Chapter 2 Talking about Yasuhiko Nishizawa's Fantasy Space--Ji Qing

Among the writers who made their debut in the new wave of reasoning, Nishizawa Yasuhiko not only has quite a lot of works, but also has a unique style of work, especially in his works, he can always introduce novel and ingenious sci-fi settings, coupled with humorous and sharp edge It is hard not to leave a deep impression upon reading.Among his innumerable masterpieces, although this work does not belong to his more famous "Jiang Qianxiao" or "Shen Ma Hezi" series, it has all the characteristics of "Nishizawa-style" reasoning. Representative works in the early days of debut.

First, let’s talk about the background information of Nishizawa Yasuhiko.Born in Kochi Prefecture in 1960, he once studied in the United States.After returning from his studies, he worked in a university for a period of time and also served as a teacher in a high school. During this period, he began to write mystery novels.Although he had submitted articles for the Edogawa Ranpo Award and the Novel Modern Newcomer Award, he was unable to make his debut as he wished. In 1990, Nishizawa participated in the first Ayukawa Tetsuya Award, and was finally nominated for "Liansha" (the final candidate).In the end, this year's first prize was won by Taku Ashibe with "Thirteen Murder Comedies", and Nishizawa's expected debut road ended at the last step.However, although Nishizawa did not win the award, he still participated in the awards party, but at this time, he happened to meet Shoji Shimada, who is always very enthusiastic about supporting new writers.Shimada told Nishizawa that if he wrote a good work, he would be happy to help find a publishing house to negotiate.

Later, Yasuhiko Nishizawa completed it, which is a series of short stories with the theme of various motives of "dividing corpses and killing people".It was sent to Shimada and published by Kodansha, thus becoming Nishizawa's debut work. Published in 1995, it was Nishizawa's third book, and it was also an important work that made him very popular in one fell swoop.The main concept of this work originated from the comedy masterpiece "Groundhog Day, 1993" (Groundhog Day, 1993), starring Bill Murray (Bill Murray) and with a strong fantasy atmosphere, describing a weather broadcaster While covering the celebration of Groundhog Day in the countryside (a real festival held on February 2nd and is a tradition in the United States and Canada), I found myself stuck in a never-ending loop Out of the possible time loop, his time stays on the day of "Groundhog Day", day after day, he meets the same people in the same order, has the same conversations, and the same things happen... only the protagonist himself Because of "knowing the result early", you can freely decide your personal behavior, use various behaviors to test the divergent end points you reach every day, and try to find the possibility of breaking away from the time loop.

This work written with the concept of "Temporarily Stopped Today", first of all, in the setting of the story background, it is very different from the traditional puzzle-solving reasoning, which is also the most distinctive feature of this work.This is of course-in traditional mystery-solving mystery novels, it is absolutely impossible for detectives to repeat a certain period of events in a trial-and-error way, and conduct searches immediately and specifically.That is to say, for traditional mystery-solving mystery novels, although it is possible to think about events in a certain period of time, it can only be achieved by retrospective memory.

However, apart from the fact that time can be repeated nine times, there are no other unrealistic settings in this game.This approach is close to the sci-fi reasoning of Isaac Asimov or Philip K. Dick.That is to say, the author added one or two unrealistic and extremely simple worldview settings to the story, and the rest are no different from the ordinary world.On the premise that readers also accept the author's new fantasy setting, reasoning that conforms to the new worldview setting is carried out.However, most of the masterpieces of sci-fi reasoning that I have read personally construct the answers in the fantasy settings added by the author. It can also be said that this approach is an unwritten rule—because, if the mystery of the story It has nothing to do with this fantasy setting. There is really no need for the author to set up a new world view for this mystery.All he needs to do is write a book on the puzzle-solving reasoning of traditional concepts.For example, Asimov, his robot detective Ilya Belle series of detectives, the mystery is always closely related to the science fiction setting; we can also see Asimov as an "ordinary" solution in the "Black Widow series". The performance of the mystery reasoning writer-this series does not need any science fiction setting.

At the beginning of reading this work, many people may think of the science fiction movie "The Butterfly Effect" (The Butterfly Effect, 2004) - every inadvertent behavior of the protagonist may seriously affect the subsequent events.However, what slowly emerged in my mind was the reasoning game on the TV game console that I had been exposed to in my previous student days. "Fright Night" (1994), written by my grandson Takemaru, a mystery writer, is a popular mystery game for the Super Nintendo.A group of college students traveling together and staying in a ski resort encountered a bloody and brutal murder.The presentation of the game provides sufficient clues like a mystery novel, but at key points of disagreement, the player must rely on the wisdom of the player, and must calmly unravel the case to have a chance to find the real culprit.If you cut into a special divergent event, you will enter a specific ending.However, if there is a slight oversight, it is more likely to become the next victim, Game Over.

In video games like "Fright Nightmare", the plot design is quite complicated and circuitous, and it is impossible to pass the level in one go.If you really want to arrest the criminal, you usually have to Game Over many times at the beginning before you can figure out the direction to solve the case.In other words, the established dialogues and events at the beginning of the case cannot be omitted; sometimes at the end of the plot, it is finally realized that there is a seemingly insignificant key at the beginning that was chosen wrong at all. do it all over again... Yes.This is almost the main structure of the story.The protagonist Jiutaro has the special physique of "repeating the same day nine times". At the critical moment when his grandfather decided to re-draft the will, he entered the time and space loop and encountered the incident of his grandfather being killed at the same time.However, Yasuhiko Nishizawa's new creativity lies in the fact that the detective keeps repeating the same day and trying to conduct searches. He is not just trying to find the real murderer who killed his grandfather, but his more important purpose is to prevent the murder from happening.In other words, this is a mystery-solving reasoning about "in order to avoid murder, we must try to conduct a search".

Perhaps it is this computer game-like story structure that allows readers to enter Yasuhiko Nishizawa's world of fantasy and reasoning with a pleasant mood.In Nishizawa's original "SF new original reasoning", in the future, we can also see the personality that is constantly exchanged, the ingestion of a certain amount of alcohol can move instantly, and the superpower of copying creatures can be copied by touching...etc. The puzzle-solving reasoning——Now, let’s start with the murder case of the Nine Days of Reincarnation. --