Murder Most Modern: Detective Fiction and Japanese Culture, and: Purloined Letters: Cultural Borrowing and Japanese Crime Literature, 1868-1937 (review)

In Yōjimbō (1961), one of Kurosawa's most popular films, the main character, masterless samurai Kuwabatake Sanjūrō (played by Mifune Toshiro), uses a combination of cunning and instinct to clean up warring factions in a provincial village. An itinerant fighter, Sanjūrō stands as a witness to the breakdown of order and finds himself in the middle of a feud brought on by economic and social upheavals, with the two groups amassing private armies of thugs. The film contains the requisite quota of swordfights, with an outnumbered hero triumphing through his martial skill and ability to size up opponents. Sanjūrō's astute reading of the scene recalls the wisdom demonstrated by judges in traditional Edo-period tales of crime and justice (torimono-chō). His solitary mistake, which nearly costs him his life—failing to hide a letter—mirrors the importance of documentary evidence in Meiji-period detective fiction. And many elements of Sanjūrō's behavior, including his idiosyncratic shoulder rolls, unkempt appearance, and studied indifference, reflect the quirks of famous fictional Japanese detectives from the early postwar period.

From these echoes of Japanese detective fiction, and knowing that Kurosawa ranged broadly for his material, we might conjecture that Kurosawa lifted his protagonist, and possibly his story, from Japanese sources. Though plausible, such an assumption would prove incomplete, however, since Kurosawa cited crime novelist Dashiell Hammett as one source of his inspiration for Yōjimbō.¹ In his adaptation of Hammett's novels Kurosawa succeeds in transposing gangster and hard-boiled detective stories into a period samurai drama (jidaigeki), conflating two worlds: that of urban America in the 1930s, full of bootleggers, mobsters, and private eyes, with that of a stylized Edo town of corrupt officials, warring clans, and masterless samurai (rōnin). Two recent monographs, both published in 2008, help explain why this seemingly odd cultural conflation works so well, even as they invite us to reconsider our views of cross-cultural literary appropriation and adaptation.

Taking the works chronologically in terms of the periods they cover, I will begin with Purloined Letters: Cultural Borrowing and Japanese Crime Literature, 1868–1937, in which Mark Silver explores the ties between crime literature and Japan's conflicted and changing views of the West from the 1870s through the beginnings of the Pacific War. He compares antecedents to detective fiction from the Tokugawa period with works by three luminaries of the genre in modern Japan—Kuroiwa Ruikō (1862–1920), Okamoto Kidō (1872–1939), and Edogawa Ranpo (1894–1965)—emphasizing the act of cultural borrowing, the "modes and means of cultural imitation" (p. 1) manifest in Japanese detective fiction, and the anxieties they can produce in both writers and readers.

Among the by-products of Japanese exposure to Western detective fiction during the Meiji period was the new genre of criminal biography, including one of the most celebrated, Kanagaki Robun's biography of an infamous murderess, Takahashi Oden yasha monogatari (The story of Takahashi Oden the she-devil; 1879). Silver notes that Robun followed Western models in his inclusion of court documents and other meticulous details, moving Japanese writers away from the sheer psychology or intuitive wisdom of earlier Edo-period tales of justice and toward a more rational, scientific, evidence-based narrative approach. Trivia became the most efficient and sure means to reveal the criminal, "since there is no telling what trifling thing may unravel an entire case" (p. 39). Robun's initial "borrowing" of evidence-based narrative launched Japanese detective fiction into a new realm of scientific investigation.

During the ferment of Meiji-era social change, the increasingly common use of pseudonyms and disguises posed significant threats to the order that had prevailed during the Edo period...