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1 C H A P T E R 1 Introduction In 1992, Miyabe Miyuki’s Kasha (Cart of fire, translated into English as All She Was Worth) was the most anticipated novel of the season. This prizewinning detective novel solidified Miyabe’s reputation as one of Japan’s top mystery writers, made it to the top of almost every “best mystery” list, and was even lauded as one of the “best novels of postwar Japan” by an eminent social critic.1 Kasha was more than just a good story about a missing woman and her mysterious identity; it was an examination of pressing social issues gripping Japan: personal bankruptcy, the deleterious effects of rampant consumerism , and the crises arising from the largely unregulated and highly speculative consumer credit industry, which had helped to finance the go-go economy known popularly as “the bubble.” In addition to its role as a social barometer, Kasha also represented a watershed moment in the history of Japanese women’s detective (or misuterii) fiction, providing the impetus for a new wave of women mystery writers in the 1990s that dwarfed the earlier, limited female presence in the field. Inspired by both Miyabe’s success and the increasing number of Western mysteries in translation, women began writing mysteries of all types, leading to the appearance (in 1997) of a twovolume anthology of short stories by women writers, Aka no misuterii (Red mystery) and Shiro no misuterii (White mystery), which made it very clear that women’s detective fiction was more than a simple fad.2 The “boom” in women mystery writers has echoed far longer than many anticipated, owing not simply to the entertainment provided by female authors or to the savvy of their publishers, but also to the way in which these authors have used the narrative and conceptual resources of the detective genre to depict and critique contemporary Japanese society, especially the situation of women within it—a combination of storytelling and social awareness found not only in Kasha, but in many other works as well. In the following chapters, therefore, I focus upon the way in which five contemporary writers—Miyabe Miyuki, Nonami Asa, Shibata Yoshiki, Kirino Natsuo, and Matsuo Yumi—critically engage with a variety of social issues and con- cerns: consumerism and the crisis of identity, discrimination and workplace harassment, sexual harassment and sexual violence, and the role of motherhood in contemporary Japan. In turn, I interrogate the structures and conventions of detective fiction that allow these writers to produce a different kind of social critique from that found in other forms of literature. Detective fiction is well suited to this type of critique since the genre has long provided a forum for reflection on and critique of modern urban life. Such a sociocultural analysis of women’s detective fiction, I argue, provides us with a wealth of information about the “real world” of contemporary Japan, not in some essential or objective sense, but rather by revealing how a Japanese author imagines her own society to be—particular the kinds of problems besetting that society. This study thus explores the worlds that these authors construct in their novels and examines how these worlds intersect with other political, cultural, and economic discourses and with the lived experiences of contemporary Japanese women. Japanese Detective Fiction: A Brief History Detective fiction has a long and somewhat complicated history in Japan. Like many other Western imports, it has been both celebrated and dismissed on account of its foreign pedigree. Yet as with other “modern” literary genres in Japan (most notably the shòsetsu, or novel), the success of detective fiction was part of the broader social and cultural changes brought about by the Meiji Restoration. Detective fiction and its protagonist presented a new type of literature, stories (as Edgar Allen Poe called them) of “ratiocination,” in which the detective works alone in the familiar world of city streets and alleyways, investigating disorder (crime) and restoring affairs to their “proper” disposition. Detective fiction thus was intimately bound up with the new social phenomena of urbanization and modernization, with their uncomfortable juxtapositions of old and new, urban and rural, wealth and poverty, and community and isolation. As critics have long noted, detective fiction in Europe and America was intimately linked to the urban environment and reflected both the terrors and the pleasures offered by newly industrialized cities like New York or Paris.3 As an urban genre, therefore, detective fiction had a special appeal in the Meiji...

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