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119 C H A P T E R 5 Sexing the City Bodies and Space in the Work of Matsuo Yumi Here was a town of pregnant women. Women who had another life inside them could leave their homes and their jobs for a while, congregate here and live peacefully. It was a perfect environment, safe and secure. . . . Some called it a “people ranch,” and certain men called Balloon Town a form of sex discrimination. Such an advantageous living situation certainly had its charms, but there wasn’t a huge rush of people who wanted to live here. —Matsuo Yumi, Murder in Balloon Town Matsuo Yumi’s 1994 collection of short stories, Baruun Taun no satsujin (Murder in Balloon Town, 1994), is set in a Tokyo of the near future divided into special wards, each dedicated to a specific function such as industrial production or commercial activities. One of these is the Special Seventh Ward, nicknamed “Balloon Town”—a place designated for pregnant women who leave their homes and families to live in this ward before they give birth. The stories in Murder in Balloon Town focus upon the resolution of a crime through the discovery of one key clue, a discovery that requires the skills of a knowledgeable “insider.” In the first story, the eponymous “Murder in Balloon Town,” a man is stabbed to death in front of Balloon Town’s main gate, and Detective Eda Marina of the Tokyo Metropolitan Police is sent undercover to find the murderer. Assisted by her old college friend Kurebayashi Mio, a Balloon Town resident, Marina solves the crime by means of an unusual clue—the shape of a pregnant woman’s stomach. Each of the other stories in the collection follows a similar pattern, as Mio’s personal experience of pregnancy provides the key to a series of vexing mysteries until at last she gives birth to a little boy.1 Matsuo Yumi was known primarily as a science fiction writer until the publication of Murder in Balloon Town, which was billed as a “science fiction mystery.” Despite its futuristic setting, however, this collection of stories is firmly grounded in the traditions of detective fiction. In particular, Matsuo’s work emphasizes one of the defining aspects of that genre: its focus upon lived space—and more specifically upon the urban environment—not only as “context,” but also as a crucial aspect of the story itself. Indeed, the subject of Matsuo’s stories often seems to be a place—Balloon Town—rather than people and the mysteries surrounding them. This highly developed sense of space and attention to its many nuances and details serve in turn as the points of departure for a parodic critique of gender relations and politics in contemporary Japan. In this chapter, I will focus upon Matsuo’s detective fiction and its treatment of the central issues of “space,” the body, and the intersection of the two. Detective Fiction and City Spaces Detective fiction is concerned with the solution of a crime, the discovery and unmasking of the criminal, and the restoration of matters to the status quo. It is a genre that relies upon digging into the past, uncovering what had been concealed , and reconstructing what was lost from sight in order to reveal the truth “in light of reason” and to “inculcate a sense of order.”2 In particular, appearing as it did at the same time that Europe’s major cities were expanding, detective fiction has always been intimately linked to the urban environment.3 Rapid urbanization bred chaos and crime, making it a place unknowable and disordered —a place that required logic to restore order and detailed observation to gain useful knowledge about its hidden nooks and crannies. In the West, the detective story first appeared in the early 1840s, with a trio of short stories by Edgar Allen Poe. Set in Paris, Poe’s stories used the city streets to show the dangers of urban life. In particular, “The Mystery of Marie Roget” (1842–1843), which was based on the real life murder of Mary Rogers, a New York shop clerk, articulated the dangers that city streets posed to women and to public safety in general. In the stories of Arthur Conan Doyle, the dark, foggy streets of London, lit by street lamps, became indelibly associated with detective fiction. In Japan also, writers such as Edogawa Rampo took advantage of the urban setting of prewar and postwar Tokyo. Rampo’s stories described the rapidly...

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