Thirty years ago, if you asked someone\u00a0British\u00a0to name their favorite Japanese author, most people would say Haruki Murakami. One of Japan\u2019s best-known postwar novelists, he has been divisive at home but lauded around the world for works like\u00a0Norwegian Wood\u00a0(1987) and\u00a0The Wind-Up Bird Chronicle\u00a0(1995),\u00a0which blend\u00a0history, nostalgia and magical realism. If you asked that same person for their\u00a0second\u00a0favorite Japanese author, you\u2019d probably get Banana Yoshimoto or \u2014 just as likely \u2014 a blank stare.<\/p>\n
Today, however, nearly half of the UK\u2019s top-40 translated fiction titles come from Japan. The most popular of them, Asako Yuzuki\u2019s\u00a0Butter, sold more copies in the UK \u2014 exceeding 400,000 \u2014 than it had done back home, where it was nevertheless still a success. Alongside the cozy and the comfortable \u2014 including a strange fixation with cats \u2014 runs the darkly criminal. The thrill of this latter genre is surely similar for both Japanese and British audiences. Members of two relatively low-crime, high-trust societies find it bracing to witness, at a safe remove, the temporary and localized breakdown of law and order. What makes stories like these plausible in both places is a long-standing sense, running from detective fiction\u2019s Golden Age a century ago through to the present day, that beneath the public civility on which both cultures pride themselves lies misery and even horror.<\/p>\n
Britain\u2019s detective fiction bond with Japan goes back to the arrival on Japanese shores in the late 19th century of Sherlock Holmes in translation. Japan\u2019s leaders at this point saw themselves playing an urgent game of Great Power catch-up. They developed modern armed forces, opened factories and began trading in the international economy. But they soon realized material progress alone was not enough. The physical and intellectual quality of the population mattered too, in an age of fierce, zero-sum global competition.<\/p>\n
\u201cAlongside the cozy and the comfortable runs the darkly criminal.\u201d<\/p>\n
Literature had a role to play here, as the country set about weeding out the remnants of \u201csuperstition\u201d and other unwanted relics of the past. Whereas the popular new \u201cI-novel\u201d genre delivered an unhelpfully mixed verdict on Japanese modernization \u2014 its first-person narrators were often bewildered by the present and yearned for the past \u2014 the translated adventures of Ars\u00e8ne Lupin and Sherlock Holmes performed a more useful service. Sales of both men\u2019s adventures were modest at first, and yet the criminal mastermind and the bohemian sleuth both, in their differing ways, served as compelling adverts for the logical, deductive mind. The exposure and punishment of wrongdoing was already a thread in Japanese storytelling, from tales of civic and samurai justice to Buddhist warnings of karmic comeuppance. But reading about someone perpetrating or reverse-engineering a fiendishly clever crime, against the backdrop of the complexities of modern life, was a fresh and salutary exercise for what Agatha Christie\u2019s Poirot liked to call the \u201clittle grey cells\u201d.<\/p>\n
The so-called \u201cfair-play\u201d crime thriller, unfolding in a closed setting with a finite list of suspects, ended up becoming a staple of crime writing in Japan. It weathered suppression during the Second World War \u2014 for its Western origins and focus on individual brilliance over collective effort \u2014 before rising again with Seishi Yokomizo\u2019s The Honjin Murders\u00a0(1946). The novel was published in English in 2019 \u2014 to rave reviews \u2014 by the Pushkin Vertigo imprint.\u00a0The Honjin Murders\u00a0centers around an apparently impossible crime. A newly-wed couple is found murdered in their detached annex, which is locked from inside. The snow all around it meanwhile remains entirely undisturbed.<\/p>\n
Fun though puzzles are, however, there were those in Japan as far back as the Twenties who wanted the genre to do more. They included the godfather of mystery writing, Edogawa Ranpo, whose pen name was a not-so-subtle phonetic clue to the debt he owed to America\u2019s Edgar Allan Poe. The kanji used meant something like \u201cstaggering along the Edo River\u201d.<\/p>\n
Ranpo\u2019s fictional detective Kogor\u014d Akechi was a dark twist on Sherlock Holmes, augmenting the latter\u2019s powers of observation and deduction with an intuitive grasp of human psychology \u2014 especially that of abnormal or unstable minds. The satirical intent seems clear: you can know a society by the sorts of crimes and crime-fighters it throws up. The Victorian world of Sherlock Holmes was ordered and contained. Akechi, on the other hand, succeeded only by becoming attuned to perversity and dysfunction. Ranpo, as his creator, became a master not of the \u201cwhodunit\u201d genre, but the whydunit.<\/p>\n
It was hardly the case, of course, that Japan was falling apart in the Twenties, when the first Akechi mystery was published. But there were seeds of uncertainty and discontent with which Ranpo could work. Until relatively recently, most Japanese had lived and died in or around the village where they were born, knowing almost everything about everyone in the community. Now, in a rapidly-urbanizing country, plenty knew what it felt like to move to a new town or city and suddenly have complete strangers for neighbors. The new and unnerving forms of intimacy that resulted \u2014 physical closeness without real knowledge or sympathy \u2014 power some of Ranpo\u2019s best-known stories. In The Human Chair\u00a0(1925), a voyeuristic furniture maker conceals himself inside an armchair so that he can enjoy the experience of having people sit, entirely unsuspecting, on his lap.<\/p>\n
Sharing Ranpo\u2019s love of using crime to probe dysfunction was Seich\u014d Matsumoto, creator of Inspector Imanishi. He was less interested than Ranpo in an \u201cerotic and grotesque\u201d (eroguro) sensibility, preferring to focus on Japan as a whole during its postwar return to prosperity from the Fifties to the Seventies.<\/p>\n
The crime, for example, in\u00a0Inspector Imanishi Investigates\u00a0(first published in Japan in 1960-1), is quite humdrum when set alongside the derangement of Ranpo\u2019s villains. An unremarkable man is found beaten to death by a railway line.\u00a0And yet\u00a0this is precisely what gives Matsumoto\u2019s detective fiction its bite. A vividly eccentric crime tells you about a single person; a \u201cconventional\u201d one implicates a whole society. An activist as well as a bestselling author, Matsumoto used Inspector Imanishi\u00a0to explore the discrimination and class prejudice which he regarded as underpinning Japan\u2019s respectability \u2014 ugly realities from which his killers drew their motivation.<\/p>\n
Matsumoto is often billed in the UK as \u201cJapan\u2019s Agatha Christie\u201d, and he\u2019s now popular enough here to command inclusion in the Penguin Modern Classics label. And yet the Christie comparison is not quite right. Her villains tend briefly to upset a privileged, if rarely very happy, gathering. Their arrest and removal is a reset. So full and compelling is Matsumoto\u2019s portrait of postwar Japan, by contrast, that the reader ends up sympathizing with some of his perpetrators, as more-or-less powerless products of their time and place.<\/p>\n
British readers coming to Matsumoto in the 2010s and 2020s no doubt recognize his villainous societies in part from those found in crime writers like Ruth Rendell and Ian Rankin. The former took aim at the obliviousness of the privileged and the murderous frustration and shame that it could inspire in society\u2019s have-nots. Rankin\u2019s Edinburgh, meanwhile, was split between a genteel New Town and the deprivation and decline that characterized less well-known parts of the city. Both are themes for Matsumoto: the festering of social and psychological wounds, and the corruption that outwardly respectable societies like the UK and Japan become adept at concealing.<\/p>\n
All this makes it easier for Japan to become part of our cultural subconscious, as it surely is, bit by bit. The heyday of Haruki Murakami, back in the Nineties and 2000s, was also the era of the Palin travel documentary and Jonathan Ross\u2019s\u00a0Japanorama: Japan was at once sophisticated and weird. Now, thanks in no small part to the fiction boom and a generation of talented translators \u2014 including Ginny Tapley Takemori (Convenience Store Woman) and Polly Barton (Butter) \u2014 we see Japan not so much as exotic as simply early, in arriving at some of the challenges we face: an aging, shrinking population; the steady disappearance of stable careers; patterns of living and consumption that draw us apart from one another rather than bring us together; and attempts to fix some or all of this with technology. The gig economy and the perpetual part-timer lie at the core of Sayaka Murata\u2019s\u00a0Convenience Store Woman; low fertility and the pressure to reproduce drive\u00a0Vanishing World, by the same author. Even the comfort genre \u2014\u00a0Before the Coffee Gets Cold, plus all those books about cats \u2014 gestures at a profound need for consolation, in the face of loneliness and isolation fostered by long working hours and anonymous urban living.<\/p>\n
No doubt there\u2019s a selection effect at play here: no publisher of translated fiction gets far without an instinct for the universal, or at least a fine-grained sense of their target audience. But whereas Western readers once enjoyed Japanese literature as anthropology \u2014 \u201cunlocking Japan\u201d, as the popular phrase had it \u2014 there is, more and more, a recognition effect at play. That is great for publishers seeking sales, but perhaps less so for the rest of us, when the individual struggles and social dysfunction we\u2019re recognizing seem at times so dark. Pessimists see Japan as a harbinger of the UK\u2019s own doom: we\u2019re headed for similar demographic decline, only without the excellent infrastructure and high levels of social trust that help make Japan livable despite its troubles.<\/p>\n
And yet it\u2019s possible to find more in Japanese fiction than this. The country\u2019s old social contract may now be disappearing. But many of Japan\u2019s novelists offer cautious hope.\u00a0Convenience Store Woman\u00a0shows people trying to rethink what a successful life might look like;\u00a0Before the Coffee Gets Cold\u00a0is about\u00a0overcoming\u00a0loneliness by reconnecting with the world. The relationship between two of\u00a0Butter\u2019s main protagonists, Rika and Reiko \u2014 by turns tempestuous and tender \u2014 provides both women with liberation and comfort.\u00a0Perhaps what attracts British readers to Japanese fiction is not just the thrill of a plausible dystopia, but the strength and ingenuity of the people who find themselves born into one.<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"Thirty years ago, if you asked someone\u00a0British\u00a0to name their favorite Japanese author, most people would say Haruki Murakami.…\n","protected":false},"author":2,"featured_media":76458,"comment_status":"","ping_status":"","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"footnotes":""},"categories":[2],"tags":[49093,10328,49094,8,17,49095],"class_list":["post-76457","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","has-post-thumbnail","category-japan","tag-asako-yuzuki","tag-butter","tag-cosy-crime","tag-japan","tag-japanese","tag-sherlock-holmes"],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.europesays.com\/japan\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/76457","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.europesays.com\/japan\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.europesays.com\/japan\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.europesays.com\/japan\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/2"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.europesays.com\/japan\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=76457"}],"version-history":[{"count":0,"href":"https:\/\/www.europesays.com\/japan\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/76457\/revisions"}],"wp:featuredmedia":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.europesays.com\/japan\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media\/76458"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.europesays.com\/japan\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=76457"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.europesays.com\/japan\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=76457"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.europesays.com\/japan\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=76457"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}