What Constitutes a Mystery?

           Stories where bad things happen are stories that deal with painful emotions. Many times, when terrible things happen to the characters I love, I believe I feel their pain. On the surface, this doesn’t exactly make sense. Why would anyone willingly subject themselves to negative emotions? The same phenomenon happens with sad songs—we intentionally wallow in negative emotions, and amplify them. For many people, it seems, this is a way to appreciate the positive emotions in life. For me specifically, I don’t look to stories of woe to appreciate my own life and standing. In fact, if the story is good and I don’t put it down, my personal life should drop away. I should lose contact with myself and merge into the character’s experiences. Sure, when I put the book down I will have a new perspective on my life, but we aren’t talking about getting new perspectives on our lives, we’re talking about why we like stories where bad things happen.

For me specifically, I look to stories where bad things happen because I am interested in finding the deepest depths of emotions. Emotions motivate my reading, and I won’t try to pretend that logic plays any role in literature. Emotions are the driving force behind everything, even if they are sometimes disguised or downplayed, because apparently emotions can be a sign of weakness or lack of intellectual rigor—a belief to which I never ascribed. Emotions motivate my reading, and when I encounter bad things in literature, I like to go as deeply as I can into the emotion. Rage, jealousy, sorrow are all too important to be simply the opposite of joy, or the shadow that gives joy its light.

As many have said, there are many little mysteries that make us continue reading the story. Why does Komura’s wife leave him? How could the sisters spot him when he wasn’t holding the box? I’m partially inclined to believe that seasoned detective readers as we are, once small details stop making sense, we begin to believe that every discrepancy is important. They aren’t important, but they prove a very useful element of style in the story.

Perhaps my easy way out answer to this question is that the mystery is what makes something a mystery? The story seems to ask how much importance and what must be at stake for a discrepancy to make us antsy, to urge us forward in a story. Though this may seem like me asking the genie for more wishes, I do think this can be a valid reading, considering the story is built on unanswered questions.