From the Front Page Sections, translated…
A very controversial book, “End Song” was recently out in Japan. On May 28th, 1997, there was the shocking brutal murder of a young boy in Kobe, the eleven-year-old victim’s head was placed in front of the front door of a certain local middle school, the mouth was cut open to the ears, with the card that says, “Drunk Rose Saint”, a confession of the murder. The murder who was caught was just a fourteen-year-old middle school student.
In the protection of youth, he was named, “Youth A”. The former “Youth A” is now thirty-two, after six years of being in the psychiatric ward, he’d returned back to the society and worked odds and ends to support himself. The close-to-three-hundred pages of his life process stated, “My life became stagnant at age fourteen……until I’d started working, the very first time I’d felt alive, because I am a human being, I’m truth grateful for this. If I don’t materialize my own thoughts and experiences, then, I will have lost the meaning to keep on living.”
The writer, Fumihiko Takayama, wrote, “Youth A, the Portrait of a Fourteen-Year-Old”; but the confessions of a murderer printed out one hundred thousand copies, and, the publishers had to print out another five thousand copies to fit the buyers’ needs, but because the publishers didn’t not get consensus from the families of the victims, the families had meltdowns, and asked the publishers to stop publishing the books. Before Youth A murdered the young boy, he’d attacked elementary school aged children three times, causing one death and two seriously injured.
A chain bookstore boycotted the book “Absolute Song”, and the libraries of the county where the murders had occurred decided NOT to have the volume on the shelves, fearing that it would cause damages again. But, those who actually read the book said, that there was NO grueling facts from the murder in it, it’s about the killer’s memories of his own childhood, how he’d started behaving abnormally since, and what was going through his mind. And still, the Japanese started calling out, they’d wanted to imitate American Laws of “Sam’s Son’s Act”, to make sure, that murderers don’t publish their memoirs to make money.
And so, you CAN see that the world IS sick, because we’re interested in what the murderers were thinking, and yet, you can’t prevent the writers from writing, because that would be an infringement of their freedom of speech and expression, and, it’s a wonder, why AND how, someone’s path of becoming a murderer can gain such high popularity among the readers.
