Quick Answer: What Is A Perfect Crime About?
*A Perfect Crime* (下面，我该干些什么, Xiàmiàn, Wǒ Gāi Gàn Xiē Shénme) is a short novel by A Yi (阿乙, Ā Yǐ). A nineteen-year-old in provincial China kills a school friend and goes on the run. He tells his own story, so the reader knows early who did it and spends the rest of the book trying to understand why he would do it.[1][2][4]
- The plot: The pursuit turns into a contest the young man wants to keep playing.
- The voice: He can tell us what he did in detail, while a convincing reason for doing it remains elusive.
- The Chinese title: It asks what he should do next, a question that sounds different once you know what he has done.
His ability to plan a crime only makes his account of its purpose more unsettling.
The suspense begins after you already know who the killer is. Every move he narrates leaves the larger question open.
What Happens in A Perfect Crime?
A high-school student invites a friend to his home and kills her. She is a talented violinist. The murder is part of a plan he has put together himself, and he leaves town afterward. Flight gives him something immediate to think about: he has to decide where to go and what to do if the police get close.[1][2]
The pursuit takes a turn that reveals what he wants from it. After eluding the authorities, the young man deliberately lets the police know where to look. The chase he appeared to want to escape has become something he wants to prolong. The book has elements of a pursuit thriller, but it uses them to ask why a person would create a threat to give shape to his own days.[2][5]
What the First-Person Narrator Lets Us See
The narrator can describe his preparations and anxieties. He can also decide where our attention goes. Planning, flight and the prospect of capture give him things to talk about at a pace that can draw a reader in. The person he kills, by contrast, has little room to explain her own experience. It is worth pausing over the fact that she is a musician with a life apart from the crime. Her friendship and talent reach us through the telling of someone who has made her part of his plan.[1][2][4]
The harder question for the reader is what to accept about the narrator’s explanation of himself. The account sounds coherent in part because he decides which events to put next to each other. It still comes from him. Lu Xun’s A Madman’s Diary offers a different use of that gap between a narrator’s account and what a reader can infer. Lu Xun provides an outer frame that lets a second voice judge the diarist.
Why Boredom Explains Only Part of the Crime
The young man has a routine and seems unable to imagine much beyond it. A task as extreme as the one he sets himself gives him a sequence of problems that demand his attention. That reading makes sense of why he would go on pursuing danger. It still leaves a gap between feeling trapped in a routine and deciding another person should die.[2][5]
The setting makes the narrowness of his world tangible, but his account gives us one young man’s relation to the place where he lives. Lu Yao’s Ordinary World offers a contrast in scale. Its account of education, labor and aspiration follows families and communities over a much longer span. In A Yi’s short novel the reader spends most of the time inside one person’s narrowing account of what is possible.
How the Chinese and English Titles Change the Question
The Chinese title can be translated “What should I do next?” It could be an ordinary question asked by someone who has finished a task. In the novel, the same question sounds alarming because each answer can make the next step worse. *A Perfect Crime* brings a different expectation. It makes you look for the precision in a plan and wonder what the killer thinks perfection would be. Avoiding the police and seeking their attention point to very different measures of success.[1][2][3]
FAQs About A Perfect Crime
Is A Perfect Crime based on a true story?
A Yi has said that a 2006 case involving a young man who killed a classmate was one starting point. He also drew on a period of isolation in his own life. He used both as material for fiction.[3]
Who translated A Perfect Crime into English?
Anna Holmwood translated the novel. Oneworld published the English translation in 2015. Later paperback listings may show a different publication date.[1][2]
Sources
[1] Simon & Schuster. A Perfect Crime, Point Blank paperback listing
[2] English PEN. A Perfect Crime, translator and English publication details
[3] China Writers. Interview with A Yi about his sources and writing
[4] Fujian Provincial Library. A guide to the Chinese edition
[5] World Literature Today. A Perfect Crime by A Yi