Abstract
The method of grass snake and gray line(“草蛇灰线法”) is a narrative technique originating from Chinese classical novels, which connects events, appearing successive characters, forming readers’expectation horizons, and suggesting the trend of plots. It has been used by a lot of literary creators to write unexpected but reasonable articles. Journey under the midnight sun, considered as the peak work of the famous Japanese detective novelist Keigo Higashino, is a modern variant of the the method of grass snake and gray line. Its enduring artistic charm shows that this technique is not out of date. Through text mining and social network analysis, this paper restores the novel’s time axis, explores the characters’ appearance frequency and sequence, and draws social network maps, which makes the role factions clear at a glance and verifies the strong connection between the two main characters. The study shows that text mining and social network analysis still have more values to be exploited in exploring complex literary works. This paper fills in the current research gap in this field, predicting that after introducing more modern statistical techniques, literary research will break through the restrictions of qualitative analysis and open up a new paradigm for studying literary works.
Key words: The method of grass snake and gray line Journey under the midnightsun text mining social network analysis Two-mode network analysis