kou kou kyoushi (high school teacher)

.. a 280+ page chinese book... fully written vertically in traditional chinese which i finished in one shot yesterday night... written by a japanese reowned novelist, nojima shinji.

it almost drove me to tears.

no..it wasn't a particularly touching story. it's not even a love story.. to me. after reading the whole book.. i just feel.. disgusted and disappointed with human life. i can say that this is the darkest-themed book i've ever come across. it's even darker than me...

kou kou kyoushi is about hamura takao, a high school teacher who was being forced into the profession because he didn't get into the good books of an important professor from a research center, also the father of his fiance. he was originally a reserved, shy and boring guy but then he got to know ninomiya mayu, a student of the high school he was teaching. eventually they fell in love, only to let him discover that mayu was actually having a sexual relationship with her father. in the end, unable to take it, takao caused the death of mayu's father and the both of them killed themselves.

incest, teacher-student love affair, rape (mayu's friend was raped by a teacher), suicide and murder.. all these were featured in the story. many times.. i almost couldn't continue with it.. because it was just too much and too heavy for me... but well.. of course i continued... haha... or i would have missed a very good story.

finishing it.. it almost drove me crazy. one... i was truly disheartened by the harshness of reality and the dark side of humans... second.. i totally loved the way the author wrote it.. at the beginning and end of every chapter was a little monologue by the male lead, takao. i particularly liked the second last chapter, "Our Failure" (Bokutachi no shippai), where takao realized that despite knowing that he loved mayu, sub-conciously, he still despised her for maintaining such a relationship with her father...

nojima shinji is known for exploring and putting into light the dark sides of human beings. and now i know.

anyway... kou kou kyoushi was actually adapted into a japanese drama... which was unfortunately banned in singapore then... that's 1993... now...ten years later... a new version starring fujiki naohito has surfaced but i am unsure whether i wanna watch it. from what i heard... the story in the new version is slightly different... it ain't that dark or heavy anymore.. but.. it's still ain't light either...

wait til i get into a depressed mood. haha.

listening to: fan wei qi -- na xie hua er.