Chapter 241

Regarding the moral character of writers, the perception of the Japanese public is very complicated.

For example, regarding the reality that Dazai Osamu constantly cheated while having a wife, the public often subconsciously ignored this point and only focused on his talent.

But for Murakami Haruki, who had been "loyal" to his wife for many years, many people did not hesitate to express their admiration and praise him in many aspects.

In short, it can be summarized as follows.

In the eyes of the public, it doesn't matter if a writer's morality is a bit poor, as long as they have talent. But if this writer has both talent and morality, they will be even more welcomed and recognized.

After the trial results were announced by the media, Akiwara Yuto received this treatment and was considered by the public to be a writer with "morality" and "empathy."

Because at that time, Akiwara Yuto still expressed understanding toward Onuki Masakazu, the murderer who wanted to "harm" him, and proposed a request for a reduced sentence to the court.

This behavior undoubtedly conformed very well to the moral standard of the "strong" sympathizing with the "weak."

For a time, many people's favorability toward Akiwara Yuto increased greatly.

To please the public, many media outlets also took this opportunity to "flatter" Akiwara Yuto, believing that he was a social writer with empathy.

And this viewpoint also increasingly became the mainstream thought in public opinion.

After hearing these things, Akiwara Yuto once felt it was very "ironic," but it was not a wise move to come out and deny it at this time.

So he could only silently accept this title in the end.

But it cannot be denied that with the great increase in public favorability, the sales of his standalone books began to further increase, and the serialized piece "The D-Slope Murder Case" he published in the "Chiji Shimbun" also began to be noticed by more and more people.

Yashiro Toshihiro, as a book reviewer, was one of the people who paid attention to this work.

After reading the entire article, he wrote a book review.

"Mr. Akiwara's 'The D-Slope Murder Case' derives several different reasoning results through the discussion of the case by two people."

"Every reasoning can be self-consistent, and then it is mercilessly shattered."

"But these prove a fact, which is that human observation and memory are actually quite unreliable. If one only relies on one-sided clues or judgments, it is often very easy to wrong a person."

"So in Mr. Akiwara's work, I saw the irony of other detective works."

But unlike Yashiro Toshihiro's focus on the ideology of the work itself, many people became interested in the fact that the deceased died due to SM after reading this article.

It is said that some people smelled a business opportunity and launched a series of props in the same version as the heroine in the text, using names similar to the heroine's to skirt the edges.

When Akiwara Yuto learned about these situations, he was very speechless.

May 9th, a high-end apartment in Minato Ward.

Akiwara Yuto received a call from Kawai Shinta. After exchanging pleasantries about the previous trial results, the two talked about Akiwara Yuto's new serialization.

"Akiwara, the 'The D-Slope Murder Case' you wrote, compared to honkaku works, is more like a biange school work," Kawai Shinta said hesitantly.

In his view, if he wanted to convince the radical honkaku school, such a work was still not enough.

Akiwara Yuto felt speechless after hearing this explanation.

"The D-Slope Murder Case" was a work by Edogawa Ranpo, who in his past life was known as the founder of the Japanese "honkaku" detective school.

He didn't expect that even his work would be considered biange just because it was mixed with some bizarre content.

It seems that the classification of schools in this world is more stringent than in his past life.

Akiwara Yuto pondered for a while and explained, "Chairman Kawai, I will bring a manuscript to the association next week, please take a look."

It seems he couldn't do it without bringing out a better work.

Since that's the case, let's bring out "The Tokyo Zodiac Murders," a classic work known as the immortal masterpiece of new honkaku.

That afternoon, he called Toyama Miho and dictated the content while having her write it down.

The content of the book "The Tokyo Zodiac Murders" is extremely cumbersome and the plot is very complex, even being called overly wordy, but its greatest advantage is that it is ingenious in the setting of tricks.

Compared with other honkaku works, there are no cumbersome mechanisms, no trivial narrative tricks, but it is grand and unrestrained, and the murder method is something one would never think of.

The story tells of the notes of a painter named "Umezawa Heikichi," in which he planned to kill 6 girls, 4 of whom were his own daughters and 2 were his nieces.

He wanted to dismember the six people to piece together a so-called masterpiece of art—Azoth.

And Azoth is actually the famous Philosopher's Stone in alchemy. And the Philosopher's Stone has another name, which is "the stone above."

Based on this name, Umezawa Heikichi thought of astrology, because there is a saying in astrology that the human body is a reflection of the universe and also a miniature model of the universe.

And the combination of human body parts is the reproduction of "the stone above," which is the Philosopher's Stone.

And the composition of this stone cannot be separated from the five parts of the human body, namely the head, chest, abdomen, waist, and thighs/legs.

But after finishing these notes, something happened, which was that "Umezawa Heikichi" himself died in a locked room.

After he died, the eldest daughter was also murdered and found to have been raped, with residues inside the body. Immediately after, the other 5 sisters died one after another, and all were dismembered and thrown in different places.

This left the protagonist in confusion: who killed them, and who disposed of the bodies?

Just then, the clues began to be revealed one by one, finally leading to the real murderer and the method.

That is, the murderer was Umezawa Tokiko, one of the people originally thought to be a "victim."

She first killed her father, Umezawa Heikichi, through a shoe-swapping trick, then killed the eldest sister, and put the secretions she got from sleeping with others into her body, creating a fake rape.

Finally, she killed the other four people separately.

By dismembering different parts of each person and "mismatched splicing," she used 5 people's bodies to disguise them as 6 people, faking that she had also "died."

In that era, this method could be said to be seamless.

And Umezawa Tokiko's motive for murder was because she was a daughter born to her father and his ex-wife, and she was squeezed out by the other sisters.

After discovering that her mother's precious items were casually disposed of by the eldest sister, she decided to take revenge.

And her purpose for killing was also to hope to meet a smart person who could discover her murder method and fall in love with him.

But in the end, she didn't wait for such a person.

So in the ending of the story, Umezawa Tokiko, who escaped legal punishment, took arsenic and committed suicide after leaving a letter.

The full length of "The Tokyo Zodiac Murders" is 180,000 words, but Akiwara Yuto could only recall the main plot, so he had to compress it.

By the time Toyama Miho finished writing, the length of the manuscript for this book was compressed to 130,000 words.

Akiwara Yuto looked at the manuscript with a little helplessness; he could only remember the main plot, so he couldn't reproduce the entire content.

He remembered that this book in his past life also had a subplot about a policeman and a search for someone, but this part seemed to be "scolded" by many people as irrelevant, so he didn't include it when retelling it.

"Master, you are really amazing!" Toyama Miho looked at Akiwara Yuto, who had finished checking the manuscript, with an expression of admiration.

In her view, Akiwara Yuto could actually conceive such a grand and surprising work without drafting or outlining!

It was simply incredible!

Especially the method of dismembering 5 corpses to disguise them as 6 people was something one would never think of!

This trick is not complicated, but no one has ever thought of it this way!

Not only that, while designing the trick, this book also adopted a large amount of constellation and alchemy knowledge, combining constellation, alchemy, and reasoning to give readers a different feeling.

While secretly admiring him, she thought of an irrelevant question.

Would her master's thinking of this trick have anything to do with his encounter with an attack this time?

Isn't it often said that the closer a person is to death, the more they can have different insights into life and death?