Mystery Romance
Chapter 1
"Isn't it problematic for dialogue to be written by one author? Especially one who isn't schizophrenic."
"You're so obsessed with schizos, as usual."
"I mean, characters created from one mind must understand each other unreasonably well. In real life, there's so much unresolved misunderstanding in conversations because everybody learns language and socialization separately. Shared reality is really quite tenuous. But it's difficult to empathize with not knowing, and of course the author does actually always know what is meant. So in dialogue, mutual understanding becomes the default when something is said, and misunderstanding or ambiguity is usually something intentional and extraordinary. In real life, total mutual understanding is probably much more extraordinary."
"Oh, right, hmm. Yeah, so fictional characters are way too often close enough to be able to finish each other's sentences, when in reality that's something worthy of being cherished. And how every conversation in a narrative seems productive, or at least developmental, while in real life people just say the same thing over and over and talk past each other."
"Yeah, and real people stutter and pause a lot, and make mistakes. They make up a sentence as they go, but an author can edit afterwards to remove redundancy and stuff. Written and spoken language are pretty different in a lot of ways. Maybe the ideal author would be autistic too. So they notice all the little details rather than just immediately abstracting everything into a meaning. Or at least an ethnographer trained to be able to notice the details, because I'm pretty sure for most people this abstraction happens on the level of perception, like those illusions like 'which line is longer', with the arrows, or 'which way is the silhouette spinning'. So they really don't even notice the details consciously."
"But narrative happens on that level of abstraction, doesn't it? I mean, a story isn't an ethnographic account. In fact, reading a fully realistic dialogue would probably be really jarring for all these reasons. Maybe a video or audio recording could make more use of those subtle behaviors, but - "
"Yeah, I mean ethnographers don't even record conversations in plain language, after all. They have like special symbols for notating various common mistakes, pauses, prolonged syllables and such."
"But that would really be a pain to read for a casual novel, I guess."
"Too avant-garde."
"Haha, yeah. But what you were saying about the problem of dialogue being written by one author - there's another aspect of that, in how people don't have direct access to private conversations that don't include themselves. So the dialogues they write are probably inevitably similar to their own conversations."
"Right. Otherwise you only have public recordings or other written dialogues. Or eavesdropping, I guess. And there are recordings of people who didn't know they were being recorded - that's probably the closest you can get."
"That's a big part of why fictional characters often have a small set of very prominent personality traits and speech patterns, isn't it? To set them apart from each other superficially, even if they're all actually similar."
"Well, I think that one's actually more realistic. I mean, isn't it normal to identify and describe others by just couple of traits? Or even to perform a few key traits that you consider 'yourself', to establish a readily identifiable character. It's like what you were saying about abstraction. Like, authors, especially in a third-person story, have to choose what to say and what to leave out. The reader doesn't get a perfect image of every character's mind, or even their actions. And then there's the question: 'what is the reader's gaze supposed to be?' Are they God? Are they a stalker? I mean, sometimes there's a frame story to establish such a gaze, but even then there's usually another gaze beyond the one established by the frame story - the real reader's gaze.
And then there are genres with conventions about how the reader is supposed to engage. Like mystery novels, for example, where the whole book becomes a puzzle - and even then it varies by sub-genre what exactly the reader is supposed to figure out, whether it's more important to deduce a motive or a mechanism or whatever else. And so readers can feel cheated if an author disregards the genre conventions in certain ways, though authors also have to disregard established conventions in some ways in order to stay fresh.
But say the author neglects to mention something that's crucial to solving the mystery, like if in a first-person story the narrator just happens to never notice some crucial detail that only ends up being explained by someone else in the conclusion. Or worse, they're just not present for some crucial event. Or for third-person stories, someone thinks some crucial thought but the author doesn't mention it. There are subtler violations too that would still feel wrong - for example, maybe giving some essential clue in a foreign language, along with a translation that doesn't actually capture the essence of the clue. Though in real life it's often like that, isn't it? Of course not everything comes together to form a coherent puzzle that anyone else looking into your mind could solve. There's not even a promise of any 'conclusion'.
But anyway, to the original point. I bring up all this to say that despite it all, people somehow still seem to live narratively. I mean, as narratives. People expect things to make sense, set goals, perform consistent personalities, tell stories about themselves, imagine futures, etc. Like, the thing you said about stories functioning at a much higher order of abstraction than raw sensation - but doesn't that apply to how most people directly experience reality as well? Heh~"
"Readers do often make theories about what's left unsaid, though. Like isn't that the whole idea of fanfiction? And sometimes authors will even explicitly confirm or deny certain theories or even entire subplots as canon. Though I bet a lot of times it's just an idea that the author happens to like, rather than something they thought of before but intentionally chose to leave out. I mean, especially with theories that have to do with current fads, like hypothesizing that whatever character is actually gay, for example, when the original story was written before LGBT discourse was much of a thing."
"Right, and I think fanfiction is much more common when the narrative is open-ended. Like when it doesn't have a main idea. You probably don't see as much fanfiction of a mystery novel as of some slice-of-life story, since it's like, okay, someone dies, you figure out who it is, and then it's all over - that's why the story existed in the first place. Same with any story where the beginning is clearly connected to the end, probably. Especially stories conceived as a whole rather than made up along the way."
"Though going back to what you were saying how people live on abstractions and consistency, doesn't that imply that many people try to live in a way that discourages fanfiction? Completeness discourages elaboration - that's kind of tragic, when you think about it..."
"Aiya. I do also wonder, why do mystery novels always have to be about a murder? Is it again because only something as extraordinary as murder is interesting anymore when you've abstracted so much? But in real life, isn't love sometimes just as intense as death? Freud explores the duality, for example - Eros vs. Thanatos and all that. It's also a common pattern in existential philosophy, or probably contemplation in general actually, to come to a point of suicidal nihilism via philosophical thinking, and then to recover by developing some kind of relation with love.
In fact, why should I care about who killed some rando, or how? Isn't that the police's job after all? It's like the same appeal as cheap gossip - honestly kinda disgusting now that I think about it. What can I gain from relating to any character from a mystery novel? I don't want to be a murderer; I don't want to meddle in mystery beyond my ability and responsibility; it's unlikely that anyone around me will die so exotically; usually the characters don't even cope very healthily either. Wouldn't it be much more interesting to have a mystery novel about love, for example? Is it really so impossible to disclose just the right things in a story, to make love just as tantalizing and inscrutable as in lived experience? Does she love me or not? Is it really that kind of feeling? Can I say this or that now? How do I feel? What do I want? How does everyone else feel? What does everyone else want?
Well, maybe the problem is that such questions don't always have a clear answer. It's not a demonstrable matter of fact like a murder and a mechanism. Though I'm sure there are still some matters other than murder that could be just as mysterious and also just as objective. Speaking of which, I found a love letter in my bag today."
"Oh. Is that why you brought all this up in the first place?"
"Of course I wouldn't ramble so much about something irrelevant to the context at hand."
"Of course...
Can I see the letter?"
"Yeah."
米木十才, 我承认了，我喜欢你～什么 “你觉得她可爱吗？”， “她是你的类型吗？”， “你喜欢这种女生吗？”， “你愿意跟她谈恋爱吗？” 的，当然都是戏言啦。 其实我想知道的是 “你觉得我可爱吗？”， “我是你的类型吗？”， “你喜欢我吗？” 虽然好像还是太害羞直接问， “愿意跟我谈恋爱吗...” 小水
"Oh. Can you translate it?"
"I thought you knew Chinese?"
"I can't read. I can recognize like four characters. 米木十 something. That's your name in kanji though, isn't it? So 'Komeki Tōsai', I guess. 我... 了... 你... Oh, '可爱' is 'cute', isn't it?"
"Nice.
Komeki Tōsai, I admit it, I like you. All that 'Do you think she's cute?', 'Is she your type?', 'Do you like this kind of girl?', 'Would you date her' stuff, of course it was all just nonsense. What I really want/wanted to know is, 'Do you think I'm cute?', 'Am I your type?', 'Do you like me?' Though I guess I'm still too shy to ask directly, 'Would you date me?'
Signed Shōsui. Hmm, Though I think that last line might be better translated literally - 'Would you consider falling in love with me?' You know, '谈恋爱', like separated as '谈' and '恋爱'... at least I think it's more romantic that way."
"Shōsui, isn't that the girl from two grades below us that never showed up? There were a bunch of rumors about her when school first started. I thought she transferred away or something."
"I think they're just writing under the pseudonym to stay anonymous. You know, 'still too shy to ask directly' and all. Also, you know, it never came up until now, but the real Shōsui is my sister - which I guess makes this kinda weird, huh. I wonder if whoever wrote the letter knows. Pretty funny coincidence if they don't. Beimoku Shōsui - she just tells people to pronounce the surname differently, I think because she doesn't want people to think she's related to me or our parents."
"Oh what? You really don't seem like the type to have a sister... Your names do kind of match though, Tōsai and Shōsui. Maybe that's part of why whoever wrote the letter chose it, too. Wow. I guess it's not too surprising. Or it probably wouldn't be as surprising if not for all the rumors and conspiracies about why she never showed up..."
"It's a pictographic wordplay too. 木米十才 and 木米小水. 米 is like 木 with two extra strokes. 才 is like 十 with one extra stroke. 水 is like 小 with two extra strokes. But 十才 also means like 'ten talents' or maybe 'great genius' if you interpret it as parallel to '十分', and 小水 means like 'little water' - so it's not like our parents gave us completely ridiculous names just for the wordplay."
"Wow. That's really cute. Apparently my name written in Chinese is pictographic wordplay too. 昌昍晶 - Xuan written as two suns side by side, and Jing the one with three suns. Chang is the two stacked suns one, of course."
"Damn. Was wherever you came from really dark or something?"
"My mother's womb? I guess so. I also have a sister named 昌晶𣊭 - the same Jing as mine, and Hua as four suns."
"At least your parents weren't a poor rural family with the last name 金, or you may have been named 金鑫𨰻. Though at least your nickname would have just been Bao Bao, which people would normally hear as 'baby' rather than eight 'gold's."
"Wow. I don't know which would be worse between that and being born to a desert family who names their children 林𣛧𣡽 and 沝淼㵘. Or a family so desperate for daughters that they name their last son 㚣奻姦."
"No, I'm sure it's much more radical to go as far as changing the surname. And is the desert family so desperate for trees that they’re doubling it each time instead of just increasing by one? Also, doesn't that last one mean 'lewd, quarrel, fornication'? I guess the ancient Chinese didn’t have a very positive impression of women. Also, didn't you say you can't read Chinese?"
"Haha, I've just talked with my parents about characters made from repeated parts while talking about my name."
"Oh. So you've been saving these jokes for a while."
"Yeah..."