How did a supposedly scenic railway trip turn into a nightmare of blood and fear?
"Manchuria Railway Travel" is set in the Puppet Manchukuo, turning a six-hour sealed train into an intense psychological thriller. Masao Hasegawa, a young Japanese military officer, carried a travel brochure and longed for the apple orchards of Jinzhou and the White Tower of Liaoyang, but he accidentally stepped into a well-planned assassination operation. The gunshots in the third-class carriage, the bizarre deaths in the first-class carriage, the confidential documents in the briefcase, and the "death together" one after another - when the gunfire spread from one carriage to another, when suspicion turned everyone into a potential murderer, Hasegawa could only huddle in the electrical room, clutching the manual that he could no longer believe.
The work abides by the law of three unities, and all conflicts break out and end within the railway section from Dalian to Fengtian. With a calm and almost cruel writing style, it peels off the hypocritical cloak of "arteries of civilization" and reveals the bloody nature under the iron heel of colonialism. Survival is not luck, witnessing is punishment. When the ninety-eight-year-old Hasegawa trembled and said "I'm sorry" at the September 18th Memorial Hall, the faded manual finally closed the last page.
History will not be forgotten, but literature will not forget it.
