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89 If censors wrote, what kind of fiction would they produce? In protest against the unfairness of censorship, writers have long entertained this thought experiment. Would the work of the censor be clean, innocuous, pure, and legally sanctioned, or maybe tantalizingly salacious, or perhaps boldly seditious? In February 1931, during the height of bans on literature in Japan, the former censor Tachibana Takahiro published a story in one of the genres that his office tended to suppress: crime fiction. The short story, appearing in the niche magazine Criminal Sciences under the title “The Ring in the Drawer,” is a tale of an affair in the exotic far reaches of the empire. Over drinks, the narrator, referred to as simply sensei, spins a yarn for his young student about how on his recent travels he was made the “toy” of a young, beautiful femme fatale. The two strangers met on a train. Both were traveling alone. Since they both would be taking the boat to Dairen anyway, she wondered if he would mind accompanying her. Lightheartedly they agreed to take on the guise of a married couple. The bewitched narrator could not believe his luck: “What a delight to be a hastily formed couple on a trip through Manchuria during this age of speed.”1 The overstimulated student listening to the tale begs to hear if the relationship was merely platonic. The sensei will only hint at a consummation: “So sensei are you telling me nothing at all out of the ordinary happened while you were on the boat?!” “Nothing out of the ordinary whatsoever. The two of us just stayed in a four passenger room.” . . . “Sensei I’m not asking you for a logbook of your voyage! I requested to hear of the life aboard ship.” 4. Seditious Obscenities 90 / Production “Oh, aboard ship we lived 100 percent as husband and wife.” “How succinct!” “You can say succinct, but the fact is that there is not anything else to say!” “No, I won’t admit to the need to pursue ‘anything else.’ Sensei, can I have another round? Please, another round.”2 So the “anything else” remains shrouded in sexual tension and mystery. But the sensei’s sexual escapades are the least of the story’s mysteries. The woman is the central enigma driving the narrative. Several aspects of her behavior are peculiar. She is traveling alone with more luggage than any one woman could possibly need. She claims it is her first time in Dairen but seems already to know it well. She insists on registering as a couple, but then quickly contrives to move into a separate room in the hotel. From her room window, sensei spies packages wrapped in newspaper being tossed out to strange men who wait below in the empty lot beside the hotel. Then sensei sees the woman, dressed in Chinese clothes, driving a getaway car. He knows he is being taken advantage of, but nothing of his has gone missing , and he cannot fathom how or why she is using him. The hook is set early in this page-turner, but the story never quite delivers on its early promise. As it turns out, the young lady is using the older man as a cover in her opium trafficking. Six months after he returns to Japan alone, sensei still is puzzled by his only memento of the affair, a ring from the beautiful young lady. Then, he receives a letter postmarked from Qiqihar containing only a newspaper clipping with the headline “The Strange Beauty, and Opium’s Great Secret Ring” and a likeness of his former object of desire. He takes the ring from his desk drawer, has it appraised, and realizes the ways he has been deceived. The financial profit seems to be his since the ring is valuable (it is worth 600 yen), but he still feels duped. Nevertheless, like many passive masochistic protagonists of Japanese literature at the time, he does not regret having played the toy for the beauty. In Tachibana’s memoirs of his time as a censor, published the following year as Everything Else Is Banned: The Memoirs of a Censor, he notes the prevalence of this sort of narrative in a section titled “Crimes Related to Smoking Opium.” He then explains the difference between the stories that are banned and those that ease past the censor. Crime procedurals are interesting, Tachibana tells his readers, because they give a window into an underworld that is seldom described...

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