Chapter 18: The trolls can no longer taunt

Chapter 18: The trolls can no longer taunt

Chapter 18: The trolls can no longer taunt

Whether it was because of the herd mentality, wanting to watch the fun, or being truly interested in "Hear the Wind Sing" and wanting to have a quick look, the influx of readers quickly sold out "Group Portrait" in major bookstores in Tokyo.

After witnessing this grand event, people who are not fans of pure literature also joined the ranks of those rushing to buy the monthly magazine "Gunzo".

Based on last month's sales, a total of about 4 copies of "Group Portrait" released on April 15 were printed, but unexpectedly they were sold out before evening.

Major bookstores immediately called Kodansha headquarters, hoping that the second wave of "Gunzo" would arrive as soon as possible.

So Muramatsu Tomomi hurriedly ran to find the director of the distribution department and asked him to print more copies immediately, so as not to cause any gaps in the sales period.

After the first wave of rush, readers who were lucky enough to buy "Group Portrait" couldn't wait to open it on the way home, skipping the other serialized novels and focusing on "Hear the Wind Sing", which won the 38th Group Portrait Newcomer Literature Award!

During the rush hour after get off work and school, on any subway car connecting various areas in Tokyo, you can see readers holding a copy of Group Portrait and reading Hear the Wind Sing with great fascination.

Young or old, male or female, everyone is immersed in the new novel world woven by Kitagawa Hide.

Tokyo's subway, Marunouchi Line.

After finishing a day of hard classes, Jabami Rei stood in the carriage, holding the tow bar to keep her balance with one hand, and holding a bag of Yumeko's favorite sweet potato buns from Shiose Sohonke in the other hand, and was about to rush to Yumeko's home in Adachi District.

Originally, she had not planned to go to Mengzi's house for a study session today, but she failed to get a copy of "Group Portrait" in the morning and afternoon, so she had to hope that Mengzi, who had taken a day off, could get a copy so that she could finish reading "Hear the Wind Sing" tonight!
She really wanted to know what the final fate of the girl with only four fingers on her left hand was.

At this moment, a girl in the same carriage who was watching "Group Portrait" suddenly showed a dazed expression, then slowly opened her mouth, her face full of disbelief.

"What is this ending like? I've never experienced this before. It's like the spring evening breeze blowing on my cheeks while the cold snowflakes are hitting my body."

The girl held "Group Portrait" in her hands, her eyes almost out of focus.

For her, who had been reading all kinds of tedious, lengthy, boring and tedious pure literary works for a long time, this novel was like a shot of cardiac stimulant to a dying person, and her body and soul suddenly came back to life!

It turns out that pure literary novels can also write youth love stories!
You don't have to write a heavy plot to touch people's hearts.

It turns out that concise and concise language can not only convey people’s emotions, but also touch their hearts!
"Is this really a work written by a completely new writer?" someone exclaimed in surprise, turning the "Group Portrait" in his hand over and over in disbelief.

He suspected that this was a pseudonym of some big shot, but he could never think of which literary giant had such a novel writing style.

"Damn it, why did it end like this? They were obviously about to get together~"

"Shut up! You almost spoiled it for me, you bastard! Is it a big deal to grab 'Group Portrait'? If you dare to say that again, I will beat you to death!"

"Oh no! I wrote a letter to Kodansha earlier, and it was full of arrogant words criticizing Kitagawa-sensei. Can you please return the letter to me?"

"I now declare that Mr. Kitagawa deserves the Newcomer Award. I don't believe there is a better novella than "Hear the Wind Sing" written by Yomiuri Okatake with great effort!

From the whispers of many readers in the carriage, one can feel that "Hear the Wind Sing" has completely overturned their understanding of pure literature!
Jabami Rei, who was watching all this from the side, felt even more itchy in her heart, and several times she even wanted to ask those readers directly to borrow the "Group Portrait" in her hands.

But she held back because the next stop was Yumeko's house.

When the subway arrived at the station, Jabami Rei immediately stretched out her long legs and rushed towards her friend's rental house at a terrifying speed, praying in her heart that Yumeko would buy "Gunzo"!
At the same time, Tetsutaro Mori, who had returned home early from get off work, came to the study with a cup of instant coffee and took out a copy of the April 1995 issue of "Gunzo" from his backpack.

I heard that "Group Portrait" is sold out today. Readers who are unlucky can only wait until tomorrow morning to go to the bookstore to buy it.

Fortunately, due to the special nature of his job, he successfully grabbed a copy through internal connections.

Tetsutarou Mori is a pure literature critic whose main job is to review pure literature novels in newspapers and magazines, while also expressing some personal professional insights to help readers decide whether to purchase the physical copies of those novels.

This job is very popular in the current Japanese literary world.

Because Japan was still in an era of scarce communications at that time, people mainly obtained information through paper media such as newspapers and magazines. Critics like him could invisibly influence the thoughts of many people.

Once a pure literary novel is criticized by critics, its physical sales will definitely be very poor.

Therefore, major newspapers and magazines will launch their own literary criticism awards to control this special group of literary critics to a certain extent.

Many literary criticism awards are no less important than orthodox literary awards. For example, "Group Portrait" has the Group Portrait Criticism Award, which is at the same level as the Group Portrait Newcomer Award. It is evaluated once a year and the awards are presented in the middle of the year.

Top literary critics earn more than some famous authors.

After the top five newcomers are announced each year, the editorial department will send a copy of the current issue of the magazine to those top critics, hoping that these bigwigs in the commentary world will praise their award-winning works, thereby further increasing the popularity of their works.

Of course, Tetsutarou Mori was an unknown figure in the literary criticism circle, far from being well-known enough for editorial offices to send him magazines.

If an unknown literary critic like him wants to gain attention and popularity, he usually takes another sensational route - criticizing the winning works of major awards to quickly attract the public's attention.

Anyway, you can always find some problems by nitpicking. Even if the criticism is illogical, the newspapers and magazines that award the awards can only swallow their anger.

If the authorities dare to confront critics like them, they will immediately raise the banner of "freedom of speech in literary criticism": "What? Do you dare to say that your award-winning works are flawless? You can't tolerate any negative comments? Do you want to stifle the critics' right to speak? Are you trying to maliciously manipulate public comments?"

No official can withstand this combination of punches.

This group portrait newcomer award has already caused various controversies early on, and now I heard that the award was directly given to a new writer with a complete blank slate.

Isn’t this a godsend?
Look how I spray it to death!
Tetsutaro Mori was ready to go. He took a big sip of coffee and immediately opened the "Group Portrait" in front of him.

It has to be said that among the five major pure literature magazines, the art design of "Qun Xiang" is indeed unique and looks more like a fashion magazine.

I turned directly to the section where "Hear the Wind Sing" was published. The preface introduced the entire selection process of this group portrait newcomer award.

This section also includes long reviews from the judges. Ordinary readers will generally skip over and read the main text at the end, but critics will not.

Because from here on, he can find a point of entry to start his rant.

"Among the 32 judges this time, seven are literary giants, and there's even the 'old-fashioned professor' Takeuchi Osamu. Kodansha really spent a lot of money on this."

Mori Tetsutarou glanced at the list of judges, and the corners of his mouth curled up slightly.
"It seems that the sales of "Gunzo" have dropped seriously. We have to hope that the newcomer award will bring back its popularity. Haha, this is ridiculous. Look how I smash your hard work to pieces!"

What follows is the detailed process of the three rounds of selection.

When he saw the second step of scoring, "Hear the Wind Sing" actually got a high average score of 97.2, and the corners of his mouth almost cracked.

What a joke!
He remembered that the highest score ever received by the winning works of the Group Portrait Newcomer Award was 88.4 points?

If I remember correctly, that work was "My Death in the Past" by Hikaru Oshima. When it was released, it was hailed as the best new work by a newcomer in the past 50 years.

And Oshima Hikaru lived up to expectations, winning the title of the best-selling author of the year last year and becoming the current mainstay of "Gunzo".

Now a novel suddenly appears and raises the highest score record by nearly 10 points!
Is "Group Portrait" going crazy in its commercial operations?
Mori Tetsutaro picked up a pen and immediately wrote down his comment on the score in his sketchbook: 97.2 points, which means it may have received more than one full score. Since the birth of various literary awards, I have never seen a judge willing to give a work a full score. This behavior is obviously irresponsible to the readers.

Let me ask you, if a work can achieve full marks, doesn’t it mean that there is no room for improvement?
Literature is something that is constantly evolving with the progress of the times, and no one's work should be given full marks!

After venting his anger, Tetsutarou Mori continued reading.

What follows is the judges’ thousand-word review of “Listen to the Wind Sing.”

Muramatsu Tomoshi: "The descriptions are very realistic, but sometimes it feels like looking at something through a fisheye lens, a film, or a microscope. There is a strange sense of distortion. It is an unprecedented reading experience."

Yasuhara Akira: "What kind of man is the protagonist? I had a very vague impression after reading it. Blanks are fine, but they should be left for the readers. After reading the novel, I only had the impression of riding a tour bus in an amusement park."

Osamu Takeuchi: “The technique of condensing things over a long period of time into a short story has been effective in many well-known Western literature. In Hear the Wind Sing, I saw similar techniques, but what is even more outstanding is that he also incorporated magical realism writing techniques such as time and space distortion and absurd fiction.”

"What the hell? Only one of the thirty-two judges disliked this novel? And he's the deputy editor-in-chief of Gunzo. It looks like he wrote it just to get a bad review."

Mori Tetsutarou scratched his head. According to his past experience, if this novel had traces of commercial operation, for the sake of their own reputation, those specially invited judges would not give low scores in the scoring stage, but they would definitely be ruthless in the subsequent free long reviews.

Even if you don't give a bad review, it's at least a medium review.

This is a subtle way to express your true opinion.

The problem is, these leading figures gave "Hear the Wind Sing" long reviews that were even more favorable than those given by the internal editors of the "Qun Xiang" editorial department!
What is going on with this reverse Tiangang?

Mori Tetsutarou was puzzled and had to turn his attention to the main text.

And then not long after, he fell.

I watched it from the beginning to the end almost in one breath.

When he turned to the last page and the book came to an abrupt end, Mori Tetsutaro clearly felt a sense of loss spreading in his heart.

So lonely, yet so healing.

After reading it, he realized that there was still only the original comment on the sketchbook.

During the whole process, he was absorbed in reading the novel and completely forgot about his job.

This is the first time.

In the past, I would always find something to criticize word by word, but this novel...
If I have to say what the shortcoming is, it’s probably that it’s only 4 words long, which is too short!
I feel like he could write more.

Why did it stop?
Tetsutarou Mori leaned back in his seat in frustration, his mind in a mess.

At this time, he should have started to build up his emotions and think about how to criticize in order to attract the readers' attention.

But now, there was only one question in his mind: Listen to the wind, what did the wind say?
Mori Tetsutaro suddenly remembered something, and immediately sat up straight. When he turned back, he saw the acceptance speech of the original author Kitagawa Hide.

"As for why I wanted to write a novel, it seems that I was severely criticized by my girlfriend's best friend when I went home one day. Seeing my girlfriend who silently gave everything for me, her words hit me hard on the head like a baseball. Suddenly, an idea popped up in my head: write a novel!"

"Damn it! How could such a sloppy reason lead to the birth of a novel that could become the best in Japanese literature?"

Tetsutaro Mori didn't know whether to laugh or cry. This Mr. Kitagawa was really as casual and straightforward as the "I" in the novel, and quite down-to-earth.

And that unknown girlfriend’s best friend, hey, do you know?
It was because of your accusations that a pure literature writer worthy of being recorded in history was born in the Japanese literary world!

Really. I don’t know what to say.

Mori Tetsutaro drank the remaining coffee in one gulp and decisively crossed out the childish comment in the sketchbook.

Just this time, do as those mainstream critics do and give it all the praise without reservation.

It deserves these praises!

(End of this chapter)