With Rhyme and Reason: Yokomizo Seishi's Postwar Murder Mysteries

The 1920s and 1930s were a fertile period for Japanese detective fiction. The genre, which enjoyed its first spurt of popularity in the 1880s and 1890s with the pioneering translations of Western detective stories by journalist-turned-translator Kuroiwa Ruikô (1862-1920), had since developed a strong following, especially among urban youth, as the literary exemplar of urbane modernity. Magazines devoted to detective fiction proliferated as stories of sensational murders and brilliant deductions found their way into the literary mainstream. Shinseinen [New youth] (1920-50), for example, the most fashionable general interest magazine of the time, regularly published Japanese translations of Western detective fiction and original stories by native authors not only in its regular issues but also in its biannual supplemental issues.¹

The genre continued to thrive until the late 1930s when changes in the political climate and Japan's increased involvement in continental affairs made it difficult for authors and publishers to justify works portraying "immoral" or "decadent" acts of crime and intrigue that ran counter to the ideology of the state. By the start of the Pacific War, the genre entered a period of creative hibernation not only because of the increased reach of censorship but also the increased pressure for self-censorship. Although the consumption of detective fiction persisted, the production of new works, both original and translated, waned. Some authors lent their talents to the war effort, while others stopped writing altogether.

The end of World War II brought detective fiction writers back to the genre to pick up where they had left off. When describing the status of the genre in the immediate postwar period, critics unanimously point out its healthy resurgence.² However, the same critics tend to be vague about what exactly was new in Japanese detective stories from the late 1940s. Nor do they attempt to describe the effect of the experience of war on authors, their postwar works, and the genre as a whole. In trying to restore the genre to its prewar prominence, many of the authors who had been active in the genre in the prewar period recycled the plots, characters, and devices that had earned them success in years past.

A prominent exception is Yokomizo Seishi (1902-81), whose contributions to the genre have been considerable-a prestigious literary prize is awarded in his name and many of his stories have been adapted regularly for television and cinema-but whose works have so far received little or no scholarly attention in either Japanese or English. His novels, especially those featuring the eccentric detective Kindaichi Kôsuke, suggest that Yokomizo did not simply rehash old styles and storylines like many of his counterparts; rather, these works demonstrate the virtuosity with which Yokomizo could manipulate the existing rules of the genre and the conventions of Western detective fiction to introduce to postwar Japanese readers a new type of murderer who could kill anyone at any time for no comprehensible reason.

In Gokumontô [Gokumon Island; literally, Hell's Gate Island] (1947), Yokomizo's first postwar novel to be set in postwar Japan, the author takes a cue from his Western predecessors in creating a killer, who by killing seemingly innocent victims not out of any personal motive but according to something more impersonal and arbitrary, embodies the turbulent postwar world of rural Japan. This article will show how Yokomizo in Gokumontô emulates and reconfigures "nursery rhyme" murders, a subgenre of Western detective fiction made popular by authors such as S. S. Van Dine (1888-1939) and Agatha Christie (1890-1976) in which killings are staged as scenes from famous nursery rhymes or performed according to widely known sayings or lyrics. Yokomizo translates their conventions into a Japanese idiom-namely, the form and practice of haiku poetry. In creating a seemingly mad killer whose only motive appears to be turning murder into an aesthetic experience by using the victims to recreate scenes from famous haiku, Yokomizo exposes the levels of fear and madness latent in rural Japanese life and plays on the anxieties (Yokomizo's own and possibly those of his contemporary audiences) that followed...