Japanese urban popular culture of the 1920s and 1930s has attracted increasing attention from social and literary historians, many of whom are drawn by the tensions evident in these years between the liberalism of the early twentieth century and the nascent fascism that led to the Asia-Pacific War. Miriam Silverberg's book Erotic Grotesque Nonsense: The Mass Culture of Japanese Modern Times (Berkeley and Los Angeles: University of California Press, 2007), for example, asserts that urbanites' opportunities for self-expression were ample enough during the interwar years to stage, in cafés, movie houses, and theaters, a “popular mobilization” that stood against the rise of state-centered ideology (p. 4). Jordan Sand's House and Home in Modern Japan: Architecture, Domestic Space, and Bourgeois Culture, 1880–1930 (Cambridge, Mass.: Harvard University Asia Center, 2005) takes a more skeptical, less sanguine view, concluding that whether one should read city dwellers' engagement with modern material culture (in particular with domestic architecture and interior furnishings) “in terms of the operations of hegemonic power or of small acts of local resistance” (p. 354) depends so heavily on the particular examples one chooses that we can only say that the period witnessed “a new stage of public discourse, in which top-down reforms and the products of mass culture became equally manipulable commodities” (p. 355).

Murder Most Modern: Detective Fiction and Japanese Culture joins this discussion by suggesting that one of the attractions of Japanese detective fiction—whose history Sari Kawana traces from the interwar years to the early postwar—was its showcasing of criminals who acted on their personal desires, thus urging readers and writers into a subject position of their own. Detective fiction, Kawana says, offered readers “hints for ways in which modern subjects can pursue their individual goals in life” (p. 221), while prodding its writers “to take a stance against one of the most comprehensive fascist regimes in modern history” (p. 222).

Kawana's material not only promises fresh prospectives, it is also gripping. One learns quite soon from this book that the Japanese tantei-shôsetsu (usually translated as “detective story,” although the genre is more loosely conceived than its Western counterpart) tended to the outré and the bizarre: Kawana introduces a motley parade of evil psychologists, dismemberers, insect-men, and deranged ex-soldiers. And apart from Edogawa Ranpo, the writers Kawana treats have so far had scant scholarly attention in English, so that she addresses a definite gap.

But the book fulfills the promise of its material unevenly. Its central contention throughout is less about the detective story's serving as a model for modern subjectivity than about its offering readers an “antidote” to anxieties brought on by modernization (p. 11). In each of five chapters, Kawana shows how detective writers addressed a different aspect of twentieth-century life: urbanization and urban anonymity, the emergence of women from the domestic sphere into the workforce, the rise of scientism and eugenics, the censorship and ideological control that came with the Asia-Pacific War, and the return of demobilized soldiers after Japan's defeat.

The first chapter, on city life, focuses on the act of tailing, or following, other people. Kawana links accounts of tailing by Ranpo and Kôga Saburô to the tailing practiced by academic “modernologists” such as Iwata Yoshiyuki, who tried to categorize the inhabitants of Tokyo by secretly watching and cataloging their everyday movements. Kawana sees both as suggesting modern city dwellers' “overreliance on visual data” (p. 32), an overreliance that works of detective fiction could expose and correct. This interpretive bridge between detective stories and academic writings is original, and Kawana's command of topics from urban planning to police records is impressive—even if skeptics may wonder whether an addiction to the visual was so powerful a modern tendency as she claims. (The intense Japanese interest in Albert Einstein that she describes later, for instance, might even imply a rival fascination with the invisible.)

The second chapter focuses on women and crime, starting with a discussion of the moga (or “modern girl”) as an object of the male gaze, especially in advertisements, and then considers crimes in which young women figure as victims or perpetrators. Reading stories by Ranpo and Hamao Shirô alongside treatises by Taishô criminologists and press coverage of the notorious Abe Sada case, Kawana argues that her detective writers' handling of female characters parodied and thereby “showcase[d] the shortcomings” (p. 16) of the simplistic links between female sexuality and criminality that were asserted by criminologists and the mass media. This chapter is undermined at least a little by its conception of female subjecthood. As Kawana sees it, the women in these narratives are engaged in a “struggle to murder someone on their own terms” (p. 73); the heroines of Ranpo and Hamao thus “rise to the position of subject” (p. 101) by being either actual or suspected killers rather than victims. This seems an oddly narrow notion of subjecthood. Granted, these women are not victims in their own narratives, but when the subjectivity they enjoy comes from the murder of a husband or lover, it is hard to see their portrayals as any less misogynistic than the discourses they are ostensibly parodying.

This problem becomes most pressing in the treatment of Ranpo. The stereotype of the dokufu (or “poison woman”) relies not only on notions of female irrationality and criminality (which Kawana emphasizes), but also on the idea of feminine guile. Shizuko, the heroine of Ranpo's novel Injû, seems to frame a (possibly nonexistent) detective writer named Shundei for her own murder of her husband, leading Kawana to suggest that “Shizuko exercises her subjectivity in shaping her masquerade and disguising her true intentions” (p. 89). But because such deception is as basic to the stereotype of the “poison woman” as ideas of female irrationality or innate criminality, a character such as Shizuko may do more to perpetuate this stereotype—and reinforce the status of women as defined objects instead of self-defining subjects—than to subvert it.

Chapter 3 reads works by Kozakai Fuboku, Unno Jûza, and Yumeno Kyûsaku against the cultural background of Japan's Taishô-era fascination with (and growing suspicion of) science and scientific rationality. Again, Kawana views these authors' works as vehicles for social criticism, in this case of misplaced faith in the power of science. Here, the cultural background given (including Einstein's visit to Japan and representations of Edward Jenner, inventor of the smallpox vaccine) becomes fuller, and her analyses less sinuous, with correspondingly compelling results. Her treatment of Yumeno Kyûsaku's Dogura Magura draws especially illuminating parallels with Richard Wiene's film The Cabinet of Doctor Caligari.

Chapter 4 examines the activities of three detective writers (Oguri Mushitarô, Unno Jûza, and Kigi Takatarô) during the Asia-Pacific War, with the goal of showing that detective writing did not taper off after Pearl Harbor simply because of top-down censorship. Kawana shows convincingly that vestiges of detective fiction lingered in the spy novel, in science fiction, and in stories of the tropical jungle, the genres these writers turned to as substitutes for detective fiction. She is less convincing when she suggests that censorship was not responsible for their turning to substitutes in the first place. Kawana offers some evidence that Unno Jûza, at least, took up science fiction because of a genuine shift in his own interests. But Kawana's proffered distinction between top-down censorship and self-censorship continually threatens to collapse, as the former could so obviously lead to the latter. Her discussion here also characterizes the view she sets out to debunk in over-extreme terms, saying for example that she “challenges the prevalent view that censors, publishers, and writers were bent on suppressing detective fiction in any shape or form” (p. 149). Nakajima Kawatarô and Itô Hideo, the critics Kawana blames for this supposed misconception, would likely agree with her own sensible description of wartime censorship as “a porous and imperfect system” under which “authors could and did find loopholes” (p. 149).

In her final chapter, Kawana reads the postwar detective novels of Yokomizo Seishi, in which demobilized soldiers loom large, alongside a contest, sponsored by Sakaguchi Ango, in which readers were asked to submit their own solutions to his detective story, “Furenzoku satsujin jiken” (The Nonconsecutive Murder Case). She concludes that Seishi and Ango were unrecognized allies, alike attempting to promote a new, postwar rationality that would let readers find an “identity independent from externally mandated ethical constructions” (p. 188). This chapter is notable for its interesting linkage of Ango's well-known 1946 essay “Darakuron” (On Decadence) with the detective fiction that both men produced at about the same time, a connection that, as Kawana notes, has been overlooked by other critics.

The argument of this final chapter leads Kawana naturally to her concluding suggestion that works of detective fiction could serve as models for modern Japanese subjecthood. In the end, however, the book proves much better at showing how detective stories reflected the cultural strains and dislocations she describes than at explaining how they might have counteracted any malaise of modernity those stresses fomented. Still, Kawana's account contains many moments of insight, and its expansion of the boundaries of the field is invaluable. Murder Most Modern is likely to remain for some time the most important work in English on many of the authors it treats. It can be recommended especially to scholars with an interest in the particular symptoms of modernity on which Kawana focuses, in early to mid-twentieth-century Japanese popular literature and culture, or in crime and detective fiction as a global genre.