[{"data":1,"prerenderedAt":-1},["ShallowReactive",2],{"origin-literary-master-of-tokyo":3,"chapter-literary-master-of-tokyo-literary-master-of-tokyo-chapter-241":6},{"origin":4,"title":5},"chinese","Literary Master of Tokyo",{"chapter":7,"nextChapterSlug":19,"prevChapterSlug":20,"totalChapters":21,"novelImage":22},{"id":8,"novel_id":9,"title":10,"slug":11,"index":12,"content":13,"wordcount":14,"created_at":15,"updated_at":15,"volume":16,"translator":17,"content_hash":18},2355090,4607,"Chapter 241: The Tokyo Zodiac Murders","literary-master-of-tokyo-chapter-241",241,"\u003Cp>The Japanese public has a complex perception regarding the moral character of writers.\u003C\u002Fp>\n\u003Cp>For instance, regarding the reality that Osamu Dazai constantly cheated while having a wife, the public often subconsciously ignores this point and focuses only on his talent.\u003C\u002Fp>\n\u003Cp>But for Haruki Murakami, who has been \"loyal\" to his wife for many years, many people do not hesitate to express their admiration and praise him in many aspects.\u003C\u002Fp>\n\u003Cp>In short, it can be summarized as follows.\u003C\u002Fp>\n\u003Cp>In the eyes of the public, it does not matter if a writer's morality is a bit lacking, as long as they have talent; but if this writer has both talent and morality, they will be even more welcomed and recognized.\u003C\u002Fp>\n\u003Cp>After the court verdict was announced by the media, Akiwara Yuto received this treatment and was considered by the public to be a writer with \"morality\" and \"empathy.\"\u003C\u002Fp>\n\u003Cp>Because at the time, Akiwara Yuto still expressed understanding for the culprit, Masakazu Onuki, who wanted to \"murder\" him, and submitted a request for a reduced sentence to the court.\u003C\u002Fp>\n\u003Cp>This behavior undoubtedly fits the moral standard of the \"strong\" sympathizing with the \"weak\" very well.\u003C\u002Fp>\n\u003Cp>For a time, many people's favorability toward Akiwara Yuto increased greatly.\u003C\u002Fp>\n\u003Cp>In order to curry favor with the public, many media outlets also took this opportunity to \"hype\" Akiwara Yuto, believing him to be a social writer with empathy.\u003C\u002Fp>\n\u003Cp>And this viewpoint also increasingly became the mainstream thought of public opinion.\u003C\u002Fp>\n\u003Cp>After hearing these things, Akiwara Yuto felt \"ironic\" in his heart for a time, but it was not a wise move to come out and deny it at this time.\u003C\u002Fp>\n\u003Cp>So in the end, he could only silently accept this title.\u003C\u002Fp>\n\u003Cp>But it is undeniable that with the great increase in public favorability, the sales of his standalone books began to further improve, and the serialized piece \"The D-Slope Murder Case\" that he published in the \"Chiji Shimbun\" also began to be paid attention to by more and more people.\u003C\u002Fp>\n\u003Cp>Toshihiro Yashiro, as a book reviewer, was one of the people who paid attention to this work.\u003C\u002Fp>\n\u003Cp>After reading the entire article, he wrote a book review.\u003C\u002Fp>\n\u003Cp>\"Teacher Akiwara's 'The D-Slope Murder Case' derives several different deductive results through the two people's discussion of the case.\"\u003C\u002Fp>\n\u003Cp>\"Every deduction can justify itself, and then it is mercilessly shattered.\"\u003C\u002Fp>\n\u003Cp>\"But these prove a fact, which is that human observation and memory are actually quite unreliable. If one relies only on one-sided clues or judgments, it is often very easy to wrong a person.\"\u003C\u002Fp>\n\u003Cp>\"So in Teacher Akiwara's work, I saw the irony of other mystery works.\"\u003C\u002Fp>\n\u003Cp>But unlike Toshihiro Yashiro's focus on the ideas of the work itself, many people became interested in the fact that the deceased died due to SM after reading this article.\u003C\u002Fp>\n\u003Cp>It is said that some people smelled a business opportunity and launched a series of props identical to those of the heroine in the text, and used names similar to the heroine's to skirt the edges.\u003C\u002Fp>\n\u003Cp>When Akiwara Yuto learned of these situations, he felt very speechless.\u003C\u002Fp>\n\u003Cp>May 9, a high-end apartment in Minato Ward.\u003C\u002Fp>\n\u003Cp>Akiwara Yuto received a call from Shinta Kawai. After exchanging pleasantries about the previous court verdict, the two chatted about Akiwara Yuto's new serialization.\u003C\u002Fp>\n\u003Cp>\"Akiwara, that 'The D-Slope Murder Case' you wrote, compared to orthodox works, it's more like a heterodox work,\" Shinta Kawai said hesitatingly.\u003C\u002Fp>\n\u003Cp>In his view, if one wants to convince those radical orthodox fans, such a work is still not enough.\u003C\u002Fp>\n\u003Cp>After hearing this explanation, Akiwara Yuto felt speechless.\u003C\u002Fp>\n\u003Cp>\"The D-Slope Murder Case\" is a work by Edogawa Ranpo, who in his previous life was known as the founder of the Japanese \"orthodox\" detective genre.\u003C\u002Fp>\n\u003Cp>Unexpectedly, even his work was considered heterodox just because it contained some bizarre content.\u003C\u002Fp>\n\u003Cp>It seems that the genre classification in this world is more stringent than in his previous life.\u003C\u002Fp>\n\u003Cp>Akiwara Yuto pondered for a while and explained: \"Chairman Kawai, I will bring a manuscript to the association next week, please take a look at it.\"\u003C\u002Fp>\n\u003Cp>It seems he cannot go on without producing a better work.\u003C\u002Fp>\n\u003Cp>Since that is the case, let's bring out \"The Tokyo Zodiac Murders,\" a classic work known as the immortal masterpiece of the New Orthodox school.\u003C\u002Fp>\n\u003Cp>That afternoon, he called Miho Toyama over and dictated the content while having her write it down.\u003C\u002Fp>\n\u003Cp>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 its trick design.\u003C\u002Fp>\n\u003Cp>Compared with other orthodox works, there are no cumbersome mechanisms and no trivial narrative tricks, but it is grand and unrestrained, and the murder method is something one would never even think of.\u003C\u002Fp>\n\u003Cp>The story tells of the notes of a painter named \"Heikichi Umezawa,\" in which he planned to murder 6 girls, 4 of whom were his own daughters and 2 were his nieces.\u003C\u002Fp>\n\u003Cp>He wanted to dismember the six of them to piece together a so-called masterpiece of art—Azoth.\u003C\u002Fp>\n\u003Cp>And Azoth is actually the famous Philosopher's Stone in alchemy. And the Philosopher's Stone has another name, which is the \"Stone of the Upper.\"\u003C\u002Fp>\n\u003Cp>Based on this name, Heikichi Umezawa thought of astrology, because there is a saying in astrology that the human body is a reflection of the universe and a miniature model of the universe.\u003C\u002Fp>\n\u003Cp>And the combination of human body parts is the reproduction of the \"Stone of the Upper,\" which is the Philosopher's Stone.\u003C\u002Fp>\n\u003Cp>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\u002Flegs.\u003C\u002Fp>\n\u003Cp>But after writing these notes, an incident occurred, which was that \"Heikichi Umezawa\" himself died in a locked room.\u003C\u002Fp>\n\u003Cp>After his death, the eldest daughter was also murdered and was 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.\u003C\u002Fp>\n\u003Cp>This left the protagonist in confusion: who killed them, and who disposed of the bodies?\u003C\u002Fp>\n\u003Cp>Just then, the clues began to be revealed one by one, finally leading to the real murderer and the method.\u003C\u002Fp>\n\u003Cp>That is, the murderer was Tokiko Umezawa, one of the people originally thought to be a \"victim.\"\u003C\u002Fp>\n\u003Cp>She first used a shoe-swapping trick to kill her father, Heikichi Umezawa, then killed the eldest sister, and put secretions she got from sleeping with others into her body, creating a fake rape.\u003C\u002Fp>\n\u003Cp>Finally, she killed the other four people separately.\u003C\u002Fp>\n\u003Cp>By dismembering different parts of each person and \"misaligning and splicing\" them, she used 5 people's corpses to disguise them as 6 people, faking that she had also \"died.\"\u003C\u002Fp>\n\u003Cp>In that era, this method could be said to be seamless.\u003C\u002Fp>\n\u003Cp>As for Tokiko Umezawa's motive for murder, it was because she was a daughter born to her father and his ex-wife, and she was ostracized by the other sisters.\u003C\u002Fp>\n\u003Cp>After discovering that her mother's precious items had been casually disposed of by the eldest sister, she decided to take revenge.\u003C\u002Fp>\n\u003Cp>And her purpose for killing was also to hope to meet a smart person who could discover her crime-solving method and fall in love with him.\u003C\u002Fp>\n\u003Cp>But in the end, she never waited for such a person.\u003C\u002Fp>\n\u003Cp>So in the end of the story, Tokiko Umezawa, who escaped legal punishment, committed suicide by taking arsenic after leaving a letter.\u003C\u002Fp>\n\u003Cp>The full length of \"The Tokyo Zodiac Murders\" is 180,000 characters, but Akiwara Yuto could only recall the main plot, so he had to compress it.\u003C\u002Fp>\n\u003Cp>By the time Miho Toyama finished writing, the length of this manuscript was compressed to 130,000 characters.\u003C\u002Fp>\n\u003Cp>After reading the manuscript, Akiwara Yuto felt a little helpless; he could only remember the main plot, so he could not reproduce the entire content.\u003C\u002Fp>\n\u003Cp>He remembered that in his previous life, this book also had a subplot about a policeman and a missing person, but this part seemed to be \"scolded\" by many people as irrelevant, so he did not include it when retelling it.\u003C\u002Fp>\n\u003Cp>\"Master, you are truly amazing!\" Miho Toyama looked at Akiwara Yuto, who had finished checking the manuscript, with an expression of immense admiration.\u003C\u002Fp>\n\u003Cp>In her view, Akiwara Yuto was actually able to conceive such a grand and surprisingly clever work without any drafts or outlines!\u003C\u002Fp>\n\u003Cp>It was simply incredible!\u003C\u002Fp>\n\u003Cp>Especially the method of dismembering 5 corpses to disguise them as 6 people was something one would never even think of!\u003C\u002Fp>\n\u003Cp>This trick is not complicated, but no one had ever thought of it this way!\u003C\u002Fp>\n\u003Cp>Not only that, while designing the trick, this book also adopted a large amount of constellation and alchemy knowledge, and combined constellation, alchemy, and deduction, giving readers a different feeling.\u003C\u002Fp>\n\u003Cp>While secretly admiring him, she also thought of an off-topic question.\u003C\u002Fp>\n\u003Cp>Could her master thinking of this trick be related to the attack he encountered this time?\u003C\u002Fp>\n\u003Cp>Isn't it often said that the closer a person is to death, the more unique insights they can have about life and death?\u003C\u002Fp>",1526,"2026-06-21T03:58:02.196Z",1,"Gemini 3.1 Flash Lite","4fa5c806c00a341b6c9b42b8f18174881224b895e0a07a819556a1225b8d7e84","literary-master-of-tokyo-chapter-242","literary-master-of-tokyo-chapter-240",334,"https:\u002F\u002Fnovelzhen.com\u002Fimages\u002Fcovers\u002Fliterary-master-of-tokyo-cover.jpg"]