Factbook

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    • Crime Fiction

    The publication of ‘The Tokyo Zodiac Murders’ in 1981 helped rebrand whodunnits in Japan and launch a new genre known as Shin-Honkaku mysteries, neoclassical mysteries[UPDATED: 4-18-2025]

    The publication in 1981 of The Tokyo Zodiac Murders, by Soji Shimada, generated a boom in whodunnits in Japan and a reappraisal of the somewhat out-of-favour and often derided genre, known locally as honkaku mysteries, classical, authentic  or orthodox mysteries, which had often been looked down on by Japan’s literati.

    So much so that The Tokyo Zodiac Murders, which has now been translated into many different languages including Russian, Chinese and English, and is considered a modern classic and one of the best Locked-Room mysteries ever written, spawned a new genre or sub-genre known as shin-honkaku, neoclassical or post-modern mysteries.

    This helped rebrand and popularise the whodunnit in a new brilliantly creative form in Japan and encourage Japanese readers to revisit works by earlier generations of Japanese authors that also contain fiendishly complex puzzling murder mysteries.

    “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,” according to Shimada.

    “Mystery writers were looked on with scorn and distain by Japan’s literary circles, and authors of so-called Jun-bungaku, pure literature,” Shimada points out.

    Shimada penned 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 labels and sub-genre.

    Crime fiction has a long history in Japan and early Western visitors to Japan 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.

    Despite this Japan’s first official detective story was published in 1889, Muzan, Cold Blood, by Ruiko Kuroiwa (1862-1913) after the arrival of highly influential Western-style detective fiction in Japan in translation.

    It was, however, Taro Hirai (1894-1965), writing under the pen name Edogawa Rampo, who established the modern genre in Japan.

    Other highly talented authors, like Shimada, who is now sometimes referred to as the Japanese master of the post-modern whodunnit, have also helped produce new interest in the broader category attracting both new readership and authorship.

    An interesting example is Miyuki Miyabe who won the Japan Mystery Writers Association Prize in 1987 putting her on the literary map and triggering a boom in female crime writing in Japan that continues today.

    Unlike authors of previous generations, including Shimada, she hasn’t felt constrained or defined by the various schools of Japanese crime fiction and has freely mixed styles and bent genres to great success generally avoiding outrageous puzzles.

    All this has created lasting momentum for crime related Japanese fiction in all its different creative forms.

    The publication of ‘The Tokyo Zodiac Murders’ in 1981 helped rebrand whodunnits in Japan and launch a new genre known as Shin-Honkaku mysteries, neoclassical mysteries Posted by Richard Nathan
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    • Crime Fiction

    In 1870s Japan there was huge demand for ‘corrupting’ crime fiction[UPDATED: 8-6-2024]

    “The books for which there is the greatest amount of demand are those that pack the greatest amount of crime into the smallest space, and corrupt the morals of all classes”, writes Isabella L. Bird (1831-1904) in Unbeaten Tracks in Japan: An account of Travels on Horseback in the interior including visits to the aborigines of Yezo and the Shrines of Nikko and Ise, published by G. P. Putnam’s Sons New York in 1881. The book follows Bird’s trip to the Land of the Rising Sun in 1878. 

    “There are large book shops which supply the country towns and the hawkers who carry books into the villages. ‘Pure Literature Societies’ are much needed in Japan,” writes Bird.

    “A bookseller tells me that eight-tenths of his very large stock consists of novels, many of them coarsely illustrated, and the remaining two-tenth of “standard works,” continues Bird.

    “You will be interested to know the names of some of those which few but the most illiterate families are without, and which take the place with us by the Bible and Pilgrim’s Progress”. 

    “There are certain books for women, called collectively the Bunko, and respectively Women’s Great Learning, the moral duties of women based upon the Chinese Classics”.

    And she also comments on the price of books observing that: “Books are remarkably cheap. Copyright is obtained by a Japanese author by the payment to Government of a sum equivalent to the selling-price of six copies of his work”. 

    Despite Bird’s concerns about criminal fiction and its corrupting influences more than a century ago, as well as the nation’s continuing love for the genre, Japan is today a peaceful nation, with low crime rates and very low homicide rates by most international measures.

    In 1870s Japan there was huge demand for ‘corrupting’ crime fiction Posted by Richard Nathan