Do you know the meaning of “white night”? White night is the phenomenon of the sun not going down below the horizon, at a high latitude, in summer. In the novel White Night, two characters’ lives look like a white night.
Ryo-ji and Yoki-ho experience their first love with each other. However, one day Ryo-ji witnesses a scene in which his father has sex with Yoki-ho, who has been forced into prostitution by her mother. He then kills his father by stabbing him with scissors and kills his mother to conceal his crime. Yoki-ho kills her mother by opening a gas pipe and letting the gas leak. The murders gradually make the two characters’ lives miserable.
After killing their parents, they promise they will not meet until the statute of limitations on their crimes has run out. However, when Yoki-ho goes to university, she falls in love with another person. Ryo-ji feels that his life has become empty without Yoki-ho. However, the man whom Yoki-ho loves likes Eriko, who was born in a happy family. As she is envious of Eriko, Yoki-ho comes back to Ryo-ji. Through this experience, she feels her life does not have any meaning without him. Thereafter, they come to live together.
At approximately the same time, Detective Sasakaki, the police officer investigating the murders, discovers their crimes and tries to discover how the crime occurred. However, after finding out why they committed the murders, he feels sorry for their situation and a responsibility to take care of them. Sasakaki falls into a dilemma over whether to prosecute Ryo-ji or not, as he realizes that Ryo-ji always protects Yoki-ho. He finds that the only way Ryo-ji and Yoki-ho can be free from the dark lives they have lived is to arrest Ryo-ji so that they can move on. Finally, Sasakaki arrests him, but he realizes that the prosecution will take place before the statute of limitations has run out, and if he is found guilty, there will be no-one to protect Yoki-ho. However, before the trial can take place, Ryo-ji, suffering from a guilty conscience, kills himself.
White Night explains in detail how the concealment of a crime can be connected to a series of other crimes. Ryo-ji wanted to protect Yoki-ho from the pain inflicted by his father, and Yoki-ho also wanted to protect Ryo-ji, whose crimes stem from his sincere love. When I first started reading this book, I felt it difficult to stop reading. A movie based on the book is going to be released soon in Korea. If you read it first, though, you can understand its sad story more completely, sympathize more with the two characters, and experience their feelings as though they were your own.
