The Pursuit

The Pursuit, originally titled Kimi yo Ikari no Kawa o Watare (Cross the River of Wrath), is a novel by the Japanese writer Juko Nishimura, published in 1975 and his best-known work. The story begins with an accusation on a Tokyo street: Du Qiu, an upright and sharp-minded elite prosecutor, is suddenly identified by a strange woman as a robber and rapist, and police soon find stolen rings and banknotes in his home. Realizing that he has been carefully framed, Du Qiu flees on the spot to clear his name, becoming a fugitive hunted both by the police and by the hidden hands behind the plot. On the run, he heads west from Tokyo toward Hokkaido, battling wind and snow in the wilderness, fighting a golden-brown bear for his life, crossing a bay by night, and riding into a street battle—narrowly surviving again and again. Along the way he saves the rancher's daughter Mayumi and comes to know Inspector Yamura, who has been pursuing him, and the two gradually turn from adversaries into comrades who respect each other. As his investigation deepens, Du Qiu discovers that the man who framed him is inextricably linked to a locked-room poisoning case he was investigating before his flight, and that he had fallen from the start into a trap laid with painstaking care by the murderer. The novel takes the tense contest of hunter and hunted as its main line, interweaving wilderness survival, criminal trickery, and social darkness, and creates the figure of a small man driven to the brink by the vast machinery of the state and a twisted fate yet never willing to bow his head. In 1976 the novel was adapted into a film of the same name starring Ken Takakura and Ryoko Nakano; released in China in 1978 under the title The Pursuit, it became a shared memory for a generation of Chinese viewers.