness and fatigue.

Then he lowered his head and slowly pushed the stack of scripts filled with praise and sales data to the corner of the table off-camera.

"But before the broadcast, I went back and reviewed the last few pages alone in the dressing room."

"It was at that moment that I realized that, faced with such a bottomless story, any attempt to quantify it with dry data or to summarize it with condescending television language is an act of ignorant arrogance."

At this point, Kume Hiroshi gently placed the heavy book back on the table, clasped his hands together, and said, "If you haven't read this book yet, then go read it."

Kume Hiroshi's voice slowly faded across the national live broadcast network: "Then you will understand why our usually bustling country has suddenly fallen into such a long period of silence over the past week."