REVIEW BOOK"THE NAME OF THE GAME IS KIDDING".

Higashino Keigo's The Name of the Game is Kidnapping continues to impress readers with its intricate storytelling and the most special thing in this work, no character plays the protagonist

Perhaps Keigo hasn't read The Art of Invisibility by Hacker Kevin Mitnick, otherwise he would have to rewrite this novel. The Name of the Game is Kidnapping is a pretty good novel, quite dramatic with a relatively surprising ending, but this literary work lacks too much logic and is unrealistic, it is difficult to rank it on par with the author's own top detective products such as Behind Suspect X or White Night Walk.

However, the dark color of the whole work combined with the unusual setting of the story, this book is still worth sipping with a cup of coffee on the weekend!

STARTING WITH AN UNUSUAL KIDNAPPING

There was a guy who was a Marketing staff of a small Agency company, a young arrogant person because he often won in competitions from big to small. He considered this life as just a game, and in any situation, any game, he always wanted to win at all costs.

But then one fine day, he failed. The plan to promote a car product for a big client (agency term) was canceled at the last minute, just because some crazy vice director coldly said no! And that director specifically named him as an incompetent person, who must be eliminated in the upcoming promotion strategy!

Arrogant people often win, and when they suddenly fail, they often act spontaneously and insanely. The poor employee was no exception. He got drunk and recklessly drove to the vice president's residence. His original intention was simply to argue with him, but then an unexpected incident happened that changed his life to a new direction.

He was lurking and caught a girl escaping from the president's villa that night. He followed her in a crazy way, approached her, and he was not too surprised when she was the daughter of a noble family "whom everyone knows who"! The reader was suddenly drawn into the journey of two strangers suddenly getting close to each other in a crazy plan - a plan for a kidnapping game.

Obviously, it was an unusual kidnapping, with the main character pretending to be the victim of the kidnapping, and the perpetrator, although amateurish, but with his unusually intelligent mind, he made the rest of the game perfect and flawless.

However, at the moment when the game was supposed to end, it went in a different direction that neither he nor the readers expected, or rather, Higashino Keigo himself took the readers from one surprise to another.

A GOOD WORK, BUT WRONG FROM THE BEGINNING

Author Keigo must have been a naturalist when he was in school, he interpreted everything according to the logic of mathematics, forgetting that life also had two subjects: sociology and psychology. It seems that Higashino forgot the concept of criminal psychology, an unusual highlight that somewhat obscured the halo of this work.

In terms of sociology, there is no noble lady in modern society without social networks like Facebook or Instagram. Even in places with strict censorship like China, there is still Weibo for people to show off their photos online. Many readers will argue that this was 2002 – when this work was published, social networks were not as popular as they are now. But don’t forget that we still had Yahoo back then – there was always a place for young people to shine! With young people who love taking pictures and especially beautiful girls who love posting pictures for the world to see, there is no reason why the director’s daughter doesn’t have a single picture online!

Yet the smart guy who plays our main character didn’t realize from the beginning that he was fooled by the girl, and believed 100% in her special identity. Sociologically speaking, this point is completely illogical!

In terms of criminal psychology, Keigo should fly to China to find Lei Mi to urgently supplement his criminal knowledge. Because the 3 main characters in this story are cold and change to an unbelievable level!

A small schoolgirl like “Juri” could coldly kill someone – even if she had a sudden outburst – but then immediately calm down and comfortably have sex right near the victim’s body where she had murdered? Normally, a person who is not a serial killer would not be calm enough to act like that, let alone a girl who is too young, and who is killing someone for the first time.

A Marketing employee is smart enough to perfectly stage a robbery, but he does not have enough knowledge to track down information about the director’s daughter, and at the same time, he reveals a fatal weakness when using a fake SIM card to contact the family of the kidnapped victim. Perhaps the author did not know that, even when using an anonymous phone but calling at the same location, the police can completely determine the identity (regardless of the time of the call) of the caller if it is linked to the nearby phone SIMs calling at that time - because these phone numbers all transmit signals to the nearest broadcasting station! And in this book, the perpetrator also used a fake SIM to continuously call in many places! If he did not know how to calculate the possibility of the police following the trail based on the phone SIM, then 100% he would be caught without understanding why (Readers should read more about The Art of Stealth - a series about Hackers and Cybercrime to understand why this phone call action is easily traced)

In short, right from the beginning, an unrealistic story was created, under the cover of perfection but 100% illogical when taking into account the so-called perfect crime. So the Name of the Game is Kidnapping is hard to be ranked on par with modern detective works, where information technology, evidence and forensics play a decisive role, not to mention the perfect help from experts in portraying criminal psychology!

There are too many illogical points like that, but readers who love detective stories should not be sad, because just portraying a world where only bad guys exist like this work of Keigo, is enough for us to add it to the list of must-reads! Ignoring the psychological and logical factors mentioned above, the kidnapping activities all take place perfectly and the open ending is enough to make readers guess, which is also considered a success of Keigo!

IN lieu of a conclusion

Higashino is still so cruel to women, always turning them into evil people disguised under the guise of beauty and intelligence. And no matter how dire the situation is, they - the fragile women still resiliently find their way out. From Yuhiko, Naoko and now Juri, perhaps those who have a good view of women should read less of his works, otherwise they will always spread skeptical and negative looks to half the world everywhere!

The men in his works always think of themselves as smart, but in the end, they are just pawns on the chessboard.

Perhaps readers are no longer unfamiliar with author Higashino Keigo and his famous works of such indignation and cruelty, but perhaps not many people know that this work published in 2002 in Japan was immediately made into a movie 1 year later. The movie G@me, based on the original The Name of the Game is Kidnapping, was a huge success and won the Japan Academy Prize (equivalent to an Oscar in Japan).