Xuanzang's negative collection, Tang Dynasty, now in the Henan Museum. Later adaptations of the visual Chinese novel "Journey to the West" continue to integrate the social history and culture of different eras. For example, in the 1980s, the CCTV version of the TV series "Journey

Xuanzang’s negative collection, Tang Dynasty, now in the Henan Museum. Later adaptations of the visual Chinese

novel "Journey to the West" continue to integrate the social history and culture of different eras. For example, in the 1980s, the CCTV version of the TV series "Journey to the West" had the popular ending song "If you dare to ask where the road is, the road will be at your feet." The lyrics are internally consistent with the words of the time such as "black cats and white cats", "crossing the river by feeling the stones", "moving towards the future" and "rushing towards the four modernizations"; in the 1990s, the movie "Westward Journey" starring Stephen Chow echoed The first generation of Chinese Internet culture, deconstruction culture and "nonsense culture"; at the beginning of the 21st century, the online novel "Wukong Biography" clearly combined Sun Wukong with youth rebellion culture; in recent years, Ma Boyong's "Taibai Jinxing is a bit annoying" and cartoons "Chinese Tales: Summer of Little Monsters" has linked Journey to the West culture with contemporary workplace culture; until the popular game "Black Myth: Wukong"...

"Journey to the West Story" has been combined by generations of authors The experience of one's own time is told repeatedly and remains fresh over time. In this sense, Chen Jian's historical mystery novel "Eighty-One Cases of Journey to the West" is obviously another version of "Journey to the West". Here, Master Xuanzang becomes a detective. Following the detective's footsteps and vision, readers see the prosperity of the Tang Dynasty, the prosperity of Chang'an, and the complex pattern of the Western Regions.

As Chen Jian said, "Journey to the West" is not only about China, but also about the world. Even the act of "Journey to the West" itself means moving from China to the world, with a spiritual connotation of self-opening and exploring the unknown. From the novel "Eighty-One Cases of Journey to the West" to the drama "Sifang Pavilion", although the storyline and characters have changed significantly, the spirit of openness and tolerance has always been throughout. Perhaps it is for this reason that the current creation of historical mystery novels and film and television dramas are generally more willing to choose the Tang Dynasty as the historical time and space for story imagination.

Yuan Mo, the "detective" in the TV series "Sifangguan" (2024), adapted from Chen Jian's "Eighty-one Journey to the West". Data map

"All history is contemporary history." All excellent historical novels point to not only the past, but also the present and the future that the present leads to.

From "socialist" to historical mystery novels

Ron Howard's novel "The Da Vinci Code" inspired Chen Jian's writing of historical mystery novels. The picture shows a scene from the 2006 movie of the same name. Data map

Southern Weekend: When did you start reading detective novels?

Chen Jian: I first came into contact with martial arts novels when I was in elementary school. I borrowed a set of "Sherlock Holmes" from the school library when I was a freshman in high school. I was shocked after reading it. Later, I also read some Japanese mystery novels and American mystery novels. Works by author Ellery Quinn. Among them, the one that had the greatest impact on me was Henggou Zhengshi. I read more than a dozen of his mystery novels such as "Prison Gate Island", "Honjin Murder Incident" and "The Devil Comes Playing the Flute". He liked to combine the story scenes It is set in the early Showa era or even earlier historical periods, in some relatively closed Japanese villages, and fully integrates local customs and folk elements. At the same time, his novels are also very strict in their reasoning, which has a great influence on me. Inspire. In addition, I also like "socialist" reasoning, such as Matsumoto Seicho's "Points and Lines", "Sandware", "Zero Focus", as well as Morimura Seiichi, Miyabe Miyuki, Natsuki Shizuko, Yamamura Misa, and even Higashino Keigo, they use suspense mystery novels to expose social phenomena and reflect social problems. This writing method has a more shocking power.

Southern Weekend: Are you born in the 1970s?

Chen Jian: Yes, I was born in the late 1970s.

Southern Weekend: Based on our previous interviews, we will find that the intergenerational characteristics of contemporary Chinese mystery novel writers are very obvious. Hu Yanyun is also born in the 1970s like you, and your mystery novel reading tracks are relatively close, such as Quin, Henggou Zhengshi, Japan's "Socialist", etc.As for the younger generation of authors like Tokichen, who were born in the late 1980s and early 1990s, they may have been Shimada Shoji when they were exposed to mystery novels when they were young.

Chen Jian: Every era has different popular reading materials. I started reading mystery novels in the late 1990s, before Shoji Shimada was translated and introduced.

Southern Weekend: Shoji Shimada's most acclaimed masterpiece, "Astrological Killing Magic", was published in Japanese in the 1980s, but its translation and introduction to mainland China had to wait until 2008, which happened to be this morning When a generation of domestic authors began to read mystery novels.

Chen Jian: This is indeed the case. Later, the younger generation of authors pursued the magnificence of conspiracies in mystery novels, which was largely influenced by Shoji Shimada.

Southern Weekend: We just talked about Japanese "socialist" mystery novels. What impact do you think these novels have on your writing?

Chen Jian: In the classic mystery novels before - whether it is Sherlock Holmes or Poirot - the detective always stayed away from the case, but in many Japanese "socialist" mystery novels, the detective began to get involved in the case. He is an indispensable character in the whole story. Detective novels are no longer about detectives uncovering other people’s secrets, but also about uncovering the detective’s own secrets. Even like Keigo Higashino's "White Night Journey", a man and a woman in the novel have been in a state of being inaccessible to each other for many years and constantly hurting each other. This is actually a very poignant love story. The author incorporated this love story into the mystery novel, which is equivalent to opening a new door for subsequent mystery novel writing.

Southern Weekend: Your "Eighty-One Journey to the West" series is usually classified into the category of "historical mystery novels". What do you think of this genre?

Chen Jian: Frankly speaking, I first started writing "Eighty-One Cases of Journey to the West" in 2011. At that time, there was no such thing as a historical mystery novel. At that time, Dan Brown's "The Da Vinci Code" had been translated and became popular all over the world. Later, his other novels such as "Angels and Demons" and "The Lost Symbol" were also introduced in China. In fact, they all belong to what we later called A historical mystery novel set in modern life. I wrote a novel called "Freud's Forbidden Land" at that time, which is a historical and psychological suspense novel that uses Freud's life experience and his psychoanalytic theory. It is the product of studying "The Da Vinci Code" , but the response to the novel was not as expected.

After that, I began to write novels using history as a method of reasoning and suspense, which later became "The Eighty-One Cases of Journey to the West". Almost at the same time, Ye Wenbiao began to write "The Code of Along the River During the Qingming Festival", and Ma Boyong's "The Wind Rises in Longxi" and "Antique Bureau Middle Game" were also published one after another. Everyone began to consciously combine historical novels with mystery novels, or in other words Use history as a backdrop to craft suspense and mystery stories.

Southern Weekend: "The Da Vinci Code" was first introduced into the country in 2004, and the earliest domestic writers of historical mystery novels affected by it were all concentrated in the generation born in the 1970s or before the 1985s, such as you and Ye Wenbiao (1971), many works by Ma Boyong (1980), as well as novels such as "A Hundred Years Curse" by Na Duo (1977), can also be discussed in this context.

Chen Jian: Yes, at that time, our generation in the late 1970s and early 1980s had several major writing positions. For example, some people hung out in the "Lotus Powder Ghost Stories" or "Boiled Wine and Discussing History" sections of the Tianya Forum; People published works in "Science Fiction World·Fantasy Edition" (later renamed "Fly·Fantasy World"). Ma Boyong and I both wrote historical mystery novels on it; there were also "Mystery", "The Most Mystery" and "Mystery World" at that time. ", as well as mystery magazines such as "Suspense World" run by Cai Jun, have also published some historical mystery novels. There were only a few positions at that time, and we were a group of people of the same age. We all had similar reading experiences and received similar literary information, so we ended up in the same writing direction.

It not only contains the historical situation, customs, politics, military, products and other contents of each country, it is equivalent to a "white paper" today, which can be used as a reference for Li Shimin's strategy in the Western Regions; it also records his various bizarre encounters along the way. , for example, he was once kidnapped on the Ganges River. The locals wanted to burn him to death and sacrifice him to heaven. The fire was lit, but suddenly it rained heavily and the fire was extinguished. So the local people who were making sacrifices thought that the monk must be protected by gods and Buddhas, so they let him go. I read these stories and found them very interesting. There is a lot of room for literary imagination in them.

Southern Weekend: Sometimes we may be misled by the image of Monk Tang in "Journey to the West". Xuanzang in history was by no means a weak man, let alone a nerd. To survive, you should have quite amazing physical strength and willpower.

Chen Jian: Yes, I think Xuanzang is actually a bit similar to Pei Ye in "Into the Wild" in this aspect.

Xuanzang had many interesting things on his way westward. Let me give you another example. In the last case in my second book "Kings of the Western Regions", the tragedy of the poisoning of the Tocharian king Yudushe was an event that Xuanzang personally experienced and witnessed in history. This is where the idea for my novel came from. We used to say that Tang Monk and his disciple Xitian had ninety-nine and eighty-one hardships to obtain Buddhist scriptures. Many of the ordeals experienced by Master Xuanzang in history were real cases, so I used Xuanzang as the character. A detective character re-enters his journey to the West from the perspective of a detective, so "Eighty-one Difficulties in Learning the Scriptures" becomes "Eighty-one Cases of Journey to the West".

html A group photo of the main creators of the 186 CCTV version of "Journey to the West". Data map

Southern Weekend: Regarding the literary imagination of Xuanzang’s journey to the west, the most famous work is the novel "Journey to the West". If "Journey to the West" turns Xuanzang's journey to the west into a legend and a demon, then Your "Eighty-One Cases of Journey to the West" attempts to bring these characters back into history and reality. For example, the character prototypes of Sun Wukong, Zhu Bajie, and Sha Seng appear in your novels. Are they all historical figures?

Chen Jian: According to my setting, the prototype of Sun Wukong is Ah Shu in "The Chronicles of Kings of the Western Regions". He is a child who has been sealed in a bottle his whole life. Although Sun Wukong and Ah Shu are both short in stature, they have great supernatural powers and have devil-like skills. As for the prototype of Zhu Bajie, he is Prince Qu Zhisheng of Gaochang. In the novel, his love for Princess Longshuang appears to be paranoid and crazy. Zhu Bajie also has similar characteristics, so I combined them together. Monk Sha was originally a rolling curtain general in front of the Jade Emperor, equivalent to a court official. I assigned him to Wang Xuance, the envoy of the Tang Dynasty, and the Eight Hundred Miles of Liusha River was accordingly changed to Moheyan. moraine. It is probably such a relationship between adaptation and correspondence. Generally speaking, I deconstructed the world of gods and demons in "Journey to the West" and restored it to a real world. Among them, the historical characters correspond to the characters in the novel "Journey to the West", and it is also out of a playful mentality. I want to connect the readers' imagination and memory about the world view of "Journey to the West" with the characters and plots in my series of novels. Let readers experience the fun of solving puzzles while reading. At the same time, the specific historical events in the novel are all true. In particular, the details of the year in which Xuanzang set off, when and where he went, and who he met, etc., all strictly follow historical records.

In August 2024, the first domestic 3A single-console game "Black Myth: Wukong" sparked heated discussions. The picture shows the restoration of the protagonist's image in the game on a graffiti wall in Xiangyang, Hubei in September. icphoto

Southern Weekend: "Journey to the West", as the most representative novel about oriental gods and demons, carries a set of oriental mythology and aesthetic system.Many fantasy settings in your novels come from the Western cultural system that we are familiar with. For example, the story of the "King David's Vase" and the Devil in the Vase in the second "Kings of the Western Regions" comes from "One Thousand and One Nights" ", the story about Kuimulang in the fourth part "The Dunhuang Incident of the Tang Dynasty" also has the color of Western human-wolf legend. Why did you think of using these Western elements to adapt Xuanzang's story? In addition, the recently very popular game "Black Myth: Wukong" also uses some Western mythology and aesthetic styles to adapt the characters and storylines in "Journey to the West", which has triggered some discussions. What do you think of this issue?

Chen Jian: "Journey to the West" is of course a novel about Eastern gods and demons, but it is essentially a story structure about going to the West to learn scriptures, so it will inevitably bring in some foreign culture, Indian culture, etc. I think "Journey to the West" is equivalent to a window for ancient Chinese folk readers to "open their eyes and see the world". A group of people in the farming civilization are fixed in the land where they were born and raised, but they also long to see the outside world. Understand different cultures, so I use this novel to imagine the world.

In this sense, the addition of Western aesthetic elements to "Black Myth: Wukong" supplements and improves the novel "Journey to the West". Because at the time when "Journey to the West" was written, Wu Chengen's understanding of the outside world was still very limited, and in many cases he was just imagining it. For example, in the novel "Journey to the West", it is written that the four masters and apprentices set out from Chang'an, passed through the Hexi Corridor, and walked to Wusizang, which is today's Tibet. This is impossible on the actual geographical route, which shows that the author has a deep understanding of the geography of this area. I don’t understand at all, let alone the customs of the Western Regions, the Middle East, Persia and India. The 1986 version of the TV series "Journey to the West" directed by Yang Jie has actually tried to make up for this shortcoming. For example, the makeup of the Jade Rabbit from Tianzhu in the drama intentionally incorporated some Indian styles, but overall the degree of integration is not enough. .

Today in the 21st century, we should use richer knowledge and a deeper understanding of Western culture and aesthetics to retell the story of Journey to the West. In particular, the audience of the game "Black Myth: Wukong" is players from all over the world. We should do both localization and globalization. This is the real "Journey to the West Spirit", which is a A highly open, tolerant, and exploratory spirit.

"There must be a sense of historical and cultural atmosphere"

The Bozhalizi City recorded by Xuanzang in "The Records of the Western Regions of the Tang Dynasty" is today Patna, the capital of Bihar state in India. Visual China

Southern Weekend: Your novel contains a lot of content about the political diplomacy and military espionage of the Tang Dynasty. It seems that it was an era when the diplomatic situation and geopolitics were very complex?

Chen Jian: is indeed quite complicated. For example, when Xuanzang traveled to the west, the Tang Dynasty was surrounded by the East Turks, Gaochang, and West Turks to the west, and Persia to the south. There were many small countries among them. They were full of diplomatic struggles and even military wars with each other. Persia was even defeated by the Arabs until it was destroyed. , the geopolitical landscape is very confusing. In South Asia, India was also divided into north and south at that time. During the period of King Harsha, northern India was unified and became a powerful country. However, after King Harsha's death, the country fell apart, which lasted only a few decades. There is also Tubo, which we are more familiar with, which is today's Tibet area. Tubo began to rise during the Songtsen Gampo period. Generally speaking, it was an era of great reshuffle of the world political landscape, with the rise, decline, division, usurpation, and destruction of various forces one after another. Xuanzang was wandering in such a land at that time.

Southern Weekend: In "Journey to the West: Eighty-one Cases", people seem to generally respect Xuanzang very much. No matter what ethnic group or class they are, they will not kill Xuanzang easily. That's why Xuanzang was able to avert danger at many critical moments.Was this because countries in the Western Regions generally respected Buddhism and eminent monks at that time, or was it because they were more wary of the close relationship between Xuanzang and Emperor Li Tang in terms of diplomacy and military affairs?

Chen Jian: This question is very interesting. You observed that Xuanzang often saved the day from danger, as if he was under the protection of Li Shimin and the Tang Dynasty, but this is actually a fictional plot by me. Because historically Xuanzang did not know Li Shimin before his journey to the West. He was smuggled out. We feel that he seems to be a monk sent by the Tang Dynasty official to obtain scriptures. This is completely the impression left by the novel "Journey to the West". In fact, the more important reason is Xuanzang's journey to the west. Most of the countries along the way worship Buddhism. For countries that worship Buddhism, killing an eminent monk at will is a very serious matter, so what really protects Xuanzang is his status as a monk. . Of course, religion is basically treated as a cultural phenomenon in my novels.

Southern Weekend: Writing history requires a lot of desk work and reading accumulation. What kind of preparation did you make when writing?

Chen Jian: Every time I write a book, I have to read almost two years of historical documents. Only when I have sorted out the entire era, history, and geography clearly can I dare to write. Especially when I was writing the third part, "The Brahma Chronicles of the Tang Dynasty", because the story takes place in the two countries of India and Pakistan, and the historical materials of these two countries are very lacking, they do not have strong historical writing like China. Tradition, many of them are recorded in Buddhist scriptures, and it is difficult to use them as historical records. This brought me a very big challenge in finding historical materials. At that time, I had a certain understanding of Indian history at that time based on Xuanzang's own "Records of the Western Regions of the Tang Dynasty" and "The Biography of Tripitaka of the Great Ci'en Temple", as well as some research monographs and archaeological reports by Western historical scholars. The biggest problem in the early stage of writing historical mystery novels is that it requires a lot of historical knowledge to support it. Without mastering enough materials, it will be difficult to write history.

Southern Weekend: Your "Journey to the West: Eighty-One Cases" on the one hand has very solid and hard-core knowledge of ancient Chinese history and geography, and on the other hand it is fully internationalized - it is already available in Japanese, Thai and other languages. The translation is also the first Chinese mystery novel shortlisted for the "Japan Mystery Writers Association Award". Are you worried that too hard-core historical and cultural knowledge will create barriers for overseas readers to read and understand the story?

Chen Jian: I don’t think so. Just like when we read "The Da Vinci Code", it involved a lot of historical knowledge about Catholicism, which we actually didn’t understand very well, but this did not affect our appreciation of the whole story. For foreign readers, the first thing that attracts them is good-looking stories, and historical knowledge is hidden in the stories. If our historical mystery novels want to go global, they must have a sense of our nation's traditional historical and cultural atmosphere, and cannot just be satisfied with telling a story that can be placed anywhere. This is a process of subtle influence. Of course, if there are readers who are very interested in reading the novel and want to delve into the Chinese history, geography and culture in it, that would be even more welcome to me.