Spoiler alert: Suspense can keep us hooked to life

I recently began reading Butter, the much-talked-about Japanese novel about food and murder by author Asako Yuzuki. I chanced upon the book in one of those monthly reading lists, its blurb instantly drawing me in. It reads, "...inspired by the real case of the con woman known as 'The Konkatsu Killer', Butter is a vivid, unsettling exploration of misogyny, obsession, romance and the transgressive pleasures of food in Japan."

Barely 50 pages into the book, and I could not bear the suspense of the real story - who is the Konkatsu Killer, what were the details of her case, is she under trial, where & how, what was the media's reaction, and the general public sentiment? And so, I went down the Google rabbit hole and found out everything there is online about her. In the process, I also ended up, inadvertently, reading a spoiler-ridden review of the book.

I'm impatient, constitutionally so as those close to me point out – not with people or relationships, but with knowledge and knowing and not knowing. I cannot let a question remain unanswered, or just let a problem be until it naturally resolves itself. I do not thrive in uncertainties and I must prod and poke until I know why (I am not claiming this to be a wholly good trait and have been trying to treat uncertainty with respect).

But I can suspend this impatience while reading a novel, or watching a film. I love the thrill of the suspense, coming up with my predictions for where the author/director is taking me, how they might tell the story and what the resolution could be. I have the patience to see where things are going, and that got me thinking, is there a difference between suspense in literature and fiction, and suspense in life?

Would life's agitations and anxieties about what the future holds be laid to rest if we were to simply experience suspense as a storytelling tool that moves the plot forward?

Alfred Hitchcock's "bomb under the table" analogy makes the case for this splendidly. In a 1970 interview with the American Film Institute, the master of suspense explains the difference between surprise/shock and suspense.

He says:

"Four people are sitting around the table, talking about baseball or whatever you like. Five minutes of it, very dull. Suddenly, a bomb goes off, blows the people up. What does the audience have? 10 seconds of shock.

Now, take the same scene and tell the audience there is a bomb under that table that will go off in 5 minutes. The whole emotion of the audience is totally different because you have given them the information that in five minutes time, that bomb will go off. Now the conversation on baseball becomes very important because the audience is saying, don't be ridiculous, stop talking about baseball, a bomb is going to go off. You've got the audience working.

...But the bomb must never go off. Because if you do, you work that audience into a state and then they'll get angry because you haven't provided them with any relief and that's almost a must. So a foot touches the bomb, somebody looks down and says god, a bomb and throws it out the window and it goes off, just in time."

In other words, what Hitchcock is saying is that suspense is not being created because you don't know what's going to happen. Rather, it is that you do. It suggests that suspense is essentially what you experience as you wait for something to happen but you don't know how. You have the information. As you wait, and slog through the moments towards something significant happening, time ceases to be tedious and instead becomes thrilling. It explains why, despite the spoilers, I now find reading Butter even more pleasurable.

In real life, of course, this thrill only holds for positive suspense. The anticipation of the result of a job interview that went well, a trip planned months in advance, a wedding, starting college, watching Part 1 of a Netflix season knowing fully well that you must hang on the cliff for an entire month for Part 2. The Typing... when you wait for a text. The thrill and pleasure come from knowing that there is a happy resolution to most of these uncertainties. Just like Hitchcock's bomb that does not go off under the table.

It doesn't hold for negative suspense – a medical diagnosis for a parent that conveys some kind of finality, your imagining of a boss' reaction when you tell them you're quitting, the slow death of a long relationship.

The strange similarity between both types of real-life suspense is that we usually have some amount of information, we are waiting for something that we know is going to happen and still feel suspense with the same intensity. It manifests similarly even physiologically, in the beating hearts and knotting stomachs.

The two types of real-life suspense are also similar in that unlike literary suspense, in life, we expect to have some control over what happens next.

In literary suspense, we are in a world with borders and everything we feel in the suspenseful moments is relevant to the journey we take within those borders and to how that journey ends. We also trust that the author/director will end that story satisfactorily.

In life, however, we aren't dealing with stories as much as we are dealing with information – and there is an essential distinction, as Susan Sontag says.

"… stories, on the one hand, have, as their goal, an end, completeness, closure, and, on the other hand, information, is always, by definition, partial, incomplete, fragmentary."

The agitation and anxiety that come with suspense in life lie in the information we have about life's infinite possibilities, the what-ifs of all the roads not taken, and our illusion that, as with stories, we can assume life will also give us some kind of satisfactory closure and completeness.

It lies in our constant swaying between wanting our lives to be controlled by some all-powerful being (and therefore having something else to blame when things go wrong) and wanting free will, some way to change the course of things.

But, as established by so many thinkers and intellectuals before, we are but a speck in this gigantic universe and there is no way to fully comprehend all the causes nor determine their effects on our future. We are not in a novel/film that must function within borders but in a world where the future is opaque, infuriatingly uncertain and therefore frightening.

And, we have two ways to deal with that suspense – we can try to thrive in the thrill of the suspense, treat every day as a cliff-hanger episode and look forward to the next, or we can hope that our tender hearts have the strength to face all doubts and still believe that things turn out well in the future – both ways treat real-life suspense as merely a storytelling tool helping us move the plot forward and could perhaps teach us a thing or two about being alive.