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

Over the last decade, scholarship on Japanese literature has contested the concept of a reified canon, and in the process the modern master narrative has been subverted, inverted, overturned, and enriched. Jonathan Zwicker, for example, has challenged our understanding of “when” modern literature began, breaking the artificial divide between the Edo and Meiji periods and establishing a literary genealogy that spans the “long nineteenth century.” Atsuko Ueda approaches the question differently, asking not when but what: “what is modern Japanese literature?” She pushes past the obfuscation of canonical discourse to reveal the processes involved in the production of “literature” as a cultural category. James Reichert has revealed the way heterosexualization emerged as an important force in that production. And as the process and placement of canon formation have been questioned, a variety of significant works have emerged to push past the borders of canonical walls. Ken Ito has introduced the importance of the family romance, Kyoko Kurita the “records of the future (mirai-ki),” and John Mertz the political novel, to cite but a few examples. As diverse as these studies are, all grapple with the specter of the West in particular or globalization in general.¹ The complex interactions that negotiations with the West engendered contributed immeasurably to the unfolding of what would become modern Japanese literature.

The two studies under review here fit comfortably into this collective trajectory by opening our critical lens even further to include detective fiction. ² Whereas each book is distinctly different in approach, the differences they manifest form important complements. Mark Silver’s Purloined Letters sets the groundwork for the introduction of the detective genre into Japan in the late 1880s by showing how earlier crime fiction in the Edo period and courtroom reportage in the Meiji era predisposed Japanese audiences to mystery fiction. Confining his exploration to the prewar period, Silver provides “case studies” of three exemplary writers of detective fiction. With careful textual analyses, Silver examines the way each author dealt with the impact of working in a “foreign form.” Sari Kawana, on the other hand, in Murder Most Modern skims past the early antecedents and dives right into the post-1923 earthquake world of modern mayhem, using the detective genre as a lens through which to explore the maladies of modernity. Her inquiry takes her through the postwar period and occasions the introduction of a fascinating panoply of detective story writers, both Japanese and Western.

Silver begins by situating Kanagaki Robun’s crime reportage, particularly Takahashi Oden yasha monogatari (The tale of Takahashi Oden the she-devil), as a precursor to later detective fiction. Robun’s Oden is a sinister seductress who embodies all the dangers of a world run amok. The fascination with Oden’s deviance and her subsequent punishment and autopsy are imbricated with notions of nation, narrative, and gender and has been deftly explicated in Christine Marran’s recent Poison Woman: Figuring Female Transgression in Modern Japanese Culture (University of Minnesota Press, 2007). Silver reads the Oden episode slightly differently, “as a sort of evil doppelganger to Nakamura [Keiu]’s ‘self-made man.’ ” Her appearance reminds readers of the threats implicit in social upheaval while simultaneously her capture and rightful punishment reinforce “the reader’s sense that justice has been served” (p. 36). As Silver argues, the sentence Takahashi received reiterates the premodern acceptance of the infallibility of the legal and justice systems.

It is this sense of infallibility then that the modern detective novel will challenge. By introducing detectives who derive clever but ultimately failed conclusions, indeed by suggesting that evidence is even open to interpretation, the detective genre underscored the very susceptibility of the justice system. Silver begins his case studies with Kuroiwa Ruikō and his...