Chapter 45 "The Magician" Problem Solving

This article involves the answer to the work, please read the work first, and then read this article. It is the ninth volume of "Edogawa Ranpo Works Collection", which contains the seventh novel of Ranpo.This work was serialized in the monthly magazine "Kotan Club" from July 1930 to May 1931, and was included in the eighth volume of "The Complete Works of Edogawa Ranpo" published by Pinghesha in May of the same year.The original text is about 180,000 words, and it is a representative work of Edogawa Ranpo's popular long-length detective novels. In 1603, Tokugawa Ieyasu ended the troubled times of the Warring States Period and established the Tokugawa Shogunate regime in Edo (now Tokyo). The peace and prosperity lasted for two and a half centuries. From then on, common people culture began to flourish. Kabuki, Ukiyo-e, etc. , Kana Kusaoko, etc. were all established in the Edo period.

"Kana Soko" is the general term for Japanese popular literature. The genre is mainly novels. Because the works are written in pseudonyms throughout, they are called Kana Soko.According to the content, it can be subdivided into more than ten kinds, such as Caoshuangzhi, Ukiyocaozi, Reading Book, Human Love Book, and Funny Book.These are the origins of the modern popular novel. The Meiji Restoration in 1868 promoted the comprehensive Europeanization process of Japanese politics, economy and art. Kana Soko was inevitably influenced by modern Western European novels, and improved in writing form and characterization.However, Japanese popular literature was finally established at the end of the Taisho period, that is, in the 1920s.

In principle, Japanese literature after the Meiji Restoration can be divided into two types: pure literature and popular literature.Pure literature is regarded as art and has research value, while popular literature is regarded as entertainment for the common people and has no research value. This kind of thinking continued until 1950.Afterwards, influenced by the study of American popular culture, a group of researchers and critics of popular literature emerged, but the numbers were not many.Therefore, the theory of popular culture has not yet been established. For example, popular novels and popular novels are different titles of the same type.If the two belong to different types, how to distinguish them and how to define them?These questions have not yet received accepted and accurate answers.

Judging from the evolution history of Japanese common people's books, the author believes that the literary works at that time were all provided for the purpose of entertainment for readers.However, in the long evolution of objectivity, such as the change of the times and the desire of readers, qualitative changes have occurred, such as the diversification of themes, the expansion of content, and the increasing emphasis on style and expression.These changes naturally improved the quality of the work.When looking back at the works of fifty or a hundred years ago from the current point of time, I always feel that most of the works are very popular and unreadable.However, although there are not many works, there are also works that can stand the test of fifty or one hundred years.From this, it can be distinguished that the former belongs to the category of popular novels and the latter belongs to popular novels.

After World War II, a large number of popular novels emerged in the publishing industry to meet the needs of readers.At the same time, Xinchaosha created a monthly magazine "Xinchao Novel" to encourage the creation of intermediate novels.The so-called intermediate novels are mainly aimed at the public readers and are written by pure literature writers in the form of pure literature.In other words, the intermediate novel is another novel form between pure literature and popular literature. Afterwards, the intermediate novel gradually grew until it replaced the popular novel.This happened during the second qualitative change of popular literature.The current popular novels can be said to be works on the extension line of intermediate novels.Now, terms such as popular novels, popular novels, and intermediate novels have been replaced by "entertainment novels" and are rarely used.

Having said that, popular novels in the broad sense before the war can be divided into three types: period novels, modern novels, and detective novels.Period novels refer to popular novels that take the pre-Meiji Restoration as the background and the stage of the story (pure literary works with this background are called historical novels).Modern novels refer to novels drawn from modern society, with love and family as the theme.Detective novels include novels with themes such as weird and science fiction. These three types of novels do not stand alone in a three-point situation, and the two types of themes of the times and modern times almost occupy the territory of popular literature.There are about 20 detective novelists, most of them are non-professional writers, and each of them has a small number of works. The writers who can often serialize long-length detective novels in popular magazines include Edogawa Ranpo and Koka Erlang and Daxia Yutuoer, their works have different styles and characteristics, but they all have to cater to the interests of readers.These works were called popular detective novels at that time.

Since the rise of socialist mystery novelists in 1957, it has been difficult for Koga and Oshita's works to get reprinted opportunities.Only Ranpo's works were published again and again.From this point, we can see the characteristics of Luan's works - the spokesperson of negative wishes. Readers should be familiar with Ranpo's works, right?Regardless of short stories or long stories, no matter the original style or the changed style, they are all novelized expressions of Ranpo's wishes.Such as the desire to transform, playing different personalities day and night, one person disguised as another person to commit a crime, and disappears afterwards, and there are also two people who play the role of one person to make the alibi testimony valid.

Ranpo also has a special interest in lenses.Taking lenses as materials, and digging out their unknown characteristics from different angles as much as possible, there are a lot of works created based on this. For example, "Mirror Hell" is a metamorphic work with the theme of lenses. Caves, dark places, wishes in the womb, voyeurism, codes, circuses, freaks...the list goes on and on. In terms of characters, whether they are positive characters or negative characters, most of them are high-level vagabonds.The most representative one is nothing more than the famous detective Akechi Kogoro.When he first appeared in the middle, he was just a high-level wanderer.

And the protagonists of the villains in the novel are mostly people who do not have normal personalities and have strong personalities. These characteristics can also be regarded as random wishes. It is about a battle of wits between a magician and Akechi Kogoro.There are many incredible magic in the story.Read these magic tricks as random wishes, readers may have another discovery.