Since its introduction to Japan in the wake of the nation's modernization and Westernization in the late nineteenth century, crime literature has been one of the most frequently discussed genres in Japanese popular literature. While the genre has its roots in the sensationalism of Japan's rising print capitalism in the late nineteenth century, its development alongside Japan's changing relationships with the West certainly motivated leading intellectuals to seriously investigate Japan's appropriation of this presumably imported genre. During the interwar years, Marxist critic and crime fiction writer Hirabayashi Hatsunosuke observed a peculiar deviation of most domestic writers from Western standards and criticized their works, including those of the renowned Edogawa Ranpo, as “unhealthy,” in that they did not adhere to the major premise of the genre—that is, to learn scientific reasoning through criminal investigation. However, major writers and readers alike favored the romantic treatment of crime over the rigidly structured narrative formula of the genre, and so-called henkaku tantei shōsetsu (inauthentic detective fiction)—a relatively neutral term coined by the crime fiction writer Kōga Saburō—ruled in the prewar publishing industry as the antithesis of the Western standards. It thus became a common view that the nation had to wait until the end of the World War II to produce the classic puzzle stories comparable to the Western golden age of the genre represented by such writers as S. S. Van Dine, Ellery Queen, and Agatha Christie.

The unique development of Japanese crime literature has recently caught the eye of American as well as Japanese scholars, and three books have been published in English. Mark Silver's is the most recent; it was preceded by Amanda Seaman's Bodies of Evidence: Women, Society, and Detective Fiction in 1990s Japan (Honolulu: University of Hawai‘i Press, 2004), which appropriately focuses on internationally known women writers such as Kirino Natsuo and Miyabe Miyuki and provides the first comprehensive introduction to the genre. Sari Kawana's Murders Most Modern: Detective Fiction and Japanese Culture (Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press, 2008) supplements Seaman's book with an examination of the prewar development of the genre. Kawana reveals the genre's various functions in Japan's nation building before and after the war from a cultural studies perspective. Silver's book takes a more conventional approach in literary studies, particularly in focusing on how the borrowed genre was appropriated in various domestic contexts during its early development, and it calls into question an assumed asymmetrical Western influence on Japanese crime literature.

Silver opens with a chapter on “the preexisting native tradition of crime narrative” in the Edo and early Meiji period before the introduction of the newly imported genre from the West (p. 22). According to Silver, the courtroom narrative about wise judges (Ōoka seidan) and the criminal biography of poison women (dokufu mono) represent the “state of the art of Japanese crime writing” during this period (p. 22). These texts, he argues, exemplify a gradual transformation of society in which the idea of social advancement (risshin shusse) and fluidity in identity in urban space draw public attention. The book then examines three major writers of prewar detective fiction who borrowed the imported form of detective fiction to serve their particular purposes. As a muckraking journalist, Kuroiwa Ruikō (1862–1920) strategically employed the new literary form to pursue an agenda of enlightening the Japanese public with accounts of the Western juridical system. Uncritical borrowing of Western culture in these early efforts compelled Okamoto Kidō (1872–1939) to choose the culture and settings of the bygone days of the Edo period in order to separate his work from foreign masters, masking the borrowed form with nostalgic recreation of disappearing historical details. Edogawa Rampo's (1894–1965) ambivalent longing for Western culture and his perception that Japan was “arriving only belatedly in the modern world” resurfaced in his works as impersonation, intertextuality with established conventions, and the monstrosity of cultural hybrids (p. 133). Silver locates their writings in each historical context by skillfully employing primary texts ranging from tabloid newspapers and general magazines, to critical writings on detective fiction, adaptations of Western crime literature, and “original” (in contrast to translated or adapted) stories written by Japanese writers. The entire book roughly covers Japan's modernization from the late nineteenth century to the 1930s and persuasively argues multiple ways that the culture of borrowing functioned in a specified historical context.

It is unfortunate that the book abruptly ends with Edogawa's prewar career, as his postwar “return back” to the West may equally exemplify his anxiety about Japan's postwar Americanization, through which Japan was expected to become an exemplary copy of the West. Overly faithful “borrowings” of the postwar detective writers may not fit Silver's thesis of unique prewar “localizations” of the foreign form, but the reader might wonder how Silver would interpret Edogawa's inability to faithfully adopt the “borrowed” form even after the war. What are the implications for the book's central thesis on borrowing that Edogawa never produced the so called “authentic” detective fiction despite his enthusiastic promotion of the form for the postwar generation? While Silver admits the elusive nature of a “pure” Japanese culture, it seems he is less critical about the supposed coherency of the West and, consequently, of the foreign genre. In his analysis, he several times refers to the “Western post-Poe detective story” (p. 58) as the model that Japanese writers tried to “borrow,” but the reference point of the Western form in his comparison is never clearly defined or discussed in relation to Western critical writings on Poe, as if the institutionalization of Poe studies had never occurred among Western critics. The absence of critical reference is further associated with his use of the terms “modernization” and “Westernization” in his argument. The book does not quite address Japan's confusion of modernity with Westernization that permeated the prewar discourses about detective fiction and then affected writers' hallucinatory projection of the supposed coherency of the superior “West.” This is one of the reasons that prewar writers nevertheless had to authenticate the “inauthentic” detective fiction in relation to the “authentic” West.

What I suggest is that there may be more going on than a process of localization in which a domestic literary tradition was influenced by the borrowed genre or in which domestic writers resisted the infiltration of the foreign form. There may be more going on than multiple modes of borrowing ranging from creative misuse to failed imitation of the Western originals. Should we not equally consider Japan's gradual internalization of the West where the genre itself as the Other delineated the domestic and foreign traditions as mutually exclusive categories to enable imaginary “cross-cultural interactions.” Whereas Silver may argue that Edogawa's prewar writings reflect his anxiety about the inevitable hybridization of discrete cultures, it may be more plausible, in a comprehensive view of his works before and after the war, that his hybrid style was the outcome of an intentionally ironic stance toward the dominant other.

Overall, this is a long-awaited book on prewar popular culture that provides a first-rate historical account of Japan's dynamic negotiations with the West. What the Japanese writers considered an initial failure in proper “borrowing” further conditioned the postwar revival of the “authentic” classic puzzle stories (honkaku tantei shōsetsu) as well as the nostalgic recreation of “inauthentic” traditions. The issue of borrowing may well be an ongoing issue in the popular imaginary of the nation as well as the West, and the book will surely be a foundation for further research on cultural negotiations in the realm of popular culture.