Crime fiction has a very long history in Japan and early Western visitors to the nation at the end the 19th century, including the famous Victorian travel writer Isabella Bird (1831-1904), commented on the large number of crime fiction titles on sale in Japan in the 1870s.
Subsequently, New Youth, a magazine launched in 1920 packed full of short stories targeting “urban modern men” quickly became an outlet and publishing platform for both science-fiction-type stories and detective stories.
The editor of the magazine grouped these stories into two categories: 1) honkaku (classical or orthodox) and 2) henkaku (irregular) stories.
Science fiction fell into the latter category and over time the broader publishing genre Tentei Shosetsu, Detective Books, as well as the term honkaku were defined and came into wide use.
Honkaku was and continues to be used as a term to describe tales about complex and unfathomable murders, often involving locked-rooms with dead bodies in them, which require puzzle-solving skills to determine who committed the crime.
It was, however, Taro Hirai (1894-1965), writing under the pen name Edogawa Rampo, who was the key creative force behind the genre’s development in Japan. He popularized it by combing scientific method with Japanese sentiment, as well as the suspense-type narratives that had been popular in Japan’s Edo Period (1603-1868).
That said, the genre’s development has, like any good detective story, faced some unexpected twists and turns, as well as the odd decoy and unexpected disruption including when the Japanese government deemed some books unpatriotic or “un-Japanese” in the lead-up to and during the Second World War. And after the war had ended in 1946, the genre hit another rather unexpected title-killing obstacle.
New regulations governing the use of the Japanese language in print were introduced by The Japanese Language Council. These new regulations and the standards they created for official documents forced the Japanese publishing industry to rethink how it referred to and labeled detective fiction in Japanese. This happened just as the pioneers of the genre, including Edogawa Rampo, were trying to revive it.
The new standards included the creation of an official list of 1,850 kanji characters (the Chinese letters used in written Japanese), known as toyo kanji, that were deemed appropriate for daily use in, for example, national newspapers.
Unfortunately, the two kanji characters, tan and tei, used to write the word tantei, detective, weren’t included on the list so new ways of writing the term using another Japanese syllabary or a completely new term was required.
These reforms triggered a fierce debate amongst authors, publishers and the literati about the best way to render the name of the publishing genre into written Japanese. This eventually led to the creation of a new broader term to describe Japanese detective fiction, Suiri Shosetsu (Reasoning or Deduction Books). Nevertheless, some author groups continued to use the word tantei in the names of their organization and writer collectives until at least the mid-1960s.
The new term, however, expanded the genre so that it also in theory encompassed horror, mysteries, thrillers and more, and importantly could be written using two kanji characters included on the official list.
The term, Suiri Shosetsu, is said to have been coined and proposed by Takataro Kigi (1954-1960) who in addition to writing books within the genre was a full-time clinical doctor and an expert in brain physiology.
He thought that detective fiction should be positioned as a literary genre and not as something completely different or as a niche distinct standalone local Japanese genre as some advocated.
Suiri Shosetsu books are also now known as mystery, misuteri, books and the authors that write them as mystery writers.
Since World War II many new labels, genres and formats have emerged in Japan and continue to do so. Some have stuck, such as Suiri Shoetsu, but there is often considerable debate regarding the definitions and classifications of genre and sub-genre.
With some stressing the importance of links to the past and the established canon of works, while others wish to create breaks with the past, and some still wonder if the genre, in the case of Suiri Shoetsu, should be classified as literary fiction at all.
The postwar regulations imposed on the publishing industry and its terminology as well as local debates about the various competing schools of Japanese mystery writing often get lost in translation outside Japan or seem somewhat futile or unfathomable to younger generations less familiar with post-war changes and Japan’s publishing history, despite the excitement that the debates can sometimes generate.
Nonetheless, new sub-genre have emerged often after publishing successes or breakthroughs such as the publication of The Tokyo Zodiac Murders by Soji Shimada in 1981, which helped renew interest in and rebrand whodunits and locked-room mysteries in Japan through the subsequent creation of a new sub-genre known as Shin-Honkaku mysteries, neoclassical mysteries. All of which helped turn Shimada into a household name in Japan.
“At that time, social realism in the style of authors like Seicho Matsumoto (1909-1992), dominated the Japanese literary scene, and honkaku mysteries based on logic and deduction, weren’t held in high regard, falling outside the interests of the critics,” says Shimada. “Mystery writers were looked on with scorn and disdain by Japan’s literary circles, and authors of so-called Jun-bungaku, pure literature,” he points out.
“It was a type of village mentality, with insular rules governing tastes, not the quality of what was being written, and books just weren’t appraised or reviewed,” continues Shimada.
Shimada wrote a manifesto, sengen, in 1989 on the scope of the new sub-genre he represented and published schema mapping out the definitions of the various crime fiction and mystery publishing classifications and sub-genres. And he continues to enthusiastically promote and encourage the Shin-Honkaku genre.
Even though this has helped create an aura of mystery around the genre itself and its practitioners, these debates have probably actually had limited real public impact in Japan with one exception, the clever exploitation of terminology to market and promote books and authors to readers with an appetite for all things mysterious.
The slicing and dicing of the canon and schools of Japanese crime fiction seem to continue endlessly with titles positioned as Whodunit, Howdunit and even Whydonit as Japanese authors pen new works with narratives that span the full range of creative plot options.
These range from classical, complex and unfathomable puzzle-like murders to socially conscious commentaries on society’s ills and deepest darkest fears, delighting Japanese readers and giving them much to choose from.
And as for the curious case of the sudden disappearance of Tantei Shosetsu, Detective Books in the Land of the Rising Sun – it was the government WhoDunit!
