Established as a popular genre in the mid-Meiji period, detective fiction remains today a staple of Japanese popular culture in print and television. Satoru Saito's Detective Fiction and the Rise of the Japanese Novel, 1880-1930 is an ambitious contribution to a recent surge in studies of the genre, but it also aims to do something more. Although the major part of the text is devoted to detective fiction (tantei shōsetsu), Saito's larger goal, as the title suggests, is to demonstrate an essential link—a “genealogy” of interactions—between detective fiction and the canonical “modern Japanese novel.” The latter, exemplified by well-known texts by writers like Akutagawa Ryūnosuke and Tanizaki Jun'ichirō, typically emphasizes “the tribulations of the student and its later incarnation – the intellectual – as emblematic subjects within Japan's modernization process” (p. 6). This juxtaposition of the figures of the student and the detective is a unifying dynamic for the study.
Chapter 1 sets the keynote with its discussion of Tsubouchi Shōyō, whose Shōsetsu shinzui (Essence of the novel; 1885) presented a framework for the creation of modern literature. For Shōyō, a vast gap between external expression and internal feelings, and by extension between the public and private spheres, was a defining characteristic of modern society. Shōyō assigned to the novelist the socially privileged position of ameliorating the situation through truthful yet moral reporting of human events, a vocation analogous to that of a detective. Saito shows how representative fictions and translations by Shōyō dealt with tragic misunderstandings that were a consequence of eavesdropping, and established his ideal of the detective as a disinterested agent of the government.
Here we must note the political framework of the study. The institutions created by the Meiji government, despite the “civilization and enlightenment” ideals that legitimated them, were fundamentally undemocratic, with a constitution under which the emperor “bestowed” rights on his subjects, and a legal and judicial system that was used to suppress political dissidence. Fictional writing needed to negotiate between the political discontent of its readers and official state ideologies, and Saito focuses on the ways in which it functioned to interpellate compliant subjects of the state. Kuroiwa Ruikō, a phenomenally productive and popular translator of detective fiction, conspicuously presented his works as lessons in the importance of establishing a fair justice system (chapter 2). Guilty, Not Guilty (Yūzai muzai; 1888) and other translated mysteries depict a trial process utterly devoid of concern for the evidence. At the same time, Saito argues that these stories, often adapted from European works in which titled aristocrats played a prominent role, served to redirect and tame the political frustrations of their readers. They did so by positioning the readers as privileged observers of aristocratic secrets who could identify with, rather than oppose, the aristocrats—who, in a Japanese context, were reconstrued as members of the new Meiji peerage, the kazoku. This is an interesting explanation for the surprising prevalence of aristocratic characters in Meiji fiction.
Dostoyevsky's Crime and Punishment, and its profound influence in Japan, form the framework for chapter 3. Ruikō had presented the detective as a model of the successful employment of a Western scientific education, but other streams of literature, starting with Futabatei Shimei's Ukigumo (Drifting clouds; 1887–89), focused on the Western-educated student or intellectual who, denied opportunities to advance in society, turned toward antisocial and even criminal behavior. Saito offers original, political readings of two canonical works of so-called naturalism, Shimazaki Tōson's The Broken Commandment (Hakai; 1906) and Tayama Katai's Futon (1907), noting their structural similarities with Crime and Punishment and the detective-like activities that drive the narratives.
Chapter 4 analyzes the detective paradigm in three works of Natsume Sōseki—Wagahai wa neko de aru (I am a cat; 1905–7), Higan sugi made (Until after the equinox; 1912), and Kokoro (1914)—noting that “Sōseki, more than any other writer in the modern Japanese literary canon, argued the evils and immorality of the detective as a profession” (p. 157). Yet Sōseki, too, actively used the trope of the detective in his fictional portrayals of the dilemmas of the modern individual.
Chapter 5 moves to the early Taishō period, presenting stories by Akutagawa, Tanizaki, and Satō Haruo that appeared in a special detective-themed issue of the magazine Chūō kōron. Preoccupied with exploring the elusive, fragmented modern consciousness of their characters, these tales deviated considerably from the detective genre.
In chapter 6, we arrive at the usual starting point of discussions of Japanese detective fiction: Edogawa Ranpo. Saito demonstrates how Ranpo's supposed movement from “healthy” to “unhealthy” (focusing on abnormal sexuality) crime fiction was the result of an epistemological project exploring the possibilities of obtaining true knowledge about a crime. Rejecting the Holmesian reliance on evidence and testimony, Ranpo turned to a Freudian model of the unconscious and the acquisition of truth through psychological observation. However, because this approach, too, fails to provide final proof, the suspect had to be manipulated into confessing. Here, we seem to come full circle to the premodern reliance on confession.
The book provides fascinating discussions of many issues, starting with its demonstration of the importance of translated literature in the Meiji period. The discussions of canonical writers are persuasive, not least because one immediately thinks of other examples Saito could have used (Sōseki's Kōjin [The wayfarer], for example). Other issues, like the rise of the “I-novel” and the “occidentalist” fetish with the West, are presented more episodically. A fascinating point is that hardly a single work discussed adheres faithfully to the standard mystery formula. Is mystery fiction, as Tomi Suzuki argued about the “I-novel” in Narrating the Self: Fictions of Japanese Modernity (Stanford University Press, 1996) as much a mode of reading as a type of writing?
The epilogue wraps up the political discussion by suggesting the ideological complicity of detective fiction in “making police out of the masses” (p. 281), a phenomenon the author links to the violence and political oppression of the 1920s and 1930s. The author tends to find a victory for state ideology at some level in most of the works discussed, which may do an injustice to the truly progressive elements in some (e.g., Ruikō’s translations) and create a misleading view of the Meiji state as uniformly oppressive, when many of its projects (e.g., the “good wife, wise mother” ideology) were distinctly progressive even while setting boundaries to the acceptable limits of change. Still, enough material is provided for the reader to decide for himself or herself.
The book would have benefited from additional editing of the translated passages, which are sometimes overly literal and awkward. Generally, the text is clear and objective. With its combination of close reading, historical discussion, and an appreciation for the nitty-gritty, fun drama of detective fiction, this is an exemplary literary study that will stimulate much new research and discussion.
