Chapter 44: Avici Hell

July 26, 1993, night.

Takamura Katsumi took a sip of coffee, but his eyes never left the magazine on the table.

Looking at the line "ZOO, by Akiwara Yuto" on the magazine, he frowned subconsciously.

He was a book critic, primarily publishing opinions on mystery novels. But unlike Yashiro Toshihiro, the reviews he wrote were mainly published in magazines.

The magazine he contributed to was called *Mystery Literature*, which had been in publication for over 80 years and had always made it its mission to promote mystery literature.

Under this mission, Takamura Katsumi and his colleagues constantly unearthed new talent in the mystery literature world and criticized the impetuous phenomena within the industry.

Moreover, because they were funded by both government and private capital, they had no revenue pressure, and their viewpoints were more objective and fair compared to other book critics.

Therefore, Takamura Katsumi often looked down on book critics who would write good things just for money; Yashiro Toshihiro was one such person.

Takamura Katsumi even suspected that the other party might have taken money from Mantan Publishing, which was why he had been strongly recommending Akiwara Yuto recently.

This possibility was quite high; after all, although *New Novels* did not have high sales, it was also a member of Mantan Publishing, and one could not rule out that Mantan Publishing had ambitions to further develop in the field of literary journals.

But these things had nothing to do with him; he was a true book critic, responsible only to the readers.

If the quality was truly too poor, he wouldn't hesitate to write an article and tear Akiwara Yuto to shreds.

He didn't know much about Akiwara Yuto; after all, the latter was a newcomer who had just debuted and hadn't even won a newcomer award. For this reason, he felt a bit of dislike toward this person.

After all, since he hadn't won any honors, he should keep a low profile instead of spending money to make a scene in the media every day. Thinking of how some small newspapers recently called the other party a "genius," Takamura Katsumi found it a bit laughable.

A genius who hadn't even won a newcomer award—when did the "genius" of the literary world become so cheap?

He pondered for a while and decided to write a proper book review. He would wake this Akiwara Yuto up from his "genius dream" and let him know that if he wanted to continue in the literary world, he still needed to write good articles.

He put down his coffee, sat up straight, and prepared to critique.

But when he saw the first paragraph, he was involuntarily drawn in...

It read:

"Every morning, a photo of my girlfriend's corpse is placed in my mailbox. Compared to the photo I saw in the mailbox yesterday, the one today shows more advanced decay."

"However, this change is relatively small and not particularly obvious. There are very few differences that can be seen at a glance; only the position of the maggots crawling on her is different between yesterday's photo and today's."

Takamura Katsumi was a bit surprised, even letting out an "Oh." He hadn't expected to see such an unexpected paragraph right at the beginning, and he even doubted whether his judgment of Akiwara Yuto was too one-sided.

He admitted that just from this opening, he was already deeply attracted.

Why did the protagonist receive photos of his girlfriend every day? Who killed the girlfriend? What was the murderer's purpose in mailing the photos?

Holding these questions, he continued reading.

The author seemed to intentionally hold back, starting to describe every scene in detail after the protagonist received the photos—the protagonist first carefully observed the details of the decay in the photos, then played all the photos in sequence, and then recalled the sweetness with his girlfriend and his desire to take revenge on the murderer.

Takamura Katsumi nodded, thinking the writing style was passable.

But this protagonist seemed a bit perverted; not only did he not call the police, but he even carefully looked at the photos of the corpse. What was the intention behind this? Was it to catch the murderer and then use means beyond the law to take revenge on him?

However, what followed should be about how the protagonist found out who killed his girlfriend, right?

Come to think of it, this kind of revenge trope was rarely seen so far.

He pondered for a while, guessing several ways the protagonist would use deductive methods to catch the murderer step by step.

After thinking it over, he continued reading. When he flipped to the part where the girlfriend disappeared on the day she had a conflict with the protagonist, he had a bad premonition. When he saw the dialogue between the murderer and the gas station owner, he was shocked.

He had just been thinking about how the protagonist would catch the murderer, but it turned out the murderer was himself. What was going on?!

Was the murderer schizophrenic? Or was everything just his imagination?

How did this author's brain work?

By the time he finished the whole story, Takamura Katsumi was stunned for several seconds before he came back to his senses.

He realized that because he was too tense, he had crumpled the paper.

To be honest, he hadn't expected the story to follow such a plot line.

Because of self-reproach and unwillingness, the man who was the murderer fell into deep self-deception, cycling daily through the process of "looking for the murderer and discovering he was the murderer."

And in such pain, the only thing that accompanied him every day was the photo of his girlfriend's corpse.

Takamura Katsumi lowered his head and pondered other aspects.

As a work of the *henkaku* (unconventional) school of mystery novels, Akiwara Yuto's *ZOO* fully met the requirements: the content was eerie, absurd, and the techniques were exaggerated. At the very beginning, he used unique methods to make the reader surprised and unexpected.

In terms of the protagonist's psychological portrayal, he depicted the protagonist's perverted psychology vividly, especially the complex thoughts of loving his girlfriend while refusing to admit he was the murderer.

How should he put it? It was a good novel.

Takamura Katsumi put down the magazine and took a sip of coffee; because too much time had passed, the coffee had gone completely cold.

He didn't care and continued to think about other aspects.

As a book critic, or rather a literary critic, he paid more attention to the core of the work, or in other words, what was the author's intention in writing this work?

He was a bit suspicious that this author named Akiwara Yuto wanted to depict the Buddhist metaphor of the Avici Hell.

According to Buddhist teachings, falling into this level of hell meant suffering day and night, with no time to ever cease.

How similar this was to the man in the article.

Because he killed his girlfriend, he was restless and irritable every day, tormented by painful thoughts, and in the choice of whether to surrender or not, he was unable to control his anxiety.

If that was the case, it seemed this author named Akiwara was not to be underestimated.

He thought for a long time, preparing to find some flaws—but after looking around, he couldn't see any problems.

Was this the legendary genius? One had to know he had been debuted for less than a month!

He pondered for a while, spread out his manuscript paper, picked up his fountain pen, and wrote the title—"A Genius Writer's Humanistic Reflection on Death!"