I am a literary giant in Japan

1998 12 Month 5 Day.

Tokyo District Court, Chiyoda-ku, Tokyo.

After several hours of fierce fighting, the almost exhausted Toshiyuki Karasawa finally walked out of the court unscathed.

The medical malpractice lawsuit that had plagued him for nearly a month finally came to an end with him and the University of Tokyo Hospital winning the case with the help of Health, Labor and Welfare Minister Naoto Kan and elite lawyer Hiroshi Yamaguchi.

Of course, winning the case is only a superficial result shown to the public.

The public cursed the verdict and the media criticized it.

But in fact, for the participants of the case, this is the best win-win outcome.

One of the defendants, Dongda Affiliated Hospital, has retained its reputation as a top hospital;
Another defendant, Toshiyuki Karasawa, also retained his reputation and his position as a full professor;
The Ministry of Health, Labor and Welfare, the Ministry of Labor and other government departments also avoided the possibility of being overwhelmed;
On the plaintiff's side, the deceased received a free permanent cemetery, and the deceased's family received a total of nearly 1000 million yen in medical compensation.

Originally, the families of the deceased wanted more and threatened to bring disgrace to Tang Ze Minxing.

But under the pressure of huge interests and power institutions, they chose to compromise.

After this battle, Tang Ze Toshiyuki, who almost lost his future and his beloved, finally saw the true nature of the towering white tower.

Once upon a time, he was also one of the crazy people climbing the White Tower. It was not until now that he realized that money, fame, and women are just clouds after all.

Just as Mr. Kitagawa said.

The most important thing for a person is to be alive.

The second thing is how to live a good life in the future.

"Thank you so much for your help, Lawyer Yamaguchi." At the entrance of the court, Toshiyuki Karasawa, unafraid of the flash lights and contemptuous looks of a bunch of reporters, solemnly shook Hiroshi Yamaguchi's hand and kept expressing his gratitude.

If it weren't for Mr. Kitagawa's introduction, an elite lawyer like Hiroshi Yamaguchi, who is extremely careful about his reputation, would never have defended a "tainted doctor" like him.

There is always money to be made, but if your reputation is ruined, it will be difficult for you to make any progress in the industry.

"Well, it's just a small favor. Professor Tang Ze, let's have dinner together again when you are free."

Hiroshi Yamaguchi's reaction was lukewarm. After the lawsuit, he had a lot of follow-up events to deal with, and they were very troublesome.

If Mr. Kitagawa had not come in person and the Minister of Health, Labor and Welfare, His Excellency Naoto Kan, had not guaranteed him, he would never have been willing to defend Toshiyuki Karasawa, who was bound to lose.

Even though he won the medical lawsuit and achieved a complete victory, he still got into trouble.

It seems that Mr. Kitagawa wants to take him under his wing and train him as his own?
This is Hiroshi Yamaguchi's own judgment.

Among some people who are currently closely related to the Kitagawa Group, he, Tetsutaro Mori, Shigeo Nishiguchi, Shunji Iwai, Masato Chihara and others are already recognized as the direct descendants of Kitagawa.

Although more than half of them do not actually work for the Kitagawa Group, their relationship with Kitagawa Hide is even closer than that of some senior executives of the Kitagawa Group.

It seems that Toshiyuki Karasawa is also going to join this sequence, which is the core reason why Hiroshi Yamaguchi is willing to help him with all his strength.

If we become colleagues in the future, we will be just like the staff under the daimyo in the Warring States Period, we will prosper together and suffer together, and we will become a community of interests.

Toshiyuki Karasawa saw that Hiroshi Yamaguchi didn't want to have much interaction with him at the moment, so he parted ways with him at the court gate.

Back in the car, he put his hands on the steering wheel, took several deep breaths, and then took out his cell phone.

After hesitating for several times, Toshiyuki Karasawa finally did not call Kitagawa Hide, but stepped on the accelerator and sped towards Maruzen Marunouchi Bookstore near Tokyo Station.

It was almost lunchtime and the morning rush hour on the Tokyo subway had passed, but public transportation around Maruzen Marunouchi Bookstore was still shockingly congested.

A large number of men and women in various clothes came from all directions, all with the same goal, that large bookstore that was already crowded!

Ziyi, the manager of Tokyo's No. 1 Kitagawa-loving bookstore, was directing the male employees to unload box after box of unopened copies of Volkswagen from the truck.

A group of female interns led by Kyoko stood in the bookstore, responsible for either guiding customers into the store or pushing books and explaining special offers.

Maruzen Marunouchi Bookstore is one of the largest bookstores in the Tokyo metropolitan area. Its mission is to "provide readers with the best quality books in Japanese literature."

But in fact, under the strong request of this "tyrant" store manager, Maruzen Marunouchi Bookstore has long become the largest "Kitagawabuki" bookstore in Tokyo.

The front shelf of the bookstore is filled with books such as "Literature and Art", "Beichuan", and "Dazhong". The rows of bookshelves further back are filled with various novels published by Mr. Beichuan since 1995.

When readers think that they can see novels other than "Kitagawa Hide" by walking to other bookshelves, they will find that the rows of bookshelves over there are still single volumes of various Kitagawa Hide novels, but with different publishers and versions.

However, this behavior did not arouse the disgust of readers. Instead, it attracted a large number of book lovers who were also die-hard fans of Kitagawa Hide, flocking to the place, completely turning this place into a holy place of pilgrimage for Kitagawa Hide fans!

After getting off the car and walking to Maruzen Marunouchi Bookstore, Toshiyuki Karasawa was shocked by the scene in the bookstore.

After No Longer Human became a hit, he, who had just been promoted to assistant professor, heard in the Medical Bureau that Kitagawa's offline book fan organization was a bit like a cult, with a large number of people coming and going every time, and its momentum was even greater than that of the Labor Union during the Spring Fight.

At that time, because of the Aum Shinrikyo cult, many lower-class people committed suicide or died mysteriously every day, and the First Surgery Department of the Tokyo University Hospital had endless surgical operations to perform.

For this reason, Toshiyuki Karasawa even complained about cults, and he did not have a good impression of similar book fan groups.

Seeing it with his own eyes, Tang Ze Toshiyuki realized that although these people were fanatical, they were not as scary as cultists. He then realized that he had many misunderstandings about Kitagawa's book fans.

And before I knew it, I had become one of them.

"Please give me a copy of the December issue of 'Mass Magazine'." Toshiyuki Karasawa came up to Kyoko and took out a 12 yen bill.

"Okay, 550 yen. Here's your change."

Kyoko handed the magazine to the middle-aged man in front of her who looked a little tired, and then swiftly took out change from the cash register. But when she looked up, Toshiyuki Karasawa had already walked out of the store.

"What a weirdo." She muttered a few words, put the remaining change aside, and served the next reader who came to pay.

Outside the bookstore, Tang Ze Toshiyuki couldn't wait to open the transparent cover and started flipping through "The Masses" while walking in the cold wind.

The last plot of "White Tower" ended abruptly at a private gathering of a group of professors' wives called "Red Cross".

This is also a unique interpersonal communication custom in the Japanese workplace.

Men who are responsible for earning money and supporting their families fight on the front line in the workplace, while women who support them at home have a second-line battlefield that is like the rear.

Whether in the financial, manufacturing or medical industries, the wives of employees are arranged in order according to their husbands' positions in the company, forming a so-called "wives club" to get together from time to time, or participate in training courses such as tea art, painting, and flower arrangement together.

The wives of the professors working at the Affiliated Hospital of Dongda University are also well-known figures in the hospital, so the "Professors' Wives Association" is called the "Red Association".

At the end of the previous chapter, a total of 130 wives of professors and associate professors from the clinical and basic research groups attended this annual event together.

The ladies were all dressed up and chatting about their daily lives.

"Among them, four or five were wearing old-fashioned suits and shabby brooches. They were professors' wives whose husbands studied bacteriology, anatomy, forensics and other unpopular disciplines, and who belonged to the basic medical school.

Compared with the wives of popular professors such as Zaizen and Dong, they seemed like country women from the countryside, completely out of place and looking restless every minute.

Professor Higashi's wife, Higashi Masako, looked at the women in front of her, thinking that after the wife of Medical Dean Ukai was elected as the Secretary-General, she would definitely be named as the Deputy Secretary-General, and she couldn't help feeling proud.

Professor Dong once laughed at her about this matter, "So what if you are elected as the deputy director-general of the Professors' Wives Association?"

However, in Higashi Masako's mind, the power distribution in the Professors' Wives Club represents the power distribution of the professors in the hospital, and it can also be used to glimpse the situation of the struggle between the various parties.

It was also for this reason that Azuma Masako was willing to be inferior to the wife of Medical Dean Ukai, who was far inferior to her in family background, education and appearance, and to be her deputy to help her manage all the affairs of the Red Cross.

Mrs. Ukai slowly stood up from her seat and said: "Thank you all for your trust in me and for allowing me to serve as the Secretary-General again.

In order to prepare for the International Medical Congress to be held in Osaka in two years, I hope that everyone can have closer exchanges of knowledge and emotions.

Next I will appoint a deputy director general to assist me.'

She paused a little hesitantly, then said: "I would like to ask Professor Zaizen's wife for a favor."

Higashi Masako, who was full of confidence just now, felt that her beautiful expectations were completely shattered.

Suddenly, the feeling of being pushed into an abyss hit Azuma Masako's heart hard.

She suppressed her panic and listened to the speech of Professor Zaizen's wife, who was named as the deputy director-general in her place. Then, Mrs. Ukai spoke at length about the agenda for the year. She stared at her speech with a blank mind, as if she was watching a rapidly receding river.
She was not only worried about her own loss of power in the Professors' Wives Association, but also worried that all this reflected her husband Dongzhen's loss of power in the hospital!"

Toshiyuki Karasawa, who never paid attention to or cared about the so-called professor's wife, felt his heart suddenly skip a beat when he read Azuma Masako's inner monologue.

It turns out that when I was fighting for power in the hospital, these women were also living in fear of it?
His heart ached even more when he thought that his wife had never revealed any of her anxieties and worries to him until the moment she died.

If I had realized it earlier and paid more attention to her physical and mental health, would she have not been delayed until the late stage of cancer?
Exhaling a breath of white air in the cold wind, Tang Ze Toshiyuki found that he had unknowingly walked through the parking lot and arrived at a small park.

In the children's playground of the park, several elementary school students were running happily, as if the cold weather had no effect on them at all.

Tang Ze Toshiyuki suddenly didn't want to go back to the parking lot, didn't want to go back to the car, and didn't want to go back to the empty mansion.

He just walked to a bench and sat down, continuing to watch "White Tower" in the biting cold wind.

Just like what happened to him in real life, in the novel, Goro Zaizen also caused the painful death of a terminally ill cancer patient due to negligence.

Such similar scenes one after another made Toshiyuki Karasawa think for a time that Mr. Kitagawa had borrowed his real events.

But he knew it wasn't.

Because this part of the manuscript was completed before his incident happened.

This is also one of the reasons why he admires Mr. Kitagawa so much.

Before writing workplace novels, Mr. Kitagawa actually entered the industry, investigated, delved into it, and researched it, so that he could write so realistically and thoroughly.

In the novel, Shuji Satoma, who reported Goro Zaizen and insisted on testifying in court for the family of the deceased, was demoted to a rural hospital in Shingu, Wakayama Prefecture.

Also because of Satoma Shuji's insistence on appearing in court, Zaizen Goro and Naniwa University Hospital, who could have easily gotten away with it, were completely put under fire.

After reading this passage, Tang Ze Minxing's breathing unconsciously became rapid.

In reality, there was no Satoma Shuji to "go against" him, and there were no such complicated and difficult patients' families to hold on to him.

Regardless of the truth of the matter, under the strong pressure from the University of Tokyo Hospital and the Ministry of Health, Labor and Welfare, the patient's family finally succumbed, took nearly 1000 million yen in compensation, and acquiesced to the "loss of the case."

How can Zaizen Goro, who has no power or influence in the novel and even those close to him are gradually distancing themselves from him, turn the tide?
Toshiyuki Karasawa could never imagine how Mr. Kitagawa would solve this difficult problem.

In short, he would never let Zaizen fail miserably.

Even though he didn't know much about literature, Toshiyuki Karasawa knew that if he wrote it that way, the "White Tower", which was almost deified, would become a boring novel that flattered the real "White Tower".

Zaizen, who came from poverty and changed his surname to marry into another family for the sake of his goals and power, and was willing to pay any price for the position of full professor, is what ordinary people can become.

And such a person would ultimately be unable to withstand the pressure of the "White Tower", which would be too despairing.

"die."

This word suddenly popped up in Tang Ze Toshiyuki's mind.

He remembered the night when he asked Mr. Kitagawa how he would write the ending of Goro Zaizen, and the other party blurted out this word.

Goro Zaizen will definitely die, but the question is what kind of death will be remembered in people's hearts and make it difficult for them to let go?
Thinking of this, he immediately turned to the next page. (End of this chapter)