A Chinese podcast · Same story, 4 levels
东野圭吾走了：让全亚洲熬夜的推理之王，留下最后一部《永远的记忆》
Keigo Higashino Is Gone: The Man Who Kept Asia Up at Night Leaves One Last Novel, The Eternal Memory
About this story
An intermediate Chinese listening story on Keigo Higashino: the prolific mystery master who turned crime into stories of love and sacrifice died of colon cancer at 68, leaving a final Detective Galileo novel out August 5. HSK 5-6 Chinese listening practice.
This is an HSK 5-6 Chinese listening episode that runs about 2 minutes. The full Mandarin script is shown with tap-for-pinyin and a line-by-line English translation, so you can listen and read at once — comprehensible input in the sense of Stephen Krashen's i+1 theory. It teaches 11 key vocabulary words such as 作品、世界、离开 and walks through 3 grammar patterns, each explained in English with examples. The same news story is retold at 4 difficulty levels — use the level selector above to find the version that is challenging but still understandable for you.
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原文Read the complete story in Chinese. Reveal pinyin and English only when you need them.
English transcript reference
If you had to name one person in mystery fiction who "kept all of Asia up at night," it would most likely be Keigo Higashino.
Over the past few decades he wrote more than a hundred works — astonishingly prolific, yet nearly every one of them was good.
His gift was taking cold, hard criminal cases and turning them into stories about love, sacrifice, and human nature.
Journey Under the Midnight Sun, The Devotion of Suspect X, The Miracles of the Namiya General Store — for many Chinese readers, these titles are almost a part of their youth.
Countless people share the same kind of night: you mean to flip a few pages before bed, end up reading straight through to dawn, and long after closing the book you still can't quite come back to yourself.
Because they were so good, his novels were brought to the big screen again and again — in China, Japan, and Korea.
But just this month, the terrible news came.
On July 23rd, Keigo Higashino died of colon cancer, at the age of sixty-eight.
For readers all over the world, it felt like suddenly losing an old friend of many years.
Yet he still left a gentle goodbye.
The last full-length novel he finished before his death — The Eternal Memory, part of his Detective Galileo series — will be published on August 5th.
In other words, just two weeks after he left, readers can still look forward to one brand-new Higashino.
Some say the title, The Eternal Memory, reads almost like his final words to the world.
Stories end, and authors leave, but those nights he gave us — the ones that kept us up, the ones that made us cry — will be remembered forever.
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Try it without the transcript and notice what sounds clearer.
What vocabulary does this episode teach?
词汇写了一百多部作品 = wrote more than a hundred works.
对全世界的读者来说 = for readers all over the world.
就在他离开两周之后 = just two weeks after he left.
突然失去了一位老朋友 = suddenly losing an old friend.
关于爱、牺牲和人性的故事 = stories about love, sacrifice, and human nature.
一位陪伴多年的老朋友 = an old friend of many years.
推理小说这一行 = the field of mystery fiction.
因结肠癌去世 = died of colon cancer.
东野圭吾因结肠癌去世 = Higashino died of colon cancer.
享年六十八岁 = died at the age of sixty-eight.
最后一部长篇 = his last full-length novel.
* beyond level超纲词
What grammar patterns appear in this episode?
语法把 A 写成 B
把 A 写成 B = "turn A into B (through writing)".
把冷冰冰的案件，写成了一个个关于爱、牺牲和人性的故事。
正因为……
正因为 X = "precisely because X".
正因为好看，他的小说被一次次搬上大银幕。
就在……之后
就在 … 之后 = "just after …".
就在他离开两周之后，读者还能等到一本全新的东野圭吾。
Proper Nouns
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