Bodies of Evidence: Women, Society, and Detective Fiction in 1990s Japan

Chapter 4. Sex and Violence: Is That a Gun in Your Pocket, or Are You Just Happy to See Me?

86 C H A P T E R 4 Sex and Violence Is That a Gun in Your Pocket, or Are You Just Happy to See Me? “Why are you making that face?” Yashiro took a bottle of mineral water out of the fridge and handed it to me. “Thanks.” I took a drink from the bottle and then handed it to Yashiro. “I’m leaving now—you wanna get together again?” “So I’ll be one of those disposable girls that you throw away after one use?” “That would be boring.” —Kirino Natsuo, Night Abandoned by Angels In 1993, Kirino Natsuo’s first novel in the Murano Miro series, Kao ni furikakaru ame, won the Edogawa Rampo Prize for best mystery. The most notable feature of this novel and those that followed was their protagonist, the hard-boiled female private eye Murano Miro, a woman whose independence and toughness resemble those of her sister detectives across the Pacific.1 The series, which describes Miro’s transformation into a professional detective , was the first to feature a heroine who takes charge of her own relationships . In the debut novel, Miro’s search through the gritty underside of Tokyo for a missing friend plunges her into the world of sadomasochism (S & M) and the adult video (AV) industry, a world defined by sex and violence. Kirino’s novel is more than merely titillating; rather, it indicates the troubling relationship among women, sex, and violence in Japanese popular culture , a relationship that is more starkly highlighted by the genre of detective fiction. Kirino’s heroine, like Shibata’s police detective Riko, attempts to negotiate an environment where violence colors her personal and professional relationships. In both series, the detectives are unmarried, older, independent women with active sexual lives. Yet both Murano Miro and Murakami Riko are aware that sex is more than merely pleasurable since the crimes they are investigating revolve around the destructive potential of sex when used as a weapon and the sexual exploitation of the innocent for profit. Indeed, Kirino’s Miro series and Shibata’s Riko series are striking for their frank and often graphic discussion of sexuality as it figures both in the personal and professional lives of the detectives and in the crimes they investigate. Their novels stand apart from others featuring women detectives in the struggle of their protagonists to express their sexuality. In contrast to the female loners in Nonami’s and Miyabe’s work, or the young, unmarried heroines of earlier authors like Yamamura Misa and Natsuki Shizuko, Miro and Riko struggle with the problematic interconnection of sex and violence, reflecting the often ambivalent portrayal of women’s sexuality in contemporary Japanese culture.2 In some respects, Shibata’s and Kirino’s protagonists appear to be irresponsible hussies, sexually promiscuous women whose escapades either damage their careers or place them in harm’s way; in other respects, they are presented as perversely titillating victims, subjected to voyeurism, sexual abuse, and psychological manipulation. In either case these two portrayals are linked by a vision of heterosexual relations as agonistic , dangerous, and potentially destructive or violent for women. To be sure, many of the lurid details can be attributed to the need to sell books, but the presence of sex and the way that it is depicted raise the troubling issue of the difficulties that single women have in asserting their sexual agency. This is particularly unsettling in women’s detective fiction, which, at least in Anglo-America, has been seen as a place for the creation of a positive image of women, forcing us to confront some of the limitations inherent in changing the gender coordinates of the genre. In this chapter, I examine the ways in which Kirino and Shibata explore the relationship between sex and violence and how their portrayals are made more complex by language and imagery from other media, the voyeuristic treatment of their female protagonists, and the protagonists’ ambivalent relationship to sexual violence and violent sex. Finally, I discuss how detective fiction itself is implicated in the sex-violence relationship and hence how the narratives under discussion are linked at a deeper level to the practices and paradigms of pornography. As I show, Kirino and Shibata take two different approaches to the complex connection between sex and violence. Kirino’s novels directly address this relationship in its most immediate and graphic manifestation by confronting pornography, while Shibata’s novels use homoeroticism (and more particularly lesbianism) to suggest possible alternatives to...