Hollow CrossBy Keigo Higashino

The first thing I want to talk about Hollow Cross is the name itself, which is much more powerful than I thought when I had first glance at it. If you only finished the 2/3 parts of the book, you would think the “Hollow Cross” is about how useless the death penalty is for a criminal who has no fear of death and no shame of what he did. But when the story goes to the very end, where it tells the story of the other two adults putting themselves in a deep sense of guilt for thirty years for abandoning their new-born baby that they had when they were teenagers. They kept blaming themselves until they grew into two adults even though no one else knew what they had done, and no judgement could have possibly been made on them. And then the name “Hollow Cross” is more than something ironic to make fun of the meaningless judgement, it also represents the invisible cross made by people’s own willingness to keep themselves remembering the sin they had made, and in the front of people’s deep self-confession, the law seems useless again in another different aspect since people already took the action first before the law notices it.
After understanding the two different ways for the “Cross” being “Hollow”, it really made me want to take a seat and think about the law. For those who hold no feelings about committing crime and do not care about others’ and even their own lives, there should be other ways to give the punishment which would truly make the people care and feel sorry about what they did. And for those who had already suffered themselves from their own sense of guilt paid a lot for what they had done, should the law still keep its cold and fair judgement that would give the same weight of punishment to them to those who feel nothing about everything?