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57 C H A P T E R 3 Office(r) Ladies Police Work as Women’s Work “There’s no doubt that the male police officers can only see me as a woman. Rather than being their partner, I’ll always be someone of a different sex, and ultimately a different kind of animal.” For better or worse, that was what Takako learned when she became a police officer. We’re not people: in the end, we’re just men and women. —Nonami Asa, Frozen Fangs For women writers attempting to create a strong and believable female detective , the combustible issues of sex and gender loom large. The author must address a number of difficult questions in her attempt to situate her character in a setting that resonates with how readers perceive the world to be. How, for instance, does a woman’s presence in the workplace affect the men around her, who have spent years steeling themselves from the horrors with which they deal on a daily basis? How does a female character deal with the often sordid world of crime, in which women too often are the victims? Failing to consider such questions and to answer them can result in a protagonist who is either unrealistic or simply unbelievable. This and the following chapter thus examine the tropes of sex and violence in Japanese women’s detective fiction, focusing first upon the portrayal of sexual harassment and sexual violence in the workplace and then analyzing more explicit treatments of the relationship among sex, violence, and female experience. Although women have been involved in Japanese law enforcement for many years, it is only in the last few decades that they have begun to play a more active role as officers and, more recently, detectives. This brave new world of female police work was depicted in stark terms by Nonami Asa, whose 1996 novel, Frozen Fangs, was awarded the 115th Naoki Prize. Although Nonami was not the first woman to create a female detective as her heroine, her novel was unique in its in-depth treatment of the day-to-day struggles of a woman trying to make it as a member of the Tokyo Metropolitan Police. In Frozen Fangs, a straightforward mystery plot serves as the backdrop for a careful and often critical analysis of a woman police officer’s relationship with her partner, her peers, and her family. Unlike the utopian picture of an all-male community that Miyabe paints in All She Was Worth, Nonami’s view of women in society is bleaker. Her depiction of how women function in the public world of the workplace and how their jobs structure their relationships, both professional and personal, suggests that despite the gains that women have made in police work (as elsewhere), they have had to pay a heavy price. The problems that Nonami’s character faces are not unique to her work, however; they arise as well in the novels of Shibata Yoshiki, featuring the female police detective Murakami Riko. Despite a professional history marred by harassment, Riko has persisted in her work and has adopted an interesting strategy for dealing with the problems that arise. That Nonami and Shibata chose to create heroines who work as police detectives was no accident. Their depiction of women detectives was bound to resonate in 1990s Japan with its steadily increasing female workforce, a resonance amplified by the medium of detective fiction. In particular, the genre of the police procedural, which is a story about how a job is performed, provides both authors with a way to discuss women at work that is not intrinsic to other types of literature and becomes a valuable representation, or figuration, of the place and possibilities of women in contemporary Japan. Unlike the private detective, who not only operates independently, letting the circumstances of each case determine the course of the investigation, but also is free to select which cases to solve, the police detective is tied to the bureaucracy and hierarchy of a public office. This very public and male-dominated world, in which these authors’ heroines must flourish, is quite similar to the professional sphere of Japanese business. Both Nonami and Shibata are veterans of this sphere, having worked in a variety of different careers before turning to writing. Their explorations of the problems women face in a traditionally male world—such as sexual harassment, unsatisfactory personal lives, and doubts over professional competence—offer a more personalized glimpse into the conditions...

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