[Zhihu question]
Who has read the Japanese mystery novel The Scream by Akira Hamanaka?
I think the label “women” makes the frame around The Scream too small.
Is The Scream really only about the way women fare in a jungle society? What it actually depicts is the fate of any ordinary person of mediocre ability and bad luck in this jungle society, regardless of gender.
Whether man or woman, if someone is as mediocre as Yoko, the protagonist of The Scream, lacking good luck and resources, how likely are they to escape a destiny of inevitable failure and pull off a comeback in life?
The answer The Scream gives is: within the bounds of the law, there is no chance.
For an ordinary person with neither ability nor luck on their side, no matter how hard they struggle within the legal framework, along the “sunlit road” on the bright side of society, it is very hard to escape an easy-prey fate—just look at what happens to Yoko in the first half of the book.
When I read The Scream, I couldn’t help thinking about investing in the stock market. Nearly every stock-investing guide on the market treats “diversifying risk” as the number-one golden rule, insisting that you mustn’t put all your eggs in one basket. We small-time investors can’t afford much turbulence, so we have to spread out our positions: put a little here, a little there, so we don’t lose the shirt off our backs.
But take a look at those world-famous investment tycoons and stock-market gods. Name one who got filthy rich by diversifying risk. Without exception, they seized a handful of limited opportunities, took enormous risks, went all in, and got filthy rich. Even Buffett, who is always telling small-time investors to buy ETFs instead of individual stocks, has kept most of his money concentrated in just a few individual stocks from beginning to end. In reality, he has spent his whole life going all in.
Life is like the stock market. You don’t turn your fortunes around by accumulating a string of low-risk “small opportunities.” You do it by seizing one or two limited “big opportunities” and going all in—either you die without a trace, or you stage a spectacular comeback.
Beneath every successful person’s feet lie the bones of their own selves in parallel universes who went all in and lost the bet.
So how can an ordinary person seize a big opportunity and go all in? Without extraordinary talent or the kind of absurd luck that comes from being blessed by a koi fish, even if an ordinary person has the courage to go all in, they can’t find an opportunity to do it. Everywhere you look, there are overcrowded red oceans; everywhere you look, there are sickles waiting to harvest the easy prey. Whichever road you choose, you either put in a hundred units of effort for one unit of return, or end up battered and humiliated.
The more I thought about it, the more it seemed that for a mediocre, unlucky ordinary person, there may have been only one “blue ocean” all along where going all in could turn their life around: the outside-the-law territory. The outside-the-law territory is an eternal “blue ocean”: the law keeps out 99% of the competitors for criminals and blocks 99% of the sickles from reaching them. In fact, the central idea of The Scream is nothing more than that familiar joke: All the profitable businesses are written into the Criminal Code.
The sad fact is that the only chance a mediocre person may have to turn the tables is crime.
This is exactly the epiphany Yoko has in the middle of The Scream, after the great upheaval that befalls her.
It’s not that men or women “get rich as soon as they turn bad”; it’s that for an ordinary person to get rich, turning bad may be the only way.
The cover copy of The Scream says:
The self-pity of the gifted is the swan song; the collapse of the mediocre is the beast’s scream.
As if afraid that readers might miss the book’s tragic atmosphere.
But is Yoko’s ending really a tragedy?
“The scream” can be a howl of despair,
but it can also be a full-throated cry after being reborn.
Which one do you think it is?
I think it is both.
Sink, Yoko. Once you fall into the abyss, the abyss will eventually swallow you whole.
Run, Yoko. The world in the shadows may be just as vast, with skies broad enough for you to race freely across it.
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