Detective Fiction

and the Rise

of the Japanese Novel,
1880–1930

Harvard East Asian Monographs 346

 Detective Fiction
and the Rise
of the Japanese Novel,
1880–1930

Satoru Saito

Published by the Harvard University Asia Center

and distributed by Harvard University Press
Cambridge (Massachusetts) and London, 2012
© 2012 by The President and Fellows of Harvard College

Printed in the United States of America

The Harvard University Asia Center publishes a monograph series and, in coordination
with the Fairbank Center for Chinese Studies, the Korea Institute, the Reischauer Insti-
tute of Japanese Studies, and other faculties and institutes, administers research projects
designed to further scholarly understanding of China, Japan, Vietnam, Korea, and other
Asian countries. The Center also sponsors projects addressing multidisciplinary and re-
gional issues in Asia.

Library of Congress Cataloging-in-Publication Data

Saito, Satoru, 1973–

Detective fiction and the rise of the Japanese novel, 1880-1930 / Satoru Saito.
pages cm. -- (Harvard East Asian monographs ; 346)
Includes bibliographical references and index.
ISBN 978-0-674-06586-4
1. Japanese fiction--Meiji period, 1868-1912--History and criticism. 2. Japanese fiction--
Taisho period, 1912-1926--History and criticism. 3. Japanese fiction--Western influences.
4. Detective and mystery stories, Japanese--History and criticism. I. Title.
PL726.6.S285 2012
895.6'308720904--dc23
2011048240

Index by the author

Printed on acid-free paper

Last figure below indicates year of this printing

22 21 20 19 18 17 16 15 14 13 12
To M
 Acknowledgments

Were it not for the goodwill of a great number of people, this book
would not have been possible. I am most indebted to my advisor at Co-
lumbia University, Tomi Suzuki, who never hesitated to offer her time
and critical acumen for as long as I have known her. I cannot express
how fortunate I feel to have her as my mentor and how invaluable her
insights have been in shaping this project.
Haruo Shirane also spent countless hours in helping me through this
project and in guiding me through my academic career to date. His
thirst for knowledge and dedication to the field continue to be an inspi-
ration for me. Paul Anderer’s warm support and guidance have been in-
dispensable, as has his ability to tease out the deepest implications of an
argument with so much eloquence. His comments brought form to
ideas that lay nebulous and dormant in my mind and now occupy the
pages of this book. Marilyn Ivy’s seminar on detective fiction and Japa-
nese modernity jump-started my project, and her theoretical vigor
quickly became a model that I still seek to emulate.
My dissertation research in Japan, which forms the foundation of
this book, was conducted through the generous assistance of the Japan
Foundation Doctoral Dissertation Fellowship. While there, Komori
Yōichi of Tokyo University took time out of his busy schedule to shed
light on the value of finding a balance between critical theory and
historical knowledge in articulating the conceptual frameworks of my
project. The Junior Fellowship in Japan Studies from the Weatherhead
East Asian Institute allowed me to focus my energies on writing in my
final year at Columbia University. The generous support of Rutgers
University and the Department of Asian Languages and Cultures made
viii Acknowledgments

subsequent research trips to Japan possible, as I was completing this

project as an assistant professor. I appreciate the willingness of Waseda
University’s Toeda Hirokazu to share his vast knowledge of Japanese
literature and to facilitate my research in Japan on these occasions.
My colleagues at Rutgers—Ching-I Tu, Richard Simmons, Young-
mee Cho, and Janet Walker—provided me with a nurturing environ-
ment in which to develop both as a researcher and a teacher. I am es-
pecially indebted to Paul Schalow who has given me support at every
juncture to guide me through the long process of revising the disserta-
tion into this book and to Senko Maynard whose productivity in and
dedication to research have truly been inspirational.
My friends and colleagues Joy Kim, Christina Laffin, Sharon Pacuk,
Torquil Duthie, Mathew Thompson, Dennis Frost, Indra Levy, and Mi-
chael Scanlon all read through various drafts of this project and provided
numerous suggestions. I am thankful to have such dedicated and fun-
loving people as colleagues. They have made my days as a graduate stu-
dent and an assistant professor not only productive but also greatly en-
joyable.
An earlier version of Chapter 1 appeared under the same title in the
Journal of Japanese Studies, vol. 36, no. 1 (Winter 2010). I am grateful for
Martha Walsh and the anonymous readers of the article for providing
insightful suggestions. A fragment of Chapter 6 was given as a presen-
tation and published as “Detecting the Unconscious: Edogawa Ranpo
and Narratives of Modern Experience,” in Literature and Literary Theory,
Proceedings of the Association for Japanese Literary Studies, Vol. 9
(2008).
I am indebted to William Hammell of the Harvard University Asia
Center for his belief in this project and for his efforts in seeing it
through to the end. I thank the anonymous readers for the press whose
reports gave the manuscript the final push and insights necessary to
bring it to completion.
And last but certainly not least, my deepest gratitude goes to To-
moko Sakomura who has been there for me always.
 Contents

Conventions x
Introduction 1
1 The Novel’s Other: Detective Fiction
and the Literary Project of Tsubouchi Shōyō 17
2 Allegories of Detective Fiction: Kuroiwa Ruikō
and the Refashioning of a Meiji Subject 60
3 Of Crimes and Punishments: The Tribulations
of Meiji Students in the Writings of Japanese Naturalism 111
4 Mysteries of the Modern Subject: The Detective
and the Detective Fiction Framework in the Writings
of Natsume Sōseki 156
5 Rhetoric of Disavowal: “Secrets and Liberation”
and the Specters of the West 197
6 Detecting the Unconscious: Edogawa Ranpo
and the Emergence of the Japanese Detective 235
Epilogue: The Detective, the Masses, and the State 277

Reference Matter
Works Cited 285
Index 295
 Conventions

Unless otherwise noted, all translations are mine. For names of Japanese
authors and scholars working in the Japanese language, I have listed the
surname first followed by the first name. For authors who use pen
names, I refer to them by their pen names, which normally takes the
place of their first names, and not by their surnames. There are a few
exceptions when I refer to a full pen name by its surname portion (e.g.,
Futabatei Shimei, but not Edogawa Ranpo) as dictated by academic cus-
toms in Japan. I have used the surname for the purposes of citation in
all cases. Throughout the book, I use single quotations to denote scare
quotes in order to distinguish them from words, phrases, and sentences
that are citations, which are denoted by double quotations. For conven-
ience, I have included the plot summaries of the lesser-known works in
the footnotes.
 Detective Fiction
and the Rise
of the Japanese Novel,
1880–1930
 Introduction

In January 1888, just as Japan was set to consolidate itself as a modern

state with the promulgation of the constitution in February 1889 and the
opening of the Diet in November 1890, the journalist and political activ-
ist Kuroiwa Ruikō (1862–1920) began the serialization of Hōtei no bijin
(A beauty in court), a translation of Hugh Conway’s Dark Days (1884), in
the newspaper Konnichi shinbun. Over the course of the next five years,
Ruikō would take advantage of American dime novel collections, such as
the Seaside Library and Lovell’s Library, that began to flood the Japanese
market in the latter half of the 1880s and serialize more than twenty
translations of Western detective stories in various newspapers. Many of
these stories were French in origin by such authors as Émile Gaboriau
(1832–1873) and Fortuné du Boisgobey (1821–1891) that depicted the glam-
orous world of French high society and the sensational secrets lurking
within it. By introducing such works to the Japanese reading public,
Ruikō catered to their exotic interest for the foreign to single-handedly
fashion “the golden era of detective novels” in Japan.1

—————
1. Takagi, Shinbun shōsetsushi kō, 70. Ruikō’s overwhelming popularity can be
observed in the following figure: when Ruikō left the newspaper Miyako shinbun
to start his own paper Yorozu chōhō in November 1892, much of the former’s
readership followed Ruikō to the latter, and by the next month the readership
of the Miyako shinbun had decreased from 27,000 to 7,000, and the Yorozu chōhō
could boast a healthy circulation of 35,000 (the figure is from Itō Hideo, Kuro-
iwa Ruikō: tantei shōsetsu no ganso, 135).
2 Introduction

No doubt prompted by Ruikō’s success, the journal Kokumin no tomo

(The nation’s friend) made the following comments in the opening edi-
torial of its May 3, 1893 issue:
The age of Maihime and Saikun has disappeared like a dream, and the age of the
detective novel or the railroad novel has arrived. For four or five years, the liter-
ary world that wore the air of unexpected spring has withered, and we can only
see birds resting on leafless branches. Everything has a period of development
and inactivity; has today become a period of inactivity? . . . Today, the literature
of our country has deteriorated. Detective novels or railroad novels, as spiritual
sustenance of our society, do not even serve as a humble meal. Our citizens de-
sire animated literature that will raise their heads, boil their blood, and severely
shake their backbones.2

Most likely written by Tokutomi Sohō (1863–1957), the editor-in-chief of

the highly influential journal, this editorial entitled “Bungaku shakai no
genjō” (Present state of the literary world) vehemently criticizes “de-
tective novels” for having emaciated the spirit of Japanese society in the
Meiji period (1868–1912) and blames their overwhelming popularity for
the decline of the literary world. Thus, it pitted detective fiction squarely
against the novel, which was conceived as a new form of fictional nar-
rative with Western influence in the latter half of the 1880s and was
exemplified, at least according to Kokumin no tomo, by Mori Ōgai’s Mai-
hime (The dancing girl; 1890) and Tsubouchi Shōyō’s Saikun (The wife;
1889). And in this battle, detective fiction seemed to have the upper
hand, forcing proponents of the novel such as Ken’yūsha, the dominant
literary group of the period and an ardent opponent of detective fiction,
to take drastic action: to “fight one evil with another” by publishing its
own detective fiction series in January of the same year the above edito-
rial appeared.3
—————
2. “Bungaku shakai no genjō,” Kokumin no tomo, May 3, 1893, 1, 4. The term
“railroad novel” used in the passage refers to fictional stories that were geared
toward the masses for pure entertainment purposes and can be considered a de-
rogatory synonym for detective fiction. General index to Meiji bungaku zenshū
lists two instances of this term’s use. In both instances, the term is used in con-
junction with “detective novel” to describe the state of the Meiji literary world in
the 1890s. For actual passages, see Izumi, “Obakezuki no iware shōshō to shojo-
saku,” 349, and Masaoka, “Bunkai yatsuatari,” 266.
3. The phrase “fight one evil with another” is from the following anecdote
written in the 1927 memoir by Ken’yūsha member Emi Suiin (1869–1934): “At that
time [1893], detective novels were in fashion. The translations by Kuroiwa Ruikō
were spreading with great momentum. . . . ‘With detective novels growing ram-
 Introduction 3

Given the severity of Kokumin no tomo’s charges against detective fic-

tion, it was fitting that Ruikō responded immediately with his side of
the story in an editorial entitled “Tantei-dan ni tsuite” (On detective
stories), which appeared in the May 11, 1893 issue of Yorozu chōhō, the
newspaper he had founded a year prior. Ruikō writes:
In our country, there are occasionally people who think detective stories as some-
thing that should be observed from the interest of literature, give them names like
“detective novels” [tantei shōsetsu], and even attempt at criticisms that detective
novels are ruining the literary world. However, a detective story [tantei-dan] is a
detective story and not a novel, and even if the author squeezed it out from his
imagination as if he were writing a novel, it is still one type of “story” and cannot
be called a “novel.” Therefore, the novel and the detective story have different
territories and are not harmful to each other. I have seen and know that in coun-
tries like the United States, the detective story, alongside the rapidly developing
novel, occupies a different path and develops without conflicting or fighting [with
the novel].4

Whereas the supporters of the novel deny the literary value of detective
fiction and view its popularity as an evil to be defeated, Ruikō rejects
any claim that detective fiction is literature and argues that they are two
distinct narrative forms which have nothing to do with each other and,
therefore, should not be in competition or in conflict.5 According to
him, it is the supporters of the novel who coined the phrase “detective
novel” in the first place to create the illusion that detective fiction exists
within the realm of literature.
If we take Ruikō’s word in assessing the state of this dispute over de-
tective fiction, then we must admit that detective fiction is falsely ac-
cused of a crime it has not committed. But despite his fervent denial,
Ruikō also does not forget to hint at the possibility of the connection
and fluidity between the two genres when he comments later in the edi-
torial that “there are detective stories that have advanced and joined the
—————
pant, the sales of pure literature are deteriorating. So let’s fight one evil with
another and publish detective novels and sell lots of them at a low cost.’ This in-
sistence of Shun’yōdō [a publishing house] was brought to [Ozaki] Kōyō’s place.
And so Kōyō at once recruited a death squad from the company” (Emi, Jiko
chūshin Meiji bundan shi, 180). The series was short lived, ending in February 1894,
as it did nothing to quench Ruikō’s popularity.
4. Kuroiwa, “Tantei-dan ni tsuite.”
5. Ruikō states later in the article: “I have occasionally translated detective
stories, not for literature, but for the newspaper. . . . [Detective stories] are not
novels but serials [tsuzukimono], not novels but news” (ibid.).
4 Introduction

ranks of the novel, and there are also emotional [ninjōteki] novels that
have the same composition as detective stories.”6 And such a comment
must have stung the supporters of the novel, for an exemplar of such a
fluidity between genres had made its appearance in Japan: the trans-
lation of Fyodor Dostoevsky’s Crime and Punishment (1866) by Uchida
Roan (1868–1929), published in two installments as Tsumi to batsu, the
first in November 1892 and second in February 1893. Sharing important
characteristics with the detective story yet undeniably literary, this work
radically problematized the fundamental difference between the two
genres, especially because Roan’s translation exhibited characteristics
that emphasized the detective fiction elements present in the Russian
original. Indeed, given the time frame of Roan’s translation, the vehe-
ment criticism of detective fiction in Kokumin no tomo also begins to ap-
pear as a defense mechanism on the part of the supporters of the novel
to repress the reality of the intimate connection and inherent fluidity
between the two genres.
But importantly, the crisis of genres between detective fiction and
the novel quietly yet powerfully brought about by Roan’s Tsumi to batsu
was, in fact, already present in the story of their birth—that is, in the
nascent stages of their emergence in the latter half of the 1880s.7 As I
explore in Chapter 1 of this book, the intricate connection between the
two genres can be clearly discerned in the literary project of Tsubouchi
Shōyō (1859–1935), whose Shōsetsu shinzui (The essence of the novel;
1885–1886) not only articulated the theoretical and technical foundations
on which modern Japanese literature would develop but also provided
the criteria against which detective fiction would be criticized. Yet, at
the same time, Shōyō was also one of the very first to experiment with
the detective fiction genre in Japan, translating the American detective
story writer Anna Katharine Green’s XYZ as Nisegane tsukai (The coun-
terfeiter) in the last months of 1887. Appearing a month or so before
Ruikō’s first adaptation Hōtei no bijin, Nisegane tsukai reveals that the
emergence of detective fiction via translations of Western detective
stories was not an isolated phenomenon of popular culture but had in-
—————
6. Ibid.
7. The timing of the emergence of the two genres in Japan already suggests a
different relationship between detective fiction and the novel from that in the
West where their formative periods do not overlap historically. For a discussion
of this relationship in the Western context, see D. A. Miller, The Novel and the
Police, especially 50–51.
 Introduction 5

stead much to do with the articulation of the notion of the modern

novel, which would have far-reaching ramifications in the development
of fictional narratives in modern Japan.
It is the extent, nature, and development of this connection between
detective fiction and the modern novel that is the subject of this book.
As such, this book does not attempt to provide a literary history of Japa-
nese detective fiction nor is its primary focus the examination of this
genre within the larger sociocultural developments of Japanese moder-
nity, especially since such approaches have yielded much scholarship in
recent years, both in Japan and in the United States.8 Rather, this book
sheds light on the deep structural and conceptual similarities between
detective fiction and the novel in prewar Japan through a series of close
reading of literary texts by canonical writers of Japanese literature—
Tsubouchi Shōyō, Shimazaki Tōson (1872–1943), Tayama Katai (1871–
1930), Natsume Sōseki (1867–1916), Akutagawa Ryūnosuke (1892–1927),
Tanizaki Jun’ichirō (1886–1965), and Satō Haruo (1892–1964)—and of
Japanese detective fiction, Kuroiwa Ruikō and Edogawa Ranpo (1894–
1965). In so doing, I hope to illustrate that the interactions between the
two genres, implicated in these texts, were not marginal occurrences but
instead critical moments of literary engagement. It is to posit a genealogy
within modern Japanese literature that comes into shape through these
interactions—from the latter half of the 1880s on the dawn of the first
detective fiction boom driven by Ruikō’s translations to the 1920s when
the second detective fiction boom took place with Edogawa Ranpo tak-

—————
8. For example, Uchida Ryūzō’s Tantei shōsetsu no shakaigaku (Sociology of the
detective novel; 2001) has provided a comparative examination of Japanese de-
tective fiction within the international history of the genre, and Tantei shōsetsu
to Nihon kindai (Detective novel and Japanese modernity; 2004) has collected es-
says by prominent scholars that discuss the role detective fiction played in the
various developments of Japanese modernity. Outside of Japan, Mark Silver’s
Purloined Letters: Cultural Borrowing and Japanese Crime Literature, 1868–1937 (2008)
has provided a much needed English-language analysis of the issues and themes
of prewar Japanese detective fiction from the perspective of this genre as an act
of “cultural borrowing,” and Sari Kawana’s Murder Most Modern: Detective Fiction
and Japanese Culture (2008) has elucidated the relationship between Japanese de-
tective fiction and a variety of contemporaneous cultural discourses, including
science and abnormal sexuality, and, in so doing, framed detective fiction within
the larger sociocultural developments of modern Japan from the prewar to the
postwar period.
6 Introduction

ing the lead through his original detective stories—that I employ the
term “the Japanese novel” in this book.
At the heart of such interactions is one of the primary preoccupations
of modern Japanese literature: the tribulations of the student and its later
incarnation—the intellectual—as emblematic subjects within Japan’s
modernization process. I contend that the detective fiction genre pro-
vided the Japanese authors with structural and conceptual frameworks,
both explicit and implicit, through which to examine and critique the na-
ture and implications of this overarching process. Loosely defined in
terms of the classical Western tradition introduced by Edgar Allan Poe
(1809–1849) and institutionalized by Arthur Conan Doyle (1859–1930),
detective fiction tells a story of a detective who uses his powers of obser-
vation and deduction based on his rational intellect and scientific knowl-
edge to identify and capture a criminal. In this sense, detective fiction
operates under the larger dynamic of secret and exposure that character-
izes many modern fictions, both in the West and in Japan. But what dis-
tinguishes detective fiction within this dynamic is the articulation of a
specific subject position occupied by the detective who represents the
subject’s epistemological desire to understand the Other as the object of
knowledge, where the knowledge as truth of the crime is posited as
undiscovered, concealed, or withheld from the subject. Importantly, this
epistemological desire finds legitimacy in the detective’s status as an
agent of the state—however aloof and eccentric he may appear in the
examples of classical Western tradition—who employs his intellect in the
name of authority for the good of the state and its people.
And it is here that the detective intersects squarely with the Japa-
nese student and intellectual in modern Japan through its symbolic value
within the critical ideologies of the nation’s modernization as Westerni-
zation process. By taking up matters of rationality, justice, and science
among others, detective fiction positioned itself perfectly within the
social-evolutionary rhetoric of bunmei kaika (civilization and enlighten-
ment), an aggressive strategy by the Meiji government and intellectuals to
import all aspects of Western civilization to Japan that posited Western
nations as ‘civilized’ and ‘enlightened’ in opposition to the ‘uncivilized’
and ‘unenlightened’ Japan.9 As such, it functioned as a site where these
—————
9. Characterized by its all-encompassing nature, bunmei kaika affected not only
the elites of Meiji Japan but also its ordinary citizens, especially those in large
cities. As Nakanome Tōru writes: “From customs and habits such as hairstyles
(cropped hair), clothing (Western dress), and diet (beef nabe) and the rapid devel-
 Introduction 7

epistemological and moral issues regarded as central to Japan’s nation

building and Westernization process were explored and as a vehicle
through which they were popularized. Through its protagonist, the de-
tective, who “celebrated the triumph of science and reason, and embod-
ied the certainty of shinpo [progress],” detective fiction provided its read-
ers with a hero who symbolized how Western knowledge can be utilized
for the good of the nation.10 That is, the detective became an emblem of
success within the ideology of risshin shusse (rising in the world) that drove
ambitious youths of Meiji Japan and beyond to seek success through edu-
cation, in general, and Western learning, in particular.11 In such a way,
the detective and his story exerted their influence through their appeal
within the binary opposition between Japan and the West, not necessar-
ily as historical reality, but as promoted by the critical ideologies of mod-
ern Japan that effectively interpellated its students and intellectuals as
subjects, a process that was not only reflected in but also reproduced and
renewed through its literary formations.12

—————
opments in transportation and communication systems such as the railroads and
postal service to the thought and education that subsumed the works of Fuku-
zawa Yukichi, the school system, and new media such as public speeches, the
newspaper, and journals—the full-scale mobilization of Westernization in all as-
pects of sociocultural phenomena and the [resulting] confusion of values . . . the
world of bunmei kaika was like a huge theater where comedies and tragedies sur-
rounding these aspects were performed” (“Bunmei kaika no jidai,” 214).
10. Kawana, Murder Most Modern, 9.
11. As Maeda Ai has discussed at length, this ideology finds its origin in the
two bestsellers of the early Meiji period, namely, Nakamura Masanao’s Saigoku
risshi-hen (a translation of Samuel Smiles’s Self-help; 1870–1871) and Fukuzawa
Yukichi’s Gakumon no susume (Encouragement of learning; 1872–1876), both of
which espoused the notion of human equality and the universal potential to suc-
ceed in life through learning. For details, see Maeda, “Meiji risshin shusse shugi
no keifu.”
12. In this sense, this book examines the ways in which literary texts function
to shape a certain collective consciousness or what Raymond Williams has
called “structures of feeling.” On this concept, Williams writes: “The term is dif-
ficult, but ‘feeling’ is chosen to emphasize a distinction from more formal con-
cepts of ‘world-view’ or ‘ideology.’. . . It is that we are concerned with meanings
and values as they are actively lived and felt, and the relations between these and
formal or systematic beliefs are in practice variable (including historically vari-
able). . . . We are talking about characteristic elements of impulse, restraint, and
tone: specifically affective elements of consciousness and relationships: not feel-
ings against thought, but thought as felt and feeling as thought: practical con-
8 Introduction

But even despite the undeniable symbolic appeal of its protagonist

that makes detective fiction appear as an overdetermined genre whose
emergence was all but guaranteed in Meiji Japan, this was not the case,
for there is another side to the story of its birth that needs to be taken
into account: the historical relationship between the detective and the
paradigmatic sociopolitical landscape of the early Meiji period buttressed
by the Freedom and People’s Rights movement ( Jiyū minken undō).
Touting Western Enlightenment ideals of human freedom and liberty
and calling for the establishment of a constitution and a representative
form of government, this liberal political movement spread throughout
Japan in the latter half of the 1870s. But as government suppression
heightened in the early 1880s, the movement steadily deteriorated, espe-
cially when its radical members, mostly affiliated with the Liberal Party
( Jiyūtō), turned to violence out of frustration and desperation.
Significantly, the government use of so-called tantei or detectives
played a major role in the movement’s deterioration, with the intro-
duction of detectives in 1881 marking a turning point in its fate.13 Infil-
trating political parties and conventions disguised as activists, govern-
ment detectives spied on and sometimes even framed activists for crimes
they did not commit. In so doing, they quickly and firmly established
their reputation as enemies of the people, as the editorial “Tantei-ron”
(On detectives), which appeared in the political newspaper Jiyū shinbun
in April 1883, clearly indicates: “A political detective is not something
that should ever exist in a peaceful society ruled by an emperor. And be-
cause it is an evil existence that should be abhorred and detested, the
ministers of the government should never lend their ears to it.”14 It was in
—————
sciousness of a present kind, in a living and inter-relating continuity” (Marxism
and Literature, 132).
13. The government use of detectives officially began in November 1881 when
the Department of Finance issued a state detective expense of 10,000 yen to
the Metropolitan Police Department (Obinata, Tennō-sei keisatsu to minshū, 77).
Coming just after the Crisis of 1881, when a public uproar ignited in response
to a political scandal forcing the government to promise the opening of the Diet
in 1890, this measure was a direct result of the government’s realization of the
power of public opinion formed through newspapers and political conventions
during this turbulent era of damning articles and inciting orations. For an over-
view of the Crisis of 1881, see Huffman, Creating a Public, 112–20.
14. “Tantei-ron,” Jiyū shinbun, April 12, 1883. The essay appeared a day after
the reporting of the unethical nature of a government detective in the Takada
Incident, in which over twenty members of the Liberal Party were falsely
 Introduction 9

such a way that the word tantei became known in Japan, often being sub-
stituted by its derogatory variant mittei (spy) and appearing as villains in
the fictional narratives of the 1880s.
Given such a negative connotation, the overwhelming popularity of
Ruikō’s detective stories—and the popularity of the detective as fictional
hero—only around ten years after the introduction of the historical de-
tective as villain in Japanese society begins to appear as an astounding
turn of events rather than as a natural course of history within the na-
tion’s modernization and Westernization process. Not surprisingly then,
the emergence and blossoming of detective fiction via translations of
Western detective stories in the late 1880s required a successful amelio-
ration and radical transformation of the negative connotations associated
with the figure of the detective. As I illustrate in Chapter 2, Ruikō’s de-
tective stories cleverly utilized existing discourses that were popular dur-
ing the period to redirect the resentment felt toward government detec-
tives by those involved in or supportive of the Freedom and People’s
Rights movement, ultimately supplanting and refashioning the historical
detective as villain with the fictional detective as hero for the people.
But as popular as Ruikō’s detective stories were, suggesting their ideo-
logical influence, I would argue that a sense of deep ambivalence charac-
terized the relationship between the detective and the Japanese student/
intellectual—at least, as portrayed by the self-proclaimed voice, the nov-
elist—within the major literary developments of modern Japan. No
doubt reflecting the condition of the detective’s birth in Meiji Japan,
such ambivalence also had much to do with the difficulties of the Japa-
nese student and intellectual in finding productive ways to participate in
society as emblems of modernization and Westernization that they were
supposed to embody. In other words, while the archetypal protagonist of
the literary works I have selected—many of which are pivotal works
within the development of modern Japanese literature—shares with the
detective his desire to understand the Other as an object of knowledge,
these works invariably fail to describe how he converts such desire into
utility for the nation, as did the detective story. And if the detective sym-
bolized the individual’s success to embody the Western values and ideals
that Japan sought hard to import and incorporate within the context of
nation-building, then the failure to find social success in society as a pro-
ductive member rendered the subject as the detective’s opposite, the
—————
charged of planning a coup d’état and assassinations of ministers. For an over-
view of Takada Incident, see Morinaga, Saiban jiyū minken jidai, 84–90.
10 Introduction

criminal. Indeed, the dangers of failing to embody these ideals are already
suggested by Futabatei Shimei’s Ukigumo (Drifting clouds; 1887–1889), of-
ten considered the first modern novel in Japan, through the protagonist
Bunzō, whose dismissal from his official post leads him on a path to delu-
sion and madness. And it was Crime and Punishment, introduced in Japan
in the early 1890s through Roan’s translation, that took these failures to
the next level, by suggesting the potential of the fallen student to turn to
violent crime when he becomes alienated from society as a result of his
divergence from the path to success.
The various permutations of the Japanese intellectual’s struggle within
the framework of risshin shusse ideology that manifests itself within the
spectrum of the opposition between the detective and the criminal—
Crime and Punishment providing one powerful example—constitute the
primary subject matter of Chapters 3, 4, and 5. In addition to considering
the Meiji reception of Crime and Punishment, Chapter 3 examines the
works of Japanese Naturalism, which emerged as the dominant literary
trend after the Russo-Japanese War (1904–1905), and, in particular, its
pivotal works, Hakai (Broken commandment; 1906) by Shimazaki Tōson
and Futon (The quilt; 1907) by Tayama Katai. While being influenced by
the heterogeneous literary developments of the 1890s, the two works
share critical narrative structures with Crime and Punishment, not only in
their employment of the dynamic of secret and exposure but also in the
way such dynamic unfolds through an act of confession that, in turn, re-
sults in the subjects’ banishment from the society in which they had
hoped to succeed. Through the analysis of such similarities that make it
possible to frame these works as successors to the Russian masterpiece,
Chapter 3 reconsiders the fate of the stories’ marginalized protagonists—
a burakumin and a woman—within the struggles of Japanese writers to
find imaginary solutions for the aspiring intellectuals in a society where
risshin shusse, as the central ideological cog of the educated class in the
Meiji period, was quickly collapsing.
If the pivotal works of Japanese Naturalism in their own ways exer-
cised strategic negotiations of the problems facing the Japanese intellec-
tual, then Natsume Sōseki, whose works are examined in Chapter 4, uti-
lized the dynamic of secret and exposure to tackle the issue of the
Japanese intellectual head on. And he did so by positing the criminality
of the intellectual in modern society as a likely and logical, if not an in-
herent, trait. Importantly, it is here that the deep-seated ambivalence
toward the detective in modern Japan manifests itself most extremely.
While he extensively criticized the detective as the most evil of all pro-
 Introduction 11

fessions—often comparing him to the criminal—Sōseki could not help

but write stories about detectives and engage more seriously than any
other writer in modern Japan on their potential as metaphors, utilizing
them to elucidate the fate of the modern individual caught in a rapidly-
changing world of self-interest and over-analysis. In so doing, Sōseki re-
considered the role of the intellectual for the nation in post–Russo-
Japanese War Japan when nation-building received new focus through
the production of a modern citizenry fit for Japan’s new position as one
of the international powers. As we shall see, Sōseki’s exploration in-
volved the intellectual’s inability to find a place for himself within the
nation-building process as a productive citizen that Western education
should have offered him, as manifested in his portrayals of subjects who
could be understood to be kōtō yūmin, or “upper-class vagabonds” char-
acterized by their unproductive existence.
Such explorations would continue in the Taishō period (1912–1926)
after Sōseki’s works finally began the process of actively connecting the
critical undercurrents of modern Japanese literature with the detective
fiction genre, bringing the contours of the Japanese novel into sharp fo-
cus. The prime example in this regard was a special issue of the maga-
zine Chūō kōron (Central review) titled “Himitsu to kaihō” (Secrets and
liberation) in 1918, which contained stories organized under the rubric of
“new artistic detective novels” written by the likes of Tanizaki Jun’ichirō,
Akutagawa Ryūnosuke, and Satō Haruo. As I argue in Chapter 5, these
stories whose focus still remain on the criminal explore the potentially
criminative power that Western ideals exercised on Japanese intellectu-
als and thereby provide a suture between the criminal and the detective
that most vividly manifests itself in Satō’s “Shimon” (The fingerprint)
in which the protagonist turns detective in order to exonerate himself
of a murder that he may have committed unknowingly. In such ways,
these stories took the exploration of the link between Western educa-
tion and criminality to its extremes—in a manner similar to Crime and
Punishment—to expose the fundamentally fragmented nature of the Japa-
nese intellectual who is torn between his belief in Western ideals and his
existence within Japanese society.
And I would argue that it was only through such negotiations between
the detective and the criminal enacted by the major writers of modern
Japan that a Japanese detective could finally emerge as hero in the figure
of Edogawa Ranpo’s Akechi Kogorō to bring about the second detective
fiction boom in the 1920s. Ranpo’s early stories, examined in Chapter 6,
reflected the process through which they emerged, telling how the edu-
12 Introduction

cated and apolitical subjects from the country become implicated in the
detective fiction framework in one way or another. Thus, these stories
engaged with the central issue of the Japanese novel explored through
its relationship to the detective fiction genre, positing the detective as a
savior of the Japanese subject whose relationship to the rapidly changing
external reality of the modern metropolis was becoming more and more
tenuous each day, especially after the Great Kantō Earthquake of 1923
that devastated much of the Tokyo-Yokohama region and spurred a ma-
jor reconstruction of the urban landscape.
Significantly, the second detective fiction boom brought on by the
popularity of Ranpo’s detective stories occurred under similar sociopo-
litical climate as the first. Both booms took place after the spread of
liberal political movements—the aforementioned Freedom and People’s
Rights movement and the so-called Taishō Democracy from the 1910s
to the early 1920s—which, in turn, were followed by a new system of po-
litical representation with the institution of voting in 1890 and of uni-
versal male suffrage in 1925. But while these movements could be said to
have obtained their goals, such successes came after vehement suppres-
sion of these movements and were coupled with despotic measures by
the government, which sought to curb any meaningful political activity
on the part of its citizens. These measures were the 1887 Public Order
Ordinance (Chian jōrei), which banned 570 activists from the capital and
prohibited political assemblies, and the 1925 Maintenance of Public Or-
der Act (Chian iji hō) whose vague language made it easily applicable—
and was, in fact, liberally applied—to control and punish any activity that
might be deemed politically subversive.
On the one hand, this historical connection between liberal political
movements (especially as it relates to enfranchisement) and the detective
fiction booms makes sense considering the theoretical underpinnings
of democracy. Despite his unofficial nature, the private detective—the
primary protagonist of the Western detective fiction tradition—is “a
shrewd agent of authority” who demonstrates the surveying and control-
ling powers of the state and suggests how such authority “has already
been deeply internalized in diffused form by the general public” to the
extent that the private detective represents the public’s active role in
reproducing the efforts of the state to capture and punish the violators
of its laws.15 And if the private detective suggested the participation on
—————
15. First citation from Takahashi, “ ‘Tantei shōsetsu’ ga inpei suru mono,” 54;
second citation from Uchida Ryūzō, Tantei shōsetsu no shakaigaku, 38.
 Introduction 13

the part of citizens in the state machinery as it relates to the disciplinary

powers of the state, then voting is a participation on the part of citizens
in the state machinery as it confers the rights of the people to the state as
an agent of the people’s will. The detective is an agent of the state, but, at
the same time, he is made possible theoretically by the authority granted
by the people to the state. Coupled with the ineptitude of the police as
the official agents of the state that is comically portrayed in the detective
stories of Conan Doyle and Poe, the private detective as coming from the
side of the public reiterates this power relationship between the state and
its citizens (that is often felt as reversed) by suggesting that the state can-
not provide the necessary disciplinary actions without the help of its citi-
zens. Thus, the detective story celebrates democracy and the rights of
citizens as powerful constituents of state machinery.
On the other hand, the despotic measures taken by the Japanese
government in conjunction with liberal political movements complicate
this understanding. In a sense, the democratic movements functioned as
foils to highlight the despotic measures coupled with such movements
as violations of the basic tenets of democracy that made citizens keenly
aware of their alienation from the state. Indeed, we could argue that it is
precisely because authority comes at them from without in reality that
there arises a need for the detective who celebrates such authority to
emerge in the fictional world and for the detective story as “an ideologi-
cal act in its own right, with the function of inventing imaginary or for-
mal ‘solutions’ to unresolvable social contradictions,” to use Fredric
Jameson’s formulation.16 And Jameson’s use of the word “unresolvable”
seems particularly fitting for Japan’s case, which was significantly differ-
ent from the advanced Western nations that may experience moments
of the government’s despotic eruptions in the course of its democratic
development, for such a contradiction was not just a facet of the devel-
opment of Japan as a modern state but rather an inherent and constitu-
tive part of the Japanese state and its political system. Crystallized in
the foundational framework of the Meiji Constitution, Japanese democ-
racy was a fraud at its source to the extent that the rights of the Japa-
nese citizen were not taken as inherent and inviolable but granted by
the graces of the emperor.17
—————
16. Jameson, The Political Unconscious, 79.
17. Delineating the power of the government and guaranteeing specific rights
of its people, the constitution, as the most basic and necessary component of
a democratic society, most often represents a contract between the state and its
14 Introduction

As the above examples make clear, a variety of contradictions, socio-

political and historical in nature, confronted the modern Japanese sub-
ject, necessitating a literary/imaginary resolution in the fictional world.
This book seeks to elucidate how the dynamic of the detective story,
whether consciously evoked or unconsciously evocative, offered ways for
Japanese writers to imagine such resolutions and what the nature of these
resolutions were. And it does so through the examination of specific
works to consider their sociopolitical function as “an ideological act,” to
heed Jameson’s formulation. But while such considerations have taken
literary studies in recent years toward what is often called a ‘sociology of
literature,’ I focus primarily on the literary texts themselves with the be-
lief that it is possible to contribute to the consideration of narrative form
as an ideological act through such methodological emphasis.
As Hans Robert Jauss has argued, the text, by existing within a
spe-cific historical moment and sociopolitical environment, presents it-
self to readers within the “horizon of expectations” that is constructed
through their prior experiences as discursive and historical subjects, and
thus: “the psychic process in the reception of a text is, in the primary
horizon of aesthetic experience, by no means only an arbitrary series of
merely subjective impressions, but rather the carrying out of specific in-
structions in a process of directed perceptions that can be comprehended
according to its constitutive motivations and triggering signals.”18 A liter-
—————
citizens. Sovereignty resides with the people, thereby indicating that the author-
ity of the government, at least in theory, is conferred by the people to the state
so that the latter can act as agents of the people’s will. But such was not the case
for Japan. Despite being the fruit of the Freedom and People’s Rights move-
ment, the Meiji Constitution was also a product of ultimate compromise, for
the constitution was not presented as a birthright of the people but as being
conferred by the grace of the emperor. That is, while the opening of the Diet
the year following the promulgation of the constitution in February 1889 may
have theoretically signaled the arrival of representation as an act of conferring
of authority by the people to their representatives in accordance with the demo-
cratic process, it did not, or could not, trump the constitution that guaranteed
the Diet possible in the first place.
18. Jauss, Toward an Aesthetic of Reception, 23. From the perspective of the au-
thor, such a horizon makes for difficulty, particularly in a detective story where
the unexpected is expected. As discussed in detail in Chapter 6, the flooding of
Western detective stories, by constructing a well-developed set of expectations
on the part of the readers, presented a challenge for Japanese writers in producing
detective stories that were original. But, at the same time, such expectations en-
abled Japanese writers, and Ranpo in particular, to use the formal and thematic
 Introduction 15

ary text adopts various narrative strategies in the process of its produc-
tion in order to guide and manipulate the reader’s interpretation of the
text in a systematic manner, and it is the understanding of these strate-
gies in literary production, which are most often consciously enacted by
the author but not necessary so, that must be the first steps in talking
about the reception of literary texts.19 Thus, the methodological focus of
this book, first and foremost as previously mentioned, is the close reading
of texts in order to reveal the often implicit and contradictory strategies
of a literary text—including its narrative forms, symbolic mappings, and
intertextual evocations—that engage the readers to respond in a specific
manner.
What Jauss calls the “horizon of expectations” does not merely con-
note the formal negotiations between the text and its reader, however,
and is also constituted by numerous extra-textual factors including the
sociohistorical conditions of the text’s consumption as well as paratexts
that provide an interpretative framework for the text’s consumption.
And it is here that theory meets history in the case of Japan during the
period in question, for the formation of the Japanese novel significantly
began during the zenith of an interpretative paradigm that utilized such
paratexts consciously and actively. This was the allegorical mode of lit-
erary production and consumption that dominated the 1880s, which, as
I argue in Chapter 2, played a major role in the emergence of detective
fiction in the late 1880s. Similar to the contradictory ambivalence em-
bodied in the emergence of detective fiction in Japan, the allegorical in-
terpretative paradigm grew out of the desire to fight for the materializa-
tion of Western ideals in Japan and of the need to combat the despotic
—————
elements of Western stories as foils against which they could construct stories
that countered reader expectations.
19. In this sense, detective fiction is a particularly suitable subject for the in-
vestigation of the ways in which a reader responds to a text. Often considered
one of the most rigid literary genres, detective fiction relies heavily on a com-
mon set of formal and cultural codes, conventions, and presuppositions—which
are formed through the readers’ previous encounters with its ‘members’—in the
production of meaning. The authors utilize these codes and expectations, or the
“horizon of expectations” that inform us of the ways in which a given story
might be interpreted by the readers, which are manipulated, suspended, and/or
thwarted in the course of the story. And while the detective fiction genre may
have strict rules and codes to be recognized as such, every story challenges and
bends these rules and codes, leading to the formation of a new “horizon of ex-
pectations” within the readers.
16 Introduction

measures of censorship by the Meiji government during the Freedom

and People’s Rights movement.
Although the allegorical mode of literary production and consumption
is often understood to have faded away with the rise of modern Japanese
literature buttressed by Shōyō’s Shōsetsu shinzui as the foundational work
that sowed the seeds of the realistic novel in Japan, I argue that the alle-
gorical mode remained a quiet yet powerful undercurrent of the modern
Japanese literary environment, placing itself in constant negotiation with
the realistic mode. And at the center of this negotiation was the detective
story, which not only offered the detective as the allegorical double of the
Japanese student/intellectual, but also mediated, by functioning as a con-
ceptual, structural, and organizational nexus, the tenuous relationships
between literature and society as well as subject and authority that made
literary texts significant as political acts, whether consciously or not, to
authors and readers alike. Through the mapping of such connections and
relationships, I hope to reconsider and shed new light on the understand-
ing of what we now call modern Japanese literature.
 ONE

The Novel’s Other:

Detective Fiction and the Literary Project
of Tsubouchi Shōyō

Tsubouchi Shōyō’s first-person narrative “Tane hiroi” (Gleaning the

seeds) opens with a writer who travels to the Kansai region to relieve
writer’s block and, while crossing Lake Biwa on a steamboat, overhears a
private conversation between two strangers. Serialized from October 1,
1887 in the Yomiuri shinbun with which he was closely affiliated, the story
deviates significantly in both content and form from his previous efforts
to embody the notion of the novel that he had come to espouse. As one
of the strangers (a woman named Osumi) recounts her hard life to the
other (a man named Masa), the narrator becomes completely engrossed
and follows the strangers from place to place in hopes of eavesdropping
the entirety of the tale. But before we get to the end of her story, the
readers are told that everything was just a dream, and, in this sense, “Tane
hiroi” follows the tradition in the vein of Kinkin sensei eiga no yume (Mr.
Glitter ’n Gold’s dream of splendor; 1775), in which Kinbei, who is from
the country, dreams of the rise and fall of his fortunes in Edo. Unlike
this latter work, a kibyōshi picture book from the preceding Edo period
(1600–1867), however, “Tane hiroi” does not end with the awakening of
the protagonist. Rather, the story continues after the dream to tell the
narrator’s discovery that Osumi’s life story, which he had dreamed to
overhear, was actually a story—a tsuzukimono (serial)—that he had read in
the newspaper during his recent trip.
18 The Novel’s Other

The development of the newspaper medium will be discussed in more

detail in the course of this chapter, but for now let us note that tsuzuki-
mono emerged in the late 1870s when news began appearing over a multi-
ple number of installments in story format. The favorite theme of tsuzuki-
mono was the crime story based on actual cases, and, in particular, those
involving immoral and often amorous women called dokufu-mono (poison-
ous women tales), that focused on the criminal and told the events lead-
ing up to the crime.1 Given its penchant for the spectacular and the scan-
dalous that were made even more so through fictional embellishments,
tsuzukimono quickly caught the interest of readers and, by the early 1880s,
its various forms, including adaptations of Edo fiction in jitsuroku-mono
style (sensational stories mixing facts and fiction), had become a domi-
nant narrative form in Meiji Japan.2
It was such proliferation of tsuzukimono and of these adaptations, in
particular, that Shōyō criticized and set as his explicit objects of reform
in his introduction to Shōsetsu shinzui:
With the restoration, writers of gesaku [so-called frivolous works] faded for a bit
and so narrative fiction [shōsetsu] deteriorated, but recently it has seen a great re-
vival . . . and thus various stories and tales are published and compete with each
other on their novelty. The situation has reached such extremes that even news-
papers and magazines carry adaptations of really old fiction, and the momentum
being thus, the number of fictional stories of this country today knows no limit,
being in the tens of millions. . . . From the long past, the custom of our country
has been to think of fiction as one means of instruction, but while it has been
proclaimed over and over that its object is to discipline evil and to encourage
good, [people] in actual practice only enjoy bloody and cruel or extremely ob-
—————
1. For an English-language examination of dokufu-mono, see Marran, Poison
Woman. For a comprehensive discussion of the development of tsuzukimono dur-
ing the Meiji period, see Honda, Shinbun shōsetsu no tanjō.
2. As a result of the popularity of tsuzukimono, newspapers, whose primary pur-
pose was the reporting of facts, were caught in a quandary, both seeking to main-
tain their claim as providers of truthful facts and needing to reflect readers’ de-
mand for the sensational and the scandalous in order to sell. In fact, newspaper
serialization, discontinuation of serialization, and the completion of the story
in the form of yomihon (literally, “reading books,” which were fictional stories pro-
duced for entertainment) would be a common course of development for dokufu-
mono. For example, “Torioi Omatsu no den” (The story of actress Omatsu), serial-
ized in Kanayomi shinbun from December 10, 1877 and said to have been the work
that brought popularity to the genre, discontinued its serialization on January 11,
1878, stating that the story would be made into a yomihon. For more information,
see Oku, Sukyandaru no Meiji, 75.
 The Novel’s Other 19

scene stories, and it is rare to see people who even give a glance to a plot that is
more serious. . . . And because they follow the trends of society, [the authors]
cannot shed the pretext of intending to encourage good, so they distort human
feelings, bend social conditions, and create impossible plots to incorporate the
object of encouraging good.3

Lamenting the state of narrative fiction, which was gaining popularity at

the cost of quality in Meiji society, this passage criticizes the predilec-
tion of contemporary authors and readers for immoral stories that dis-
tort reality and calls for their reform. According to Shōyō, whose trea-
tise was one of the first organized efforts in the world to argue for the
artistic value of narrative fiction, the key to such reform was the rejec-
tion of the didactic framework (kanzen chōaku or “encouraging virtue and
chastising vice”), which prevents the accurate portrayal of the true sub-
jects of the novel that are made clear by the treatise’s most famous proc-
lamation: “The principal object of the novel is human feelings [ninjō];
social conditions [setai ] and customs [fūzoku] come next” (68).
When considered within Shōyō’s critical position toward extant Meiji
narratives exemplified by tsuzukimono, “Tane hiroi” presents itself as a
contradictory work within his literary project that exposes his ambiva-
lence toward the literary genre he sought to reform through Shōsetsu
shinzui. As suggested by the plot summary of the story given above, the
ending of “Tane hiroi” demands a radical reinterpretation on the part of
readers in making sense of the story. No longer is the work just about a
writer who eavesdrops on a strange conversation to use it as the “seed” for
his next story, but it also becomes a story that suggests the powerful ef-
fect that tsuzukimono exercises on the imagination of its readers and the
allure of the act of eavesdropping that is at the source of such imagination.
To the extent that it is a dream, the narrator is free to assume any charac-
ter position that he desires within the story-world. Yet, the narrator of
“Tane hiroi” finds himself in the position of an eavesdropper within the
conspiratorial framework between the narrator and the reader of tsuzuki-
mono: the identification of the narrator-as-character of “Tane hiroi”
was with the gaze of the narrator-as-perspective, who, standing outside
the story’s events, perceived and described the private affairs of individu-
als as if he were an eavesdropper existing inside the story-world.
But while it may appear as a contradiction and an aberration within
Shōyō’s literary project, there is no denying that “Tane hiroi” took up the
—————
3. Tsubouchi, Shōsetsu shinzui, 40–42. All subsequent references to this source
will appear in the text in parentheses.
20 The Novel’s Other

project’s primary themes, namely, the desire to penetrate the private lives
of people and the role of eavesdropping as an act, perspective, and tech-
nique that enables the fulfillment of such desire.4 Indeed, it was, as I
argue in this chapter, Shōyō’s need to legitimate his relentless pursuit of
these themes in Meiji society—that is, to dissociate the novel from a
similar emphasis expressed as desire to eavesdrop by the narrators of
tsuzukimono and “Tane hiroi” alike—that led to his experimentation with
the detective fiction genre. Through the examination of his theoretical
and fictional works in conjunction with the translated detective story
Nisegane tsukai, this chapter reconsiders Shōyō’s literary project and
makes clear the nature of the intricate connection between the novel and
the detective story in their nascent stages of emergence. In so doing, this
chapter illustrates how the detective story assisted in the establishment
of a modern authorship suitable for the age of bunmei kaika, by function-
ing as a tool to address the inherent contradiction between Shōyō’s ar-
ticulation of the novel based on the notion of the moral author and the
potential of his endeavor to evoke the immoral eavesdropper.

Shōsetsu shinzui and the Two Gazes of the Novelist

Although the most famous passage in Shōsetsu shinzui is undoubtedly the
aforementioned proclamation on “human feelings,” “social conditions,”
and “customs,” we must also recognize that this statement, which epito-
mizes the commitment to verisimilitude and criticism of didactic frame-
work that are often seen as the backbone of Shōyō’s treatise, was nothing
new. As early as 1821, Tamenaga Shunsui (1790–1843), the pioneer of ninjō-
bon (books on human feelings), used the phrase ninjō setai to describe the
proper subjects of depiction for narrative fiction in the preface to his first
work Akegarasu nochi no masayume (Prophetic dream after the morning
crow).5 As Peter Kornicki has noted, moreover, various Meiji writers, in-
cluding Kanagaki Robun (1829–1904), were naming the terms ninjō and
setai as the goals of fiction during the late 1870s and early 1880s.6 These
precedents clearly set Shōyō’s rhetoric within a pre-existing paradigm es-
—————
4. In his seminal work on Shōsetsu shinzui, Kamei Hideo argues that one of
the most distinctive characteristics of Shōyō’s literary theory “even if we com-
pare it to the contemporaneous theories of the novel in English [was its empha-
sis on] the private realm and the ‘interior’ [naimen] as the reason of being for the
novel” (“Shōsetsu” ron, 134).
5. Hiraoka, Nihon kindai bungaku no shuppatsu, 18.
6. Kornicki, The Reform of Fiction in Meiji Japan, 33–35.
 The Novel’s Other 21

tablished, in particular, by ninjōbon and suggest his attempt to utilize an

indigenous model in developing his notion of the modern novel.7 Indeed,
as I hope to show, the significance of Shōyō’s literary project had less to
do with new terms or even new ways to construct fictional narratives and
more to do with a new strategy to establish the social importance of the
novel and its author, which was fundamental to the negotiation between
past traditions of Japanese fiction and the newly emergent Western nov-
els in the Meiji period.
The underpinnings of such an ideological project manifest them-
selves most clearly in the way that Shōyō couches the term ninjō within
the visual dichotomy between the exterior (seen) and the interior (un-
seen), a dichotomy ubiquitous in the treatise. After the aforementioned
proclamation, for example, Shōyō rearticulates ninjō as jōyoku (passions)
and hyaku-hachi bonnō (108 earthly desires) and proposes their natural
conflict with dōri (reason) and ryōshin (conscience) within the individual
as the true subject of the novel, identifying the task of the novelist as re-
lentless exploring and exposing of such conflict:
Humans should have two phenomena, external actions that manifest on the out-
side and thoughts that are hidden on the inside. . . . The likes of actions that can
be seen on the outside have been depicted for the most part, but the likes of the
thoughts that are contained on the inside can be diffuse, and it is rare to suc-
ceed in their depiction. To pierce the depth of this ninjō and to depict, in detail
without missing anything, the inner workings of the inside of hearts . . . and to
make human feelings manifest vividly—this is to be the duty of our novelists
(69–70).

Significantly, Shōyō primes the vectored interpretation of this goal of

the novel and the novelist by positioning it within the rhetoric of bunmei
kaika and “the framework of Herbert Spencer’s theory of social Darwin-
ism, which lay behind many Meiji period notions of modernization and
westernization.”8 Rather than simply positing the Western novel as the

—————
7. Literary scholars have pointed out Shōyō’s use of the terms ninjō and setai,
among other factors, to discuss the fluidity that exists between the fictional nar-
ratives of the Edo and Meiji periods. For example, in recent years, Jonathan
Zwicker has argued: “To take Shōsetsu shinzui as the starting point for investigat-
ing the semantic history of shōsetsu in Japanese not merely severs—artificially—
this history at its midpoint, it also and perhaps more importantly misrecognizes
the fact that this was the framework within which Shōyō was himself, quite self-
consciously, working” (Practices of the Sentimental Imagination, 158).
8. Tomi Suzuki, Narrating the Self, 20.
22 The Novel’s Other

most advanced form of narrative fiction that Japanese writers should

strive toward and ultimately surpass—no doubt echoing the popular slo-
gan oitsuke oikose (to catch up and surpass) that was used to promote
bunmei kaika—Shōyō instead delineates sociohistorical causes to explain
the evolution of narrative forms, beginning with mythology and ending
with the novel as the dominant art form of present society. And it is in
the latest shift in this evolutionary process, “the decline of theater” and
the blossoming of “the true novel,” that the dichotomy between the in-
terior and exterior takes on explanatory power as the central cog of his
ideological project (61). In an “uncivilized and unenlightened society,”
Shōyō argues, people do not have much power to reason so their inter-
nal thoughts and emotions are expressed outwardly, and, thus, theater,
which is a narrative form based on external expressions, flourishes (61).
But the novel takes over “when the intellect advances” because, in an
age of reason, “one tries to suppress one’s passions and tries not to show
[them] clearly on one’s face” (62).9
By promoting the link between the objectives of the novel with the
preconditions of its emergence in such a manner, Shōyō establishes the
unique social position of the novel and the novelist in “the age of reason/
civilization” (kaimei no yo) (56). On the one hand, the flourishing of the
novel becomes a sign that a society and its people have embraced reason
and, thus, are ‘civilized’ and ‘enlightened.’ In this sense, Shōyō’s treatise
posits the production of fictional narratives that fit his articulation of the
novel as a way to demonstrate the ‘civilized’ and ‘enlightened’ nature of
Meiji Japan, and, as such, fictional writing, which was traditionally con-
sidered a frivolous pastime for entertainment of women and children, be-
comes elevated into a national project.10 On the other hand, to the extent

—————
9. It can be argued that the developmental understanding of the novel is in-
consistently applied in the course of Shōsetsu shinzui. For example, Shōyō argues
that Bakin’s Hakkenden is a less developed work of fiction than Genji monogatari.
However, this can be seen as Shōyō’s complex strategy to reconstruct the line-
age of Japanese fiction in terms of native and not Chinese-influenced works.
Atsuko Ueda provides a discussion of this strategy in her Concealment of Politics,
Politics of Concealment, 28–33.
10. For more information on the understanding of fiction prior to Shōsetsu
shinzui, see Tomi Suzuki, Narrating the Self, 15–32. We should note that the rise
of the political novels in the early 1880s also played a significant role in changing
the public’s view toward fictional narratives precisely because political novels, as
a vehicle to spread the ideals of the Freedom and People’s Rights movement,
 The Novel’s Other 23

that Shōyō’s evolutionary view of narrative forms posits the suppression

of passions by reason and the resulting cessation of their external expres-
sion in actual human beings as historical preconditions for the develop-
ment of the novel, the task of the novelist rhetorically becomes what lay-
persons can no longer do in the society in which they live: to understand
what is going on underneath the appearances of others. Fittingly, such an
ideological framing of the novelist as a solver of a real-world problem
finds support in the oft-cited phrases of Shōsetsu shinzui—“observe pas-
sively” (tada bōkan shite) and “depict as it is” (arinomama o mosha suru)—that
present the novelist, albeit only figuratively, as an external observer who
maintains critical distance from the object of depiction (71).
The privileged position of the novelist in the modern age in conjunc-
tion with the novelist’s façade as an observer, then, makes the detective
the perfect metaphor for the novelist and, by extension, the narrator.
Not only is the criminal, the object of the detective’s gaze, an extreme
example of an individual who must suppress external manifestations of
the interior through reason (as self-interest that such manifestations
would lead to exposure), but the myth of the master detective is also
founded upon his ability to read internal thoughts and emotions by
means of external appearances and behavior. We only need to recall the
famous scene in Edgar Allan Poe’s “The Murders in the Rue Morgue”
(1841) in which the detective Auguste Dupin reads the thoughts of the
narrator, leading the latter to exclaim: “Tell me, for Heaven’s sake . . .
the method—if method there is—by which you have been enabled to
fathom my soul in this matter.”11
Such a scene, which would be repeated in Arthur Conan Doyle’s
Sherlock Holmes tales, posits the detective as a master novelist, if we
were to follow Shōyō’s definition. Of course, it is not the detective but
the psychologist to whom Shōyō explicitly likens the novelist in Shōsetsu
shinzui, urging the creation of characters according to “the logic of psy-
chology” (70).12 But either way, the analogy does not seem to be a rigor-

—————
made clear the value of fictional narratives as educational tools and political mo-
tivators.
11. Poe, “The Murders in the Rue Morgue,” in The Short Fiction of Edgar Allan
Poe, 180.
12. During his first and second year at Tokyo University, Shōyō attended
psychology classes that focused primarily on the teachings of the evolutionary
psychologist Alexander Bain (1818–1903). For Shōyō’s early influences, including
that of Bain, see Ochi, “Shōsetsu shinzui no botai.”
24 The Novel’s Other

ous one, for the primary task of the novelist as articulated in Shōsetsu
shinzui lies not in being a true detective or a psychologist—that is, in
understanding one’s interior through external appearances and behavior
and, more specifically, in constructing a code that will make the exterior
legible as effects of the interior—but rather in portraying the internal shift
of thoughts and emotions in his characters as an entity with full access
to them.13 The novelistic gaze, which ‘observes’ the interior, does not do
so through the senses but through the power of imagination as an au-
thority that offers imaginary or fictional access to a barrier ‘created’ by
the breakdown of correspondence between interior and exterior.
But fittingly when considering the emphasis Shōyō places on the
presentation of the novelist as an external observer, Shōyō’s use of the
dichotomy between interior and exterior in Shōsetsu shinzui extends be-
yond the confines of what I have called the novelistic gaze to demarcate
another level of the apparent and the hidden. Here the detective be-
comes a more apt metaphor than the psychologist; whereas a psycholo-
gist’s task is focused on the understanding of human psyche, the detec-
tive’s task is not restricted to connecting a person’s interior with the
exterior. The detective had some dirty work to do as well. He had more
hands-on tasks of collecting evidence, disguising himself to infiltrate the
world of crime, eavesdropping on conversations, and, in most general
terms, prying into people’s private lives and discovering their secrets.
And the same seems to be the case for Shōyō’s novelist:
To freely dissect people’s hearts, which would be impossible in reality, to enter
the bedroom of a dignitary’s wife, which is not to be entered without good rea-
son, and write about her behavior and actions, or to depict the situations inside
[the house] without considering whether the gates or sliding doors are closed—
these are the freedoms of a novelist (149–50).

As this passage reveals, the novel operates on two different but inter-
related levels of the invisible or the inaccessible, which Shōyō delineates
without differentiation here. On the one hand, the novel “dissect[s] peo-
ple’s hearts” to make visible the ninjō that is hidden beneath the exterior.
—————
13. Shōyō writes: “So if [the novelist] wants to create a person and depict feel-
ings, then [the novelist] should first stipulate temporarily that this person al-
ready possesses what is called passion. If such and such event were to take place
to give this or that stimulation, what kind of feelings would be awoken in this
person? Or would there be certain differences in the workings of such feelings,
not to mention the nature of this person, according to his past education and
the temperament of his occupation?” (74).
 The Novel’s Other 25

On the other hand, the novel reveals the private affairs of people—the
actions and behavior of a woman in her bedroom or goings-on behind
closed doors—that those who are not family members or close acquaint-
ances are restricted from knowing in real life. In this passage, then, Shōyō
conflates the interior with the private life of individuals, thereby rep-
resenting the epistemological dichotomy between interior and exterior as
a spatial dichotomy between the public and the private.14
Through the dual metaphor of the interior and the exterior, Shōsetsu
shinzui presents the novelist as a bearer of two distinct gazes, which had
contrasting literary significances in Meiji Japan. Rarely seen in fictional
narratives of and before Meiji Japan but prevalent in Western fiction,
a gaze that penetrates and portrays in detail the interior thoughts and
emotions of characters is the explicit centerpiece in Shōyō’s articulation
of what constitutes a modern novel. Not only does he make this gaze the
characteristic privilege of the novelist but he also makes the need for this
gaze the necessary condition for the emergence of the novel as the domi-
nant narrative form of a given society in the first place.15 In contrast, the
explicit manifestation of the gaze that penetrates into the private lives of
characters was a carry-over from and a staple of Edo-period fiction, most
notably the works of ninjōbon. Extensive depictions of the inner thoughts
and feelings of characters being all but non-existent, this tradition most
often presented the narrator as “an expressive subject who positions him-
self on the borderline that differentiates the inside and the outside of the
scenes of a story-world [and] from there . . . ‘peeps’ and ‘eavesdrops’ on
the actions and behavior of characters.”16
Like his recycling of the terms ninjō and setai as the primary goals
of the novel, these two gazes of the novelist make evident that Shōyō’s
conceptualization of the novel involved an intricate negotiation between
—————
14. As we will see in the next section, the spatial dichotomy between the
public and the private had particular sociohistorical significance in the Meiji pe-
riod that went beyond literary theory and narrative perspective.
15. As Maeda Ai states: “Meiji fiction gained the qualification as a modern
novel when the narrator who talks about the interior of the Other was posi-
tioned solidly in the story-world” (“Meiji no hyōgen shisō to buntai,” 6).
16. Komori, Kōzō to shite no katari, 166. Komori uses this explanation to com-
pare the narrator of Futabatei Shimei’s Ukigumo, especially of the narrator in its
first section, to the archetypal narrators of ninjōbon, but, as many scholars attest,
Tōsei shosei katagi, discussed below, employs a similar narrator. For an example of
such a discussion regarding the similarity of the narrator in these two works, see
Yamada Yūsaku, Gensō no kindai, 116–30.
26 The Novel’s Other

Japanese tradition, as exemplified by ninjōbon, and the Western realistic

novel. In this sense, Shōyō’s decision to mix the old with the new in his
first full-length fiction Tōsei shosei katagi (Manners and lives of contempo-
rary students; 1885–1886), about a group of students at a private Tokyo
school, is hardly surprising. At the most basic level, Tōsei shosei katagi, by
telling the story of the student-protagonist Komachida Sanji and his rela-
tionship to the geisha Tanoji, mixes the new subject of the Meiji novel—
the student—with the archetypal heroine of Edo fiction, the geisha. But
more significantly, such mixing extends to the core of the story, on the
level of narrative development and narration: to the extent that Sanji’s
attraction to Tanoji comes into conflict with his ‘rational’ awareness that
he would be better off without Tanoji, Tōsei shosei katagi explores how
ninjō as passions come into conflict with and are ultimately suppressed
by reason.
Yet, despite this choice to implement the new objective of the novel,
Shōyō nonetheless chooses to employ the paradigmatic narrator of the
pre-existing fictional narratives described above. Given the characteris-
tics of such a narrator not to describe the inner thoughts and feelings
of characters, however, it was natural, if not necessary, that satisfying
the new objective of the novel through such a narrator proved itself as a
difficult undertaking. For example, while the narrator of Tōsei shosei katagi
occasionally makes visual observations in a similar manner to “how Sher-
lock Holmes deduces personal data from things like clothes that are ob-
served by the eye,” the conclusions drawn from these observations remain
superficial—such as age and social class—rarely divulging information
regarding the internal state of characters.17 Thus, these attempts, rather
than being sincere efforts on the part of Shōyō to produce a code to make
the interior decipherable by means of the exterior, suggest his strategy
to shed light on the limitations of this type of narrator and thereby pave
the way for the emergence of a new narrator who embodies the privileged
gaze of the novelist. In fact, after another such attempt at a detective’s
analysis, the narrator concludes that “it is an arbitrary opinion based upon
the observation of the author” and thereby relativizes the possible ac-
curacy of his observation and the benefit of these attempts at being a
detective.18
—————
17. Yamada Yūsaku, Gensō no kindai, 133–34.
18. Tsubouchi, Tōsei shosei katagi, 228. Yamada Shunji discusses this topic by
incorporating the work of Kamei Hideo in his essay “Tōsei shosei katagi ni okeru
‘sakusha’ no ichi,” 11.
 The Novel’s Other 27

The story’s extensive use of dialogue, which is another characteristic

of Edo fictions and reflective of the restrictions placed on the story’s
narrator, also presents Shōyō with difficulties in reconciling the old and
the new. On the one hand, the use of dialogue supported by narration is
certainly a legitimate method, on the level of literary expression, to indi-
rectly construct the internal turmoil of characters. On the other hand,
dialogue, as an interchange of individual utterances through which char-
acters attempt to express and share their internal passions, is precisely
what has become difficult in “the age of reason” according to Shōyō’s
understanding of ninjō in Shōsetsu shinzui. That is, if the text allows indi-
vidual utterances by a character to give readers the sense of truthfully
expressing internal thoughts and feelings, then it does so at the risk of
presenting the character as an individual who is, at best, a bad represen-
tative of the age and, at worst, someone who is lacking in reason, the
advancement of which prevents the expression of his or her internal
passions.
And of course, the subject of this work—the students—are the mod-
ern rational individuals par excellence not only because of their knowledge
of Western values and culture but also because they, having left their
communities and flocked to the city for the purpose of education, repre-
sent the indecipherability of human beings in the modern age as they
confront one another as complete strangers in the metropolis. In this
sense, the illegibility of human beings, which founds Shōyō’s theory of
the novel, is the flip side of Walter Benjamin’s comment that the detec-
tive story emerges with “the obliteration of the individual’s traces in
the big-city crowd” that results from urbanization in the modern age.19
Significantly for the case of early Meiji Japan, the materialization of this
condition was sudden and substantial, thanks to the prompt lifting of
restrictions on travel that was in effect during the Edo period coupled
with new opportunities in the big cities after the Restoration. And as
Shōyō highlights in the opening paragraph of Tōsei shosei katagi, the stu-
dent was one of the most conspicuous groups in this process: “Saying that
it is a metropolis, various people come from all directions, but above all
others the most numerous are rickshaw drivers and students. . . . Every-
where there are drivers and students. There is a sign for a boarding house
there; a lantern for a rickshaw house here. There is a private school for

—————
19. Benjamin, “The Paris of the Second Empire in Baudelaire,” 43.
28 The Novel’s Other

Western learning in the side streets; there are rickshaws waiting for pas-
sengers at the intersections.”20
Given the theoretical hurdles associated with combining old literary
perspectives with the new themes and goals of the novel, how does the
narrator of Tōsei shosei katagi attempt to depict ninjō? An example of
such an attempt can be seen in Shōyō’s employment of a specific form
of speech, namely, confession—an act in which the external speech
sincerely describes the internal thoughts and feelings of a character—
exemplified in Section 13 of the text when Komachida confesses to
Tanoji his thoughts regarding their relationship. Importantly, it is here
that the narrator becomes most like a character who is eavesdropping
on a private conversation outside “sliding doors,” as the identities of the
interlocutors are not disclosed, designated only as “man” and “woman,”
and the narrator, besides the few stage-direction-like comments inserted
parenthetically within the dialogue, disappears in his narration.21
In this scene, then, Shōyō juxtaposes the incidence of the character’s
attempt at a sincere expression of the interior with the narrator’s pene-
tration into the private and thereby utilize the eavesdropping gaze of
the narrator to take on the function of enhancing the appearance of the
confession’s truthfulness and earnestness. More specifically, the narra-
tive technique in this scene actively invokes a barrier between the inter-
locutors and the narrator through its continuous ‘failure’ to provide the
readers with visual cues, and, in so doing, confession as a voluntary ex-
pression of the interior by a character becomes reframed and reclaimed
as a ‘hidden’ interior that is actively exposed by the narrator who pene-
trates the barrier via the act of eavesdropping. Through the employ-
ment of this narrative technique, moreover, Shōyō actively places the
narrator in the position of the unknowing, promoting the façade that
the narrator and the readers share the same knowledge regarding what
is being ‘overheard.’ Thus, this scene reiterates the receptive framework
of ninjōbon, which, as Yamada Shunji has noted, consisted of “a kind of
fictitious community where [readers] can form a conspiratorial relation-
ship with the narrator that they had met in the process of weaving a
text.”22
—————
20. Tsubouchi, Tōsei shosei katagi, 223.
21. As Yamada Shunji notes, a similar technique was employed in Tamenaga
Shunsui’s Shungyō hachiman gane (1836–1838) (“Tōsei shosei katagi ni okeru ‘sakusha’
no ichi,” 10).
22. Ibid.
 The Novel’s Other 29

Considering its profound implications within Shōyō’s discussion of

the novel and the novelist in Shōsetsu shinzui, it was only natural that the
act of eavesdropping, highlighted in the above example from Tōsei sho-
sei katagi, would quickly become a major preoccupation in his fictional
writings. As his next work Imotose kagami (Mirror of marriage; 1885–
1886) clearly illustrates, Shōyō’s experimentation with eavesdropping
was broad in scope, not confined to the realm of literary practices and
narrative techniques that he explored in his first work. Instead, it in-
volved a negotiation with the rapid sociohistorical changes taking place
in Meiji Japan, which imbued this old practice with new conceptual sig-
nificances that would bring to light the fundamental contradiction
within Shōyō’s articulation of the modern novel.23

Eavesdropping and the Paradox of the Novel

in Imotose kagami
Written during a similar time frame as Tōsei shosei katagi, Imotose kagami
in many ways is a complement to its immediate predecessor.24 Whereas
—————
23. Of course, eavesdropping not only served as a commonly used technique
of past and contemporary Japanese fictions but also constituted, as Ann Gaylin
illustrates, a fundamental part of the novel (she states: “Eavesdropping has ex-
isted in the novel as long as the novel has existed”), most notably in nineteenth-
century novels such as Emily Brontë’s Wuthering Heights, the sensational novels
by Wilkie Collins, and the numerous novels by Honoré de Balzac (Eavesdropping
in the Novel from Austen to Proust, 1). This fact, it could be argued, was significant
for Shōyō’s literary project that grasped literary development within an evolu-
tionary framework, for, to the extent that it was a common narrative technique
in both Western and Japanese fictional narratives, eavesdropping provided evi-
dence of the ‘evolutionary’ link between the two.
24. Imotose kagami tells the story of the bureaucrat Misawa Tatsuzō who
hopes to wed Oyuki, a refined daughter of a high government official. Upon dis-
covering that Oyuki has no feelings for him, he instead marries Otsuji, a fish
dealer’s uneducated daughter whom he fancied as a student. Soon after, during
a business trip to Kansai, Misawa encounters a woman named Sawae whom his
father had wronged in the past by not repaying a debt that her daughter Kouno
(who has since died) had paid on his behalf. Shocked by her story, Misawa vows
to rescue Wakazato, Sawae’s younger daughter, who has been sold to a Nezu
brothel as a result of the debt of Misawa’s father. Upon returning to Tokyo,
Misawa contacts Wakazato to convince her to let him pay for her freedom. Be-
cause of her husband’s repeated lateness in coming home and a letter sent to
him by a mysterious woman (Wakazato), Otsuji begins to worry that Misawa
is having an affair. Realizing her feelings, Misawa explains to her the story of
30 The Novel’s Other

the narrator of the former insisted on maintaining its position as an out-

side observer and an eavesdropper—even employing specific narrative
techniques to emphasize such a position—the narrator of Imotose kagami
is not as adamant, freely moving from transmissions of characters’ con-
versations to depictions of their internal thoughts and feelings in the
form of internal monologues. While the employment of the privileged
gaze of the novelist may mitigate the story’s need to use eavesdropping
as a narrative technique like its predecessor, this is not to say that Imo-
tose kagami does not share the interest in the notion of eavesdropping
with Tōsei shosei katagi. Rather, the exploration of the concept of eaves-
dropping occurs elsewhere in Imotose kagami, its most striking quality be-
ing the central role played by eavesdropping not as narrative perspective
but as concrete story-events for plot development. Overhearing a con-
versation between Otsuji and Oyuki makes the protagonist Misawa be-
lieve that Oyuki has no interest in him and decides to marry Otsuji; lis-
tening in on a conversation of gossiping servants at a restaurant about
Oyuki’s unhappy marriage to Tanuma, a friend of Misawa, forces Mi-
sawa to realize his mistake about Oyuki’s feelings for him and pushes
him to harbor misdirected resentment toward Otsuji. And it is the re-
porter’s eavesdropping of a conversation between Otsuji’s sister Oharu
and the geisha Wakazato that leads to a false gossip-column account of
the intention behind their meeting and to the story’s tragic ending as
Misawa is dismissed from his official post and Otsuji commits suicide.
Given such prevalence of eavesdropping, it is not surprising that this
characteristic of Imotose kagami did not go unnoticed by Shōyō’s con-
temporaries. In his essay “Imotose kagami o yomu” (Reading Mirror of
marriage; 1887), Ishibashi Ningetsu (1865–1926), one of the leading liter-
ary critics of the Meiji period, objects to Shōyō’s repeated use of eaves-
dropping as “one method of abbreviation,” going as far as to state that
the story “begins with eavesdropping, ends with eavesdropping, and it
is possible to say that the story’s central framework is found in eaves-

—————
Wakazato, but, egged on by her sister Oharu, Otsuji continues to harbor her
suspicions, ultimately enlisting Oharu to go to the brothel to talk to Wakazato.
While there, a newspaper reporter in the next room overhears Oharu’s conver-
sation with Wakazato and prints an article regarding Misawa’s infidelity with
Wakazato. As a result of this article, Misawa is forced to leave his government
post, and he, in turn, realizes Otsuji’s involvement and divorces her. Devastated
by this turn of events, Otsuji kills herself.
 The Novel’s Other 31

dropping.”25 While Ningetsu’s objection may be warranted, his criticism

that the act of eavesdropping functions as a ‘lazy’ way for Shōyō to
develop the story seems to miss the import of this act within Imotose
kagami. As many scholars have noted, the act of eavesdropping in Imo-
tose kagami provides information to characters in general and to Misawa
in particular, inciting specific reactions, both internal and external, that
determine the course of the narrative.26 Or to put it in terms of Shōyō’s
literary theory, the various acts of eavesdropping enable the production
of causal relationships between story-events where a peek into the pri-
vate world of others causes internal turmoil between ninjō and reason,
which, in turn, leads to external action, and, in so doing, Shōyō synthe-
sizes the two realms that are to be the proper subject of the novel: the
interior and the private.
But crucial here is the fact that external actions arrived through such
course of development produce one tragedy after another in Imotose
kagami precisely because information obtained through the various acts
of eavesdropping turn out more often than not to be false, as highlighted
by the source of all tragedies in the story, namely, the eavesdropping
by Misawa of a private conversation between Oyuki and Otsuji. In this
conversation, Oyuki tells Otsuji that she does not like Misawa, stating:
“I hate people like that. Even if father and mother told me to become his
wife, I have . . . no intention of becoming his wife.”27 Upon hearing these
harsh words, Misawa gives up his hope of marrying Oyuki and turns his
interest toward Otsuji. And as we later discover, Oyuki’s mother, who
had been hoping to wed Oyuki to Misawa, was also eavesdropping on this
conversation, and she too abandons her plan to pursue Misawa as Oyuki’s
husband. But as we later learn through the peculiar narrative technique
—————
25. Ishibashi, “Imotose kagami o yomu,” 8. First appearance in Jogaku zasshi,
January 29, 1887.
26. In his discussion of Imotose kagami, Maeda Ai states that the act of eaves-
dropping in this work functions as “a device that expands the conflict between
the ‘exterior’ and the ‘interior’ and accelerates the misunderstanding and mistrust
not only by Misawa but by all the characters in the story” (“Meiji no hyōgen shisō
to buntai,” 9). In a similar fashion, Komori Yōichi states that eavesdropping in
this story functions as that which “not only produces misunderstanding, but also
provides the opportunity for people who have been grasped by the feeling of
jealousy to make a false step from ‘reason’ that they should have preserved” (Kōzō
to shite no katari, 189).
27. Tsubouchi, Imotose kagami, 185. All subsequent references to this source
will appear in the text in parentheses.
32 The Novel’s Other

of the “magic mirror”—named as such in the text—that reflects the true

thoughts of a person, Oyuki had in fact been hoping to become Misawa’s
wife.28 The magic mirror reveals:
When I first heard about this [her mother trying to marry her to Misawa], I was
so happy that I could jump, but I was embarrassed to show my feelings. And if
Misawa wasn’t handsome, then there would be no reason to be embarrassed, but
I didn’t want people to say that I took fancy to his appearance, so I behaved
myself and acted as if it was nothing. And when Otsuji said this and that [about
Misawa], I said such bad things that were not in my heart because I didn’t want
her to vie for his attention (217).

As disclosed to the readers some chapters later in such a manner, it

was because Oyuki saw Otsuji as her rival for Misawa’s affection and was
embarrassed to admit her feelings for him that she said what she said
about Misawa on that fateful day. In short, Oyuki lied out of self-interest.
Importantly, other narrative details frame Oyuki’s falsehood—and
succeed in making others believe it as true—as a behavior in accordance
with her disposition, which is explicitly characterized as indecipherable.
For example, when the narrator introduces her for the first time: “The
older sister [Oyuki] was by nature prudent and had a character short on
affability from the beginning. So even on occasions when she was deeply
happy, her happiness was not conspicuous to the eyes of others, and
on occasions when she was very angry, she endured and did not express
it in words” (178). And a comment by Oyuki’s servant girl Okama regard-
ing Oyuki’s reaction to her mother’s suggestion that she wed Tanuma
instead of Misawa: “Oh, what a strange girl! I have no idea if she’s un-
happy or happy. With her proud temperament, she might be feigning
ignorance regarding her [marriage] to Tanuma because, although she is
happy inside, she feels ashamed to be seen by others as such” (216).
Not only do these passages present Oyuki as a person who is difficult
to understand, but they also present her as a person who actively sup-
presses her internal emotions from manifesting on the outside because
of the belief that to do so would be embarrassing or shameful. Although
the text of Imotose kagami does not explain how she has come to hold
this belief (except perhaps to say it was “by nature”), we must note the
undeniable resemblance between the description of Oyuki’s disposition
and Shōsetsu shinzui’s description of the changes that take place as a soci-

—————
28. For details on the “magic mirror,” see Maeda, “Meiji no hyōgen shisō to
buntai,” 10–11.
 The Novel’s Other 33

ety enters into ‘civilization and enlightenment.’ The following is the

longer version of a previously cited fragment regarding this change:
As mental capacities advance, people suppress their passions, trying not to dis-
play them frankly on their faces. For example, even when they are very angry, they
deliberately soften their expressions and converse calmly; or even when they are
extremely sad, they sometimes don’t shed a tear. Human feelings change in such a
way, and passionate behaviors and appearances gradually disappear (62).

Oyuki then is an indecipherable figure—the ‘mystery’ to be solved—

who is, at least in Imotose kagami, the closest embodiment of an individ-
ual in “the age of reason” that Shōyō describes in his Shōsetsu shinzui.29
Through the awkward technique of the magic mirror, Shōyō singles out
and emphasizes Oyuki’s indecipherability, suggesting that even a novel-
ist—whose uncanny ability to penetrate through external appearances
that have become impenetrable for the ordinary man in the age of rea-
son sets him apart in society—cannot access her internal thoughts and
emotions without the help from the un-modern supernatural tool.
But Imotose kagami does not turn out as tragically as it does simply
because of Oyuki’s indecipherability. It is also the result of Misawa’s be-
lief, and to certain extent the belief of Oyuki’s mother, that he had under-
stood Oyuki’s feelings through his eavesdropping of the conversation be-
tween Oyuki and Otsuji. For, the fact that such eavesdropping leads to
his decision to marry Otsuji and not Oyuki requires his rejection of the
possibility that Oyuki may have ulterior motives (which she does) for
saying what she said. As highlighted by his comment after he overhears
the conversation, the rejection is subconscious and instantaneous, for
such a possibility does not even occur to Misawa: “I see, Oyuki hates me

—————
29. This marks the seemingly obvious but nonetheless peculiar conflation be-
tween the object of desire and of knowledge that will have profound effects on
the development of the Japanese novel. Although I argued earlier in this chapter
that the student presents himself as an emblem of the illegibility of human be-
ings because of his education and of his uprooted condition, it is the woman
who is actually presented as a mystery in Imotose kagami as well as in other ca-
nonical works of modern Japanese literature, including Osei in Ukigumo and Yo-
shiko in Futon. Within the context of this argument, the woman as mystery is a
result of a projection of the suspicion that the student has for his own kind, a
suspicion whose admission would force the student to realize that he is not only
a subject of suspecting but also inevitably the object of suspicion. This issue of
projection will resurface in the course of the development of the Japanese novel,
and I will revisit this issue in the conclusion to Chapter 6.
34 The Novel’s Other

to this extent on the inside [naishin]” (185). To put it in terms of Shōsetsu

shinzui once again, Misawa believes the external actions (words) of Oyuki
as a reflection of her internal feelings, an ‘anti-modern’ belief that goes
against the understanding of human beings as indecipherable in the age of
reason. Fittingly, the text makes sure to emphasize the gap that exists be-
tween the gullible Misawa and duplicitous others driven by self-interest.
For example, after visiting Oyuki’s house where Misawa reencounters
Otsuji, Misawa’s friend Tanuma praises Otsuji and recommends that Mi-
sawa take her for his wife, a recommendation which Misawa takes to
heart. However, we later find out that this recommendation was a ploy
to prevent Misawa from courting Oyuki whom Tanuma hopes to have—
and soon takes—as his wife.30
Shōyō also provides examples of instances in which truthful utterances
are met with suspicion, reiterating the state of communicative break-
down or uncertainty that characterizes the world of Imotose kagami and,
by extension, contemporary society. Upon realizing that Otsuji has begun
to harbor suspicions that he is having an affair, Misawa confesses his
involvement with Wakazato to her by explaining the story of his father’s
wrongdoing to Wakazato’s family and by reading the letter written by
Wakazato to prove that he is merely trying to help Wakazato leave the
brothel. But these efforts do not dissolve Otsuji’s suspicions because the
letter, despite merely thanking Misawa for his “kindness” ( goshinsetsu),
can be interpreted in more than one way. The narrator states: “Depend-
ing on the reader’s interpretation, the word ‘kindness’ can mean ‘human-
ity’ [ gi ] or ‘love’ [ai]” (226). Although the narrator leaves Otsuji’s inter-
pretation of this word as a mystery, her subsequent actions show that it
was the latter. That is, while Misawa made an honest confession, Otsuji
doubts its truthfulness due to the multiple possibilities for interpretation
inherent in language.
In Imotose kagami, Shōyō presents a world where an accurate assess-
ment of whether a certain utterance is true or false proves difficult. The
act of eavesdropping by various characters produces scenes that are ex-
emplary of such a state of communication breakdown where the desire
of the eavesdropper to know and the eavesdropped to hide his or her
true feelings or thoughts are at irreconcilable odds. Through these eaves-
dropping scenes in which the truth-value of information has a negative
—————
30. In his social ambition and duplicity, Tanuma can be seen as the forerunner
to Honda Noburu in Ukigumo. For passages that portray Tanuma’s character, see
Tsubouchi, Imotose kagami, 213–16.
 The Novel’s Other 35

relationship to how it is obtained (through an act of eavesdropping) and

where it originates (behind closed doors), Imotose kagami problematizes
the epistemological validity of the conflation of the private and the inte-
rior, all the while synthesizing them causally on the level of plot through
the act of eavesdropping.
This problematization then functions to undermine the narrative
technique employed in the critical scene of Tōsei shosei katagi that juxta-
poses the confessions of characters with the narrator who presents the
story as if he were an eavesdropping character. In this previously dis-
cussed scene, a conscious attempt is made to augment the appearance
of truthfulness and earnestness of the confession by presenting it as a
conversation behind “sliding doors” captured through the act of eaves-
dropping. In Imotose kagami, the opposite is the case: eavesdropping,
rather than being the means to access truthful information, is exposed as
an act that only produces the illusion of such access precisely because of
the way in which the information is obtained. And if Imotose kagami
points out the shortcoming of eavesdropping as an act that leads to truth-
ful information, then it presents such shortcoming as a social disease by
ending the string of eavesdropping by various characters with an act of
eavesdropping as a professional task. This, of course, is the eavesdropping
by a newspaper reporter of a conversation between Oharu and Wakazato
that leads to a false report in a gossip-column account, called zappō, of the
relationship between Misawa and Wakazato directly responsible for the
story’s tragic end.
Developing rapidly from the early 1870s, the newspaper, as many have
argued, functioned as the most effective medium for the inculcation of
the public on the ways of bunmei kaika. 31 The Newspaper Ordinance
(Shinbunshi jōrei) issued in July 1871 made this function of the news-
papers explicit, stating that “the goal of the newspaper should be the
guiding of people’s wisdom” which meant “breaking stubbornly narrow
minds to guide them to the state of civilization and enlightenment.”32
One newspaper that took this official guidance to heart, at least on the
surface, was the Yomiuri shinbun, whose inaugural issue on November 2,
1874 contained the following announcement: “This newspaper intends to
take up matters that will serve as a lesson for women and children so
—————
31. There was a popular song in the early Meiji period that went: “To those
who don’t know bumei kaika, boil a newspaper and make them drink it” (cited in
Nakanome, “Bunmei kaika no jidai,” 220).
32. Reprinted in Matsumoto and Yamamuro, Genron to media, 410.
36 The Novel’s Other

please earnestly arrange nearby matters that are of benefit into a story
and send it to us with your name and place.”33 Befitting this didactic in-
tention and its target—the ordinary citizens of Tokyo and its surround-
ings—the Yomiuri deviated from both the kanbun-style writing and the
focus on political, economic, and foreign matters that were found in such
newspapers as the Yokohama Mainichi shinbun (first issue, December 8,
1870), Tōkyō Nichinichi shinbun (first issue, February 21, 1872), and Yūbin
Hōchi shinbun (first issue, June 10, 1872), and employed colloquial language
to take up news around town. These differences in the Yomiuri and the
newspapers above would later lead to the distinction between koshinbun
(small newspapers) and ōshinbun (large or prestige newspapers), named as
such for the size of the paper that was used.34
And it was within the numerous koshinbun that quickly blossomed in
the latter half of the 1870s that the zappō (literally, “miscellaneous re-
port”) column emerged to become their mainstay, attracting the interest
of the general public. Consisting of reports that might be thought of as
a combination of today’s tabloid news and neighborhood gossip, zappō
columns ran stories of a public and private nature—from crime reports
to acts of infidelity and from admonition of superstitions to commemo-
ration of filial piety—that were sent in by readers or were gathered by
reporters called tanbōsha. The targets (or victims) of such news included
not only the rich and the famous or geishas and prostitutes but also or-
dinary people from next door. The panoptic intention of this gossip
column can be discerned, for example, in the first issue of the Yomiuri
shinbun, which warned the readers that “all things good and bad will be
known by the newspaper so you won’t even be able to have a fight be-
tween husband and wife carelessly.”35 This warning was no lie, as reports
by eavesdropping neighbors exposing the minutiae of everyday life filled
the pages day after day while others wrote in letters expressing the fear

—————
33. Yomiuri shinbun, November 2, 1874.
34. It has been traditionally understood that the readership of koshinbun,
which targeted the ordinary citizen, and ōshinbun, which targeted the intellectu-
als, did not overlap until the mid-Meiji 10s, but Yamada Shunji suggests that
there were many people who read both koshinbun and ōshinbun. For details, see
Yamamoto, Shinbun to minshū, 43–55 and Yamada Shunji, Taishū shinbun ga tsu-
kuru Meiji no “Nihon,” 35–36.
35. Yomiuri shinbun, November 2, 1874.
 The Novel’s Other 37

that any criminal or immoral act would be discovered by the newspaper

for all the world to read.36
Within the discursive construct of zappō columns, correspondents and
reporters alike were to spy on the private lives of people and expose the
good and evil (but mostly evil) that had previously gone unnoticed with
the newspaper passing judgments based on its position as the harbinger
of bunmei kaika. The result was that the zappō column fostered—and
legitimated as socially responsible and culturally productive—the desire
to transgress the boundary between public and private spheres and ex-
pose what lay behind closed doors. But this is not to say that the produc-
tion of such desire was the sole doing of the newspapers. Rather, such
desire—as well as Shōyō’s seemingly obsessive exploration of the topic
of eavesdropping—must also be considered in conjunction with the radi-
cal changes taking place in the early Meiji period regarding the signifi-
cance of private and public spheres that provided the conceptual frame-
work within which the desire of the eavesdropper exerted its power.
The primary impetus behind this change took the form of government
intervention via various regulations—most systematic of which was the
Ordinance of Transgressions and Negligence (Ishiki kaii jōrei) issued in
Tokyo prefecture on November 13, 1872—that prohibited such things as
sale of erotic prints, nudity, mixed bathing, display of tattoos, urination,
and fighting in public spaces.37 And it was through articulation of the
spaces where these regulations took effect—the sphere of enforcement—
that the public/private distinction, which was undifferentiated in the Edo
period for the most part, became emphasized and bifurcated. Makihara
Norio states:
For the common people, there was still not a clear differentiation between the
inside and outside of a house, and the alley was nothing but an extension of the
earthen entrance [doma]. Therefore, if “the focus of the regulations was on
the streets—to make peaceful streets, clean streets, and ‘civilized’ streets”—then
this meant the exfoliation of the streets as a “public” space from a community
where the house and the alley were fused. The streets were no longer owned by
the people, and “private life” became gradually confined into the house.38

—————
36. For examples of such letters, see Yamada Shunji, Taishū shinbun ga tsukuru
Meiji no “Nihon,” 199–219.
37. For details of the ordinance, see Ogi, Kumakura, and Ueno, Fūzoku sei,
3–29.
38. Makihara, “Bunmei kaika ron,” 256.
38 The Novel’s Other

Through restrictions placed on acts performed in the streets, including

small alleyways, people were forced to differentiate between a space
where regulations would be applied and a space where they would be free
to continue their ‘uncivilized’ customs. To the extent that these regula-
tions were primarily concerned with the view (as it relates to the vision
and to the opinion) of the Westerner, this differentiation was fundamen-
tally visual in nature.39 Whether something was considered public—and,
thus, restricted by law—or private was determined first and foremost by
what was accessible to the eyes of strangers, officials, and Westerners.
Thus, public space became a stage where the Japanese would perform ac-
cording to the externally determined criteria of decorum and the private
a realm to where ‘uncivilized’ activities were expelled.40
As this overview makes clear, government regulations and zappō col-
umns were intimately linked in their utilization of the rhetoric of bunmei
kaika to actively construct and separate the private and public spheres in
the 1870s and beyond. If government regulations sought to remove
‘uncivilized’ activities from the public realm, then the zappō column
emerged as their flip side, exposing the ‘uncivilized’ activities that had
been expelled to the private realm and making them into public specta-
cle for the purposes of education and entertainment. And if the regula-
tions strengthened the demarcation between public and private spheres
through their prohibition of certain activities in specific areas, then the
zappō columns did the same by presenting the private sphere as some-
thing that required transgression and exposure.41 Indeed, we could argue

—————
39. A prime example of the visual nature of these regulations can be seen in
one of the earliest and most detailed regulations of the early Meiji, which re-
lated to the issue of skin exposure, whether it involved taking off one’s shirt in
public or mixed bathing. And it was the characteristic of Japanese people not to
be sensitive about nudity that impressed or surprised the Westerners most. For
details on regulations on nudity and its relationship to the Western gaze, see
Imanishi, Kindai Nihon no sabetsu to sei bunka, 129–80. Also see Oku, Bunmei kaika
no minshū, 5–13, 159–67.
40. The need on the part of the government to show Westerners that Japan
was a civilized nation stemmed largely from Japan’s desire to renegotiate the un-
equal treaties, which Japan was forced to sign with the Western nations during
the late Edo and early Meiji periods.
41. But this is not to say that the government was satisfied with merely regu-
lating what happened on the street, as the door-to-door surveys (toguchi chōsa)
by police officers went into full effect in 1876. As a report made by the Tokyo
police in 1879 reveals, this practice was intended not only to monitor the identi-
 The Novel’s Other 39

that the visual barrier necessitated by the government regulations pro-

duced a prohibitive rift between the inside and the outside, and this rift
(as Lacanian distance) in turn produced the desire to know what existed
on the inside. In this context, the eavesdropper, as a presence existing
at the boundary between the public and the private—literally, under the
eaves just outside house walls—functions as the marker that actively
produces and reproduces the demarcation between public and private
spheres. For, while the eavesdropper satisfies the desire to transgress
the barrier by gaining access to what is going on behind the barrier, he
also refuses to penetrate the barrier directly via physical or visual means,
thereby maintaining his distance to the object of desire. Instead of be-
ing a direct penetration of the barrier, the access gained through eaves-
dropping is a linguistic substitution via auditory means of a visual desire.
That such a nonvisual ‘gaze’ succeeded in addressing the desires of the
reading public can be surmised from the growing popularity of koshinbun
from the late 1870s into the 1880s—fueled by zappō columns and their
longer, more narrative and fictional form tsuzukimono discussed earlier in
this chapter—as its counterpart ōshinbun deteriorated.42 In treating the
subject of eavesdropping, then, Shōyō’s Imotose kagami took up a subject
and a discursive framework that had become embedded within the popu-
lar consciousness of his readers through their encounter with the zappō
column on a daily basis. As we have seen, however, the story’s position
on eavesdropping is a highly negative one, and it seems only fitting that
Shōyō sought to explicitly make this point the moral thrust of the story
through a narrator’s intrusion near the end of the story:
There is nothing more sinful than overhearing [tachigiki ] . . . it is the same as
eavesdropping [nusumigiki ] on an important secret without the person’s consent.
Even if one does not become a criminal by law, what is it but a theft of morality?
In the world of today in which one is free in general to do as he pleases as long
as one does not violate the rights of others, does one have to endure the finger
pointing of others into private matters relating to one’s intimate affairs? (241).

—————
ties and occupations of people living in a specific address but also to determine
their characters and beliefs. For the details of this practice, see Obinata, Nihon
kindai kokka no seiritsu to keisatsu, 200–203.
42. In 1880, daily circulation of ōshinbun (36,024) accounted for 42 percent
and koshinbun (49,410) 58 percent of Tokyo newspapers. In 1885, the number was
28 percent for ōshinbun (28,686) and 72 percent for koshinbun (73,924) (figures are
from Tsuchiya, Taishūshi no genryū, 157).
40 The Novel’s Other

Although Shōyō goes on to discuss the evils of eavesdropping from a

variety of angles—from human psychology to the structure of Japanese
houses—the cited passage, which begins the rant on eavesdropping as an
immoral act, frames the ensuing discussion within the ethical framework
of privacy.43 Employing the fashionable terminology of the Freedom and
People’s Rights movement, the passage posits the private sphere as an
untouchable space where one should be “free [ jiyū ] in general to do as he
pleases” as long as what occurs behind closed doors “does not violate the
rights [kenri ] of others.” In so doing, Shōyō indirectly criticizes the zappō
columns and the ‘gaze’ of the eavesdropper that they promote, offering a
different understanding of the private sphere in the process. Rather than
being a space for ‘uncivilized’ and ‘unenlightened’ activities that need to
be exposed and admonished (zappō columns) or hidden away from view
(government regulations), Shōyō presents the activities of the private
sphere in positive terms as an “important secret” and “intimate affairs”
and, thus, as something to be respected.
But Shōyō runs into a problem here, for the goal of the novel is pre-
cisely to expose what happens in the most private of the private, and, in
this sense, a respect for privacy is exactly what the novel does not have.
As we have seen, Shōyō’s notion of the novel is founded upon the de-
tailed depiction of the private lives of its characters, which he couches
in the rhetoric of relentless exposing by a novelist who “observe[s] pas-
sively” and “depict[s] as it is.” Albeit metaphorical, these epitomes of
Shōyō’s realism prescribe the treatment of characters as if they were real
human beings and present the novelist as an eavesdropper regardless of
—————
43. The rant continues as follows: “Unlike the people of other countries who
live in solid stone houses and lock their doors without fail, people of our country
live in houses that are thin-walled and bunched up closely . . . not to mention the
sliding doors and paper doors, if one decides to eavesdrop, it is easy to know the
private affairs of others. So people of our country, since they are not sages, can-
not gain a sense of relief, and they cannot even talk to themselves from the fear
of being heard by others. . . . After all, I wouldn’t think to criticize the act of
overhearing so much if it remained with the hearing of truths, but overhearing is
for the most part mishearing, and from the old days, to become falsely accused
of a crime is normally the result of a mistake in overhearing. . . . when overhear-
ing, everyone holds his breath with all his effort, worries not to be noticed by
others, and listens with all his might. Thus, the mind is probably in a frenzy,
missing parts here and there, and upon encountering places that are hard to un-
derstand or hear, he thinks that it is probably this way or that way with ground-
less suspicion and bias” (241–42).
 The Novel’s Other 41

whether the narrator assumes a perspective of the eavesdropper, as was

the case in Tōsei shosei katagi. Thus, such a diatribe draws attention to
this potential of the novelist and, by extension, the inherently paradoxi-
cal nature of Shōyō’s formulation of the novel, which Maeda Ai has suc-
cinctly described as “the contradiction between modern civil ethics that
respects the privacy of individuals and the logic of a modern novel that
delves boldly into the internal life of individuals.”44
By bringing attention to this paradox of the novel, Imotose kagami’s
vehement criticism of eavesdropping may appear to be an instance of
Shōyō shooting himself in the foot. But I would argue that it is also possi-
ble to see it as the opposite: the moral criticism of eavesdropping not
only evokes the paradox of the novel but also represents Shōyō’s attempt
to resolve this paradox. Might not the structure of Imotose kagami—the
over-reliance on eavesdropping for narrative development followed by an
extensive narrator’s intrusion that criticizes this act from all angles—be
seen as Shōyō’s attempt to foreground and tackle this paradox? By telling
a story in which the various acts of eavesdropping lead to misinformation
and ultimately tragedy, the narrator positions himself to explicitly criti-
cize such acts and the invasion of privacy that they represent, thereby
retaining his moral high ground all the while suggesting his difference
from the eavesdropping characters in the story. The aforementioned
problematization of the conflation between the private and the interior
on the part of the characters makes clear their inability to cut through
appearances despite their desire, unlike the novelist who is, by Shōyō’s
definition, someone who can do precisely what they as ordinary people
cannot do. The eavesdropping characters assert, albeit negatively, the
privileged position occupied by the novelist in the age of reason.
In ‘chastising’ the act of eavesdropping as a ‘vice’ in order to inculcate
his readers, however, Shōyō also seems to be walking a fine line between
implementing the educational role of the novel, which he espouses in
Shōsetsu shinzui, and operating within the framework of kanzen chōaku,
which he vehemently criticizes in the same treatise.45 No doubt, Shōyō
is treading dangerous waters, but when we consider the following pas-
sage from Shōsetsu shinzui, we see the way in which the rejection of the

—————
44. Maeda, “Noberu no mosaku,” 306–7.
45. Atsuko Ueda provides an insightful discussion of the significance of kan-
zen chōaku during the Meiji period (Concealment of Politics, Politics of Concealment,
44–48).
42 The Novel’s Other

didactic framework that paves the way for the realistic novel gives rise
to a new type of a moral framework. Shōyō writes:
Because this society in which we live still is in the position of half-civilization,
there are many cruel people, and occasionally there are obscene incidents. If,
just because one selfishly disliked these [people and incidents], one disregarded
them, the story that will be depicted would be a thing that is based on the
author’s ideals and cannot be said to be the conditions of the period. . . . Ob-
scene love stories should be written, cruel incidents should be told, but when
one writes these [stories] it requires that the author’s heart is pure and un-
motivated. . . . If the author himself enjoys exposing and writing about secret
love affairs, the inner thoughts of the author will unknowingly manifest them-
selves on the page, and discerning readers will not be able to persevere and will
stop reading (136–37).

In this passage criticizing contemporary Meiji fictions for employing

the didactic framework as a moral license to tell obscene or immoral
stories, we see that Shōyō’s concern does not lie with their content (the
immoral incidents or behaviors that are depicted within the narrative)
but in their execution (the authorial attitude toward the objects of de-
piction). In order to present a realistically depicted story, Shōyō admits
that “obscene” and “cruel” incidents, which are part of contemporary
Japanese society, need to be taken up. His qualm with extant narratives
of Meiji Japan exemplified by tsuzukimono—the objects of his reform—is
the lack of distance shown by the authors in depicting these incidents,
as reflected in the eavesdropping narrator who fosters a conspiratorial
relationship with the readers. According to him, the “author’s heart”
must be “pure” and “unmotivated” in describing these incidents, a sen-
timent that is echoed in his introduction to the second half of Tōsei sho-
sei katagi where he writes: “However vulgar and base in nature the hu-
man feelings, social conditions, or words [that are depicted in the story]
may be, if their spirit is not vulgar, then [one] should not denounce
them as base.”46
—————
46. Tsubouchi, Tōsei shosei katagi, 331. Indeed, such belief expressed by Shōyō
went beyond paratexts and literary theories, for he had consciously been incor-
porating the world of zappō columns and tsuzukimono into the world of the novel.
For example, Maeda Ai hypothesizes that the romance between Komachida and
Tanoji may have been influenced by the newspaper serial “Asao Yoshie no ri-
reki” (The life of Asao Yoshie), which appeared in Tōkyō e’iri shinbun from April
26 to August 5, 1882 (Maeda, “Gesaku bungaku to Tōsei shosei katagi,” 116–33).
And in Imotose kagami, Shōyō explicitly notes in the text (203) that he had gained
the idea for the story of Wakazato’s mother Sawae—of how she was wronged by
 The Novel’s Other 43

But how are we to recognize whether the author’s “spirit” is “vulgar”

or not? According to Shōyō, such a determination is an easy one for
“discerning readers” because “the inner thoughts of the author will un-
knowingly manifest themselves on the page.” But this comment certainly
does not provide us with a method to discern the immorality or non-
immorality of a given text on the practical level of fiction writing and
reading. As we have seen, the extensive narrative intrusion in Imotose
kagami, which criticizes the act of eavesdropping, attempts to maintain
the author’s “pure” and “unmotivated” stance toward what he narrates
and provides an example of the difference in authorial stance between the
novel and contemporary fictional narratives whose author “enjoys ex-
posing and writing about secret love affairs.” In so doing, the modern
novel—whose emergence depends, according to Shōyō, on the rejection
of the didactic framework—gives birth, paradoxically, to a moral author
whose nonvulgar “spirit” is guaranteed by the critical distance he keeps
from the content of his depiction.
Such ‘resolution’ of the paradox of the novel in Imotose kagami seems
to have not been a satisfactory one for Shōyō, however. Clearly discern-
able from his relentless pursuit of the subject of eavesdropping in his
fictions, the paradox of the novel continued to be a fundamental theo-
retical problem of his literary project. And it was, I would argue, the
preoccupation with this paradox and the search for the moral “spirit”
that prompted his experimentation with the detective fiction genre in
Nisegane tsukai.

Nisegane tsukai and the Transformation

of a Bungling Detective
“Let us leave aside its value as a novel, but from the point of view of the
impression it leaves, there is nothing more interesting.”47 So Shōyō writes
in his introduction to Nisegane tsukai, the translation of XYZ (1883) by

—————
Misawa’s father, forcing Sawae to sell Wakazato’s services to a brothel—from a
serialized report entitled “Geigi no kontan” (Complicated circumstances of a
geisha), which appeared in the zappō column of Yomiuri shinbun during February
1884. Shōyō’s incorporation of the world of zappō and tsuzukimono into the world
of the novel could be understood as an attempt to present a “vulgar” story in a
non-vulgar manner.
47. Tsubouchi, Nisegane tsukai, 662. All subsequent references to this source
will appear in the text in parentheses.
44 The Novel’s Other

Anna Katharine Green (1846–1935). Appearing on November 27, 1887

in the Yomiuri shinbun, this first installment foreshadows the sentiment
expressed by the Kokumin no tomo editorial in 1893 (discussed in the In-
troduction): detective fiction, while interesting as a form of entertain-
ment, has no literary value, even or especially in a country which has
just begun its path toward the modern novel. No doubt Shōyō, who had
just completed his Shōsetsu shinzui, in which he reconsidered the cultural
role of fiction and sought to position the Western realistic novel as the
model toward which Japanese authors should strive, had to be careful
of the examples he posited. He did not want Japanese authors to mis-
take Nisegane tsukai for an exemplar of the novel he sought. But unlike in
the Kokumin no tomo editorial, Shōyō does not see this example of de-
tective fiction as an useless form of entertainment. Arguing that plot
must come before the investigation of ninjō because a good plot is what
makes people read, Shōyō concludes the first installment of Nisegane
tsukai with the proclamation to embark on his translation of Green’s
highly “interesting” text in order to “study the workings of plot” as a
part of his training to become a novelist (662).48
Significantly, as the plot from which Shōyō sought to learn clearly re-
veals, Anna Katharine Green’s XYZ is, in short, a failed detective story,
and its narrator-detective no Sherlock Holmes.49 True, he solves a crime
—————
48. Shōyō uses a citation from a French writer in his argument: “Eight or
nine out of ten animals of reading society read with their eyes. There are barely
any that read with their hearts. If an author hopes for a good reputation, he
should put tangible things first and intangible ninjō second. More specifically,
put plot before unsurfacing. The first thing to do is to change what lies immedi-
ately before their eyes” (661).
49. XYZ tells a story of a government detective who is dispatched to Brandon,
Massachusetts, on a money counterfeiting case to investigate suspicious letters
being mailed to “X.Y.Z.” and picked up by a mysterious recipient at its post of-
fice. There, the narrator discovers a letter—with code-like language designating
a meeting place and a password (“counterfeit”)—that he alters so that he can
take the place of the intended recipient to rendezvous with the letter’s sender in
the garden of the millionaire Benson’s mansion on the night it will host a cos-
tume ball. Acting as the letter’s recipient, the narrator makes the appointment
and successfully infiltrates the ball, but he soon realizes his mistake. The plot
involving the letter turns out not to concern a counterfeiting scam but the re-
uniting of Benson and his disowned son Joe, assisted by Joe’s brother Hartley
and sister Carrie. Before the narrator can rectify the situation, however, Hartley
escorts him to the library for a meeting with Benson who quickly drops dead
upon entering the room after drinking from the wineglass that was on the table.
 The Novel’s Other 45

in this story—the murder of the millionaire Benson—but this crime has

no relationship to the money counterfeiting case that the government
ordered him to investigate and is encountered as a consequence of a
critical misstep in his treatment of the suspicious letters addressed to
“X.Y.Z.” In a flash, the narrator decides that one of these letters is the
letter he is looking for, although the narrator (as well as the readers)
should already recognize at this point that the lead which brought him
to this town was a false one, as the letters that caught the authorities’
attention—the letters that are picked up every night by the same indi-
vidual who is not the mysterious recipient of the letter—were unrelated
to the counterfeiting case. Nonetheless, the narrator proceeds to alter
the meeting place designated in the letter so that he, and not its in-
tended recipient, will rendezvous with the letter’s sender at the costume
ball held at Benson’s mansion. Thus, while it is true that this rash deci-
sion enables the narrator to solve a murder case, the accomplishment is
nothing but an accidental result of the narrator’s misunderstanding and
mishandling of evidence. In fact, such incompetence on the part of the
detective would be the norm in this story, promoting the understanding
of the narrator-detective as a dupe rather than a hero.
As such, it is no wonder that Green’s XYZ employs a first-person
narrative to tell a confessional story, for it is this mode of narration that
is particularly suited to depict the sense of self-reflection—including the
feeling of shame—that might naturally arise in the process of recounting
such ineffectiveness on the part of the detective. In the course of the
narrative being told at a future time when the narrator has had a chance
to reflect upon his past actions, a clear distinction develops between the
narrated self, the rash detective, and the narrating self who is repenting
the actions of the former self. The following comment at the story’s end
succinctly summarizes the narrator’s feeling regarding his involvement
in the Benson affair: “I was too much ashamed of the curiosity which
was the mainspring of my action to publish each and every particular of
my conduct abroad.”50

—————
Hartley immediately arrives at the scene, and the narrator understands all. Hart-
ley, thinking that the narrator was Joe, has framed him for the murder of their
father. In the investigation that follows, Hartley cleverly guides the discussion
to incriminate his brother, but the narrator reveals his identity by discarding his
disguise and incriminates Hartley for the murder of his father instead.
50. Green, XYZ, 97. All subsequent references to this source will appear in
the text in parentheses.
46 The Novel’s Other

Given the archetypal nature of Green’s first-person narrative, it seems

quite fitting that Shōyō decided to translate this story when he did, for,
as Komori Yōichi notes, 1887 was the year when a sudden interest in the
first-person narration form arose among Japanese writers.51 While the
specific import of this form for Shōyō will be discussed a bit later, it is
clear from his literary endeavors in 1887 that he was one of the first and
most enthusiastic writers of the boom in first-person narration. In Janu-
ary 1887, he published the essay “Jitsuden ron” (Theory of autobiography),
which called for the writing of autobiographical confessions, and, from
October 1 to November 9, 1887, he serialized “Tane hiroi,” with which we
began this chapter, in the Yomiuri shinbun, just prior to his serialization
of Nisegane tsukai. 52 Moreover, two translations of Edgar Allan Poe’s
stories—“The Black Cat” and “The Murders in the Rue Morgue”—by
Aeba Kōson (1855–1922) appeared in the supplementary issues of the
Yomiuri shinbun in the late months of 1887 when Nisegane tsukai was being
serialized in the main issues of the same paper, the latter of these stories
suggesting the intimate connection between Japanese authors’ interests
in first-person narration and detective fiction.53
But Shōyō surprises us given such historical circumstances: rather than
continuing his experimentation with the first-person narrator, Shōyō re-
places Green’s first-person narrator with the third-person in the process
of translation. Green’s XYZ is a recounting of the narrator’s past investi-
gation. In contrast, Nisegane tsukai is told as an unfolding of a continuous
present, and Shōyō takes care in his translation to eliminate the narrative
framework of self-reflection, which constitutes Green’s text. No longer
—————
51. Komori, Kōzō to shite no katari, 301.
52. In 1889, moreover, Shōyō would posit the detective explicitly as a meta-
phorical double of the ideal narrator/novelist, a connection implicit in his Shō-
setsu shinzui, by stating that the first-person narrator “should be like an observant
detective” who provides “objective observations and subjective feelings” of what
he/she sees and hears (“Eikoku shōsetsu no hensen,” 5).
53. Other works appearing in 1887 that employ or discuss the first-person
narration were Morita Shiken’s essay “Shōsetsu no jijotai kijutsutai” (First per-
son narration and descriptive style of the novel; September 1887), Shiken’s trans-
lation Kinro monogatari (The tale of the golden donkey; January–February 1887),
Yoda Gakkai’s original work Kyōbijin (Chivalrous beauty; July and November
1887), and Aeba Kōson’s essay “Jiden o kakubeshi” (Write an autobiography;
June 1887). For Komori’s complete analysis of the first-person narration during
the Meiji 20s, including an illuminating discussion of Aeba’s translations of
Poe’s stories, see Komori, Kōzō to shite no katari, 301–54.
 The Novel’s Other 47

present in Nisegane tsukai is the aforementioned ending of XYZ, in which

the narrator-detective expresses his shame for the curiosity that led to
his involvement in the Benson’s case. Also eliminated are the many clues
in Green’s text that suggest curiosity as the motivating force behind the
narrator-detective’s actions. For example, the narrator employs phrases
such as “moved by a sudden impulse” (9), “seized by an intense desire”
(18), and “so my adventurous curiosity decided” (19) at critical junctures of
the narrative to describe how something beyond his control is pushing
him to delve deeper and deeper into the mystery at hand.54 In Shōyō’s
translation, however, these phrases are nowhere to be seen, replaced in
all instances by a variation of the verb omoitsuku (to think of ), which is
less nuanced to say the least (668, 674, 675).
As these changes in the translation should make clear, Shōyō sup-
presses any evidence of curiosity’s grasp on the narrator—and the result-
ing shame—all the while presenting a story whose original had curiosity
as its driving force.55 Unlike the narrator-detective of Green’s text, Ku-
risu Masamichi, the protagonist of Nisegane tsukai, is not motivated by
his sense of curiosity and is presented as a consummate professional: he
does what is expected of him by the government. The fact that he goes
astray from his original mission is not his fault but rather his fortune.
This point is emphasized in the introduction to Nisegane tsukai where
Shōyō has this to say about the story: “because the occupation of the
secret detective, in always looking to detect and expose criminals, re-
quires that he disguise appearances or sneak into people’s houses to in-
vestigate hidden things, there are times when he unexpectedly discovers
—————
54. Fittingly, the first of these examples occurs when the narrator is altering
the meeting place designated in the letter at the post office.
55. Here we must say that Shōyō makes a conscious decision not to employ
Nisegane tsukai as a work that represents his notion of the novel, which aspires to
describe realistically the inner conflict between reason and desire. But it is also
true that Shōyō made some changes to Green’s text in order to better position
Nisegane tsukai within his understanding of the novel. For example, as Takahashi
Osamu notes, Shōyō casts Sadamune (Hartley in XYZ) as a son of the million-
aire Amako (Benson) and his mistress, and a half-brother of Jōjirō ( Joe) and Ka-
ruko (Carrie). Takahashi interprets this change as Shōyō’s way to provide a
framework within which Sadamune’s ill will toward Jōjirō can be understood:
“Shōyō’s translation consciously creates a psychological drama between half-
brothers and positions this ‘conflict’ as the ‘coherent thread’ that flows beneath
the novel. This should be interpreted as a direct reflection of Shōyō’s novelistic
method” (“ ‘Hon’yaku’ to iu jiko genkyū,” 78–79).
48 The Novel’s Other

secret wrongdoings” (662). In this way, Shōyō replaces XYZ’s textual

framework of shame regarding the detective’s curiosity with a paratextual
framework through which the readers will view the actions of Kurisu’s
involvement in the murder of the millionaire Amako (Benson in XYZ)
not as a shameful accident but as a characteristic, albeit extraordinary,
consequence of a detective doing his duty.
But Shōyō does more than offer such an interpretative framework
constructed via paratexts. Through making other changes to Green’s
text, Shōyō emphasizes Kurisu’s sense of duty and delineates what this
duty of the detective entails. After altering the letter addressed to “123”
(X.Y.Z. in the original) with the intention of taking the place of its
proper recipient, Kurisu goes to the train station to gather information
on the wealthy Amako family whose garden is to be the meeting place
between the mysterious stranger and the “counterfeiter.” Here is Ku-
risu’s train of thought regarding his decision:
Since my duty [ yakume, written as shokushō which is a more official word mean-
ing “charged function”] is to gather information that may be of use, however un-
certain it might be, and to determine without exception whether they are fact
or fiction, I must do that without fail. Generally where people gather, rumors of
famous people flow, so a waiting room at a train station would be perfect. I will
mix in with the crowd and listen (670–71).

In contrast, the corresponding section in Green’s text runs as follows:

“business is business, and no clue, however slight or unpromising in its
nature, is to be neglected when the way is as dark as that which lay before
me” (13). As this comparison reveals, Shōyō explicitly uses the word
“duty,” highlighting the awareness on the part of Kurisu regarding what
he is expected to do, which in this instance is the collecting of rumors
surrounding the suspect through the act of eavesdropping and the deter-
mining of their truthfulness. In addition to this delineation of the ex-
pected actions of the detective’s duties, Shōyō emphasizes the detective’s
sense of duty, expressed in the phrase “I must do that without fail.”
No doubt, the collection of rumors through eavesdropping is but one
of many actions a detective is expected to take in the course of his in-
vestigation. Considering the importance that eavesdropping has within
Shōyō’s understanding of the novel, however, it is no surprise that the
emphasized relationship between the demands of the profession and
this act can be seen elsewhere as well. Upon visiting the Amako estate
in order to be hired as a guard to serve at the costume ball, Kurisu over-
hears a conversation between Sadamune (Hartley in XYZ) and Karuko
 The Novel’s Other 49

(Carrie), although Kurisu does not know to whom the voices belong.
First, a look at the corresponding section from XYZ:
The sound of voices reached my ear from the next room. A man and woman
were conversing there in smothered tones, but my senses are very acute, and I
had no difficulty in overhearing what was said.
“Oh, what an exciting day this has been!” cried the female voice. “I have
wanted to ask you a dozen times what you think of it all. Will he succeed this
time? Has he the nerve to embrace his opportunity, or what is more, the tact to
make one? Failure now would be fatal. Father—” (21–22).

And here is Nisegane tsukai:

From the next room leaked voices of people whispering. Straining his ears to
listen, he realized that it was the voices of a man and a woman conversing
stealthily, but Kurisu by nature had good ears, which was indeed a necessary
professional trait, so although the voices were faint they were clearly audible.
The woman’s voice said, “Really, there was not a day that I worried like to-
day. Although I wanted to ask you, I couldn’t because there’s an ear on every
wall. So I worried alone. . . . What do you think? Will he accomplish it success-
fully? I cannot but worry. A great opportunity like this will not come again, but
will he do it boldly? Even if he has the courage to do so, he must also have tact
or else he will be exposed before . . . Father” (677; ellipses in the original).

That Shōyō sought to augment the element of eavesdropping in Green’s

text can clearly be seen in the changes he makes in the passage. Made
explicit in the translation is the awareness on Karuko’s part of the possi-
bility that her conversation with Sadamune may be eavesdropped. But
even more important for our purposes here is the alteration Shōyō makes
in the role played by the detective in the scene. While the text of XYZ
makes the narrator a passive listener who overhears the conversation,
Shōyō’s translation gives Kurisu an active role: although he has good ears,
Kurisu must make the decision to listen actively (“straining his ears”) to
ascertain what is being said in the next room. Moreover, Shōyō presents
Kurisu’s acute hearing as a necessary qualification for being a detective,
intimating that eavesdropping is a crucial function of the profession.
Indeed, this connection between the duty of the detective and the
act of eavesdropping goes beyond Shōyō’s alterations. In both XYZ and
Nisegane tsukai, the detective is an eavesdropper. It is who he is and all he
does. And this is nowhere clearer than in the second half of the story
when Kurisu infiltrates the costume ball disguised as Jōjirō ( Joe in XYZ),
the second son of Amako and the mysterious recipient of the letter that
Kurisu has altered. While his choice to impersonate the suspect may ap-
pear as a clever way to get into the heart of the criminal gang and to take
50 The Novel’s Other

on an active role in the investigation, it does nothing of the sort. Once

he dons the costume provided by the suspect, Kurisu, despite his desire
to ask questions that will lead him to the truth of the case, is forced to
become a completely passive subject, for to speak would mean that he
would be exposed as a fake. Thus, he becomes a listener to a barrage
of disguised partiers who accost him at every turn to discuss the sordid
affairs surrounding the Amako family with the understanding that he is
Jōjirō.56 This situation clearly marks Kurisu as an eavesdropper to the
extent that eavesdropping is an intrusion by a third party on a dialogue
that is taking place within an ‘I-you’ relationship where those involved
are unaware of the existence of a third party who is neither a recognized
addresser nor an addressee of utterances in a dialogue.
At this point in the discussion, it is easy to see that the intrusion by
a third party on an ‘I-you’ relationship is what drives the entire narrative
of Nisegane tsukai, for the root of all ‘evil’ in the story, its Pandora’s box—
the letter—also exists within this structure of eavesdropping. The letter
is a statement made by its sender to be communicated to its recipient,
and, in this regard, it is the same as an utterance in a dialogue made
possible within an ‘I-you’ relationship. Thus, a letter that is read by a
third party shares the same fate as an utterance overhead by an eaves-
dropper. Or rather, an intercepted letter is an example par excellence of
the structure of eavesdropping. The eavesdropper is provided with some
extra-linguistic factors—emotions and accents that can be discerned
from the voice, for example—that assist him/her in giving meaning to
what is being said. Moreover, the eavesdropper always has the context
of the scene of a conversation, which enables him/her to interpret certain
utterances within the flow of a dialogue between interlocutors. But such
factors do not exist in the case where a letter is read by a third party, for
the letter is a monologue that is always out of context, its place of writing
always different from the statement it makes.
And now, the mechanism of Nisegane tsukai that is produced as the
result of the changes effected by Shōyō in the process of translation of
Green’s text begins to surface. On the one hand, Green’s XYZ presents
—————
56. The sordid affairs of the Amako family involve the story of how Jōjirō be-
came estranged from the family after he was accused of the theft of Amako’s
money and bonds. Kurisu’s conversations with family members suggest that it
was not Jōjirō but Sadamune who was guilty of this theft. The knowledge of this
family story then serves to promote the understanding of Sadamune as an evil
person who is deceitful and disloyal to his father and, thus, capable of patricide.
 The Novel’s Other 51

eavesdropping as an act where the detective-narrator’s curiosity mani-

fests itself, and, in this sense, the feeling of shame that he experiences
at the end of the story is a direct result of his repeated indulgence in
this act, which reflects his desire to pry into people’s private lives in the
name of the law. On the other hand, there is no judgment passed in
Nisegane tsukai on the actions of the detective Kurisu, either by the de-
tective himself or by the third-person narrator. Instead, Shōyō high-
lights eavesdropping as a crucial function of the detective and presents
him as an exceptional eavesdropper whose actions are not dictated by
his curiosity but by the demands of his profession. It is not that the de-
tective wants to eavesdrop; it is just that he must. Through the presen-
tation of the detective as the rightful and fitting subject of eavesdrop-
ping whose motivation derives from his sense of duty to expose the
truth of the case at hand, Shōyō provides an example of the moral and
objective gaze that is required of the novel’s narrator who must explore
and depict the most interior and private without any ‘personal’ interest
or investment: the detective becomes the metaphorical double of the
ideal narrator and, by extension, the novelist.
But Shōyō’s strategy to establish the foundations for the novel in Meiji
Japan through the articulation of a new type of writer—the novelist—
went beyond the promotion of such doubling, extending to the employ-
ment of practical strategies to establish the narrator as the authorial sub-
stitute of the novelist at the level of the text. And here again, the shift in
perspective from first- to third-person narration plays a critical role. As a
mode of narration in which the narrator is assumed to exist as a character
within the story-world, the first-person narration must adhere to the lim-
ited perspective of the narrator who lacks the privileged gaze of the nov-
elist to cut through appearances. Because of this characteristic, the first
person posits itself as a suitable mode of narration for the detective story
whose success is highly dependent on the ability of its narration to main-
tain suspense as the primary mechanism of readers’ enjoyment. Most
often, such narration takes the form of what Komori Yōichi calls “the
companion-style,” where the narrator is not the detective but rather
his sidekick, a clueless observer—exemplified by Watson of Sherlock
Holmes tales—who only knows to record everything without under-
standing the significance of anything and, thus, is incapable of divulging
the case’s mysteries ahead of the detective.57
—————
57. Komori, Kōzō to shite no katari, 332. The narrator of Poe’s Dupin trilogy
also employs this type of first-person narration, as Meiji readers would have
52 The Novel’s Other

Of course, Green’s XYZ does not employ such a sidekick, for the de-
tective himself is a clueless observer who does not pose a threat as nar-
rator to destroy the suspense of the text as Dupin or Holmes might.
This characteristic of XYZ, thus, makes the story conducive for a re-
formulation into third-person narration because there is no need to deal
with the narrator-sidekick who would become a superfluous narrative
element after such a change in narrative perspective, enabling the trans-
lator to focus on maintaining suspense critical to the detective story. In
this sense, Shōyō’s Nisegane tsukai can be seen, as Takahashi Osamu does,
as Shōyō’s attempt to utilize the generic demands of detective fiction to
achieve the limited third-person narration that he deemed necessary for
the development of the modern novel.58 But if such was the case, then I
would also argue that this attempt involved Shōyō’s engagement with
XYZ not as a typical detective story but as a parodic text keenly aware
of the narrative dynamic and implications of the classical detective story,
as manifested not only in the fact that the story’s narrator is the once-
clueless detective but also in the way he comes to solve the Benson case.
After the death of Benson, Joe—or rather the man in a yellow dom-
ino who is believed to be Joe—is accused of poisoning Benson based on
the testimony of his servant who claims to have seen the man in a yellow
domino holding the wineglass in which the poison was poured. But such
an accusation, of course, does not trouble the narrator-detective who
simply takes off the yellow domino to reveal his identity to the crowd
and clears the accusation against him. It is not because the narrator is
not Joe and, thus, does not have a motive for killing Benson that suspi-
cion against the narrator is cleared. In fact, Hartley, upon seeing a total
—————
known through Kōson’s translation of Poe’s “The Murder in the Rue Morgue”
in December 1887. This type of narration would also be employed in Futabatei
Shimei’s “Aibiki” (The rendezvous; 1888) and “Meguriai” (The encounter; 1888),
translations of Ivan Turgenev that had a major impact on the future generation
of Japanese writers.
58. Takahashi understands Nisegane tsukai within the development of Shōyō’s
notion of the modern novel that finds its fruition in the 1889 story Saikun, a
story that employs the limited third-person narration. He states: “It can be said
that to consciously translate the detective novel XYZ, which employs a first-
person narration that necessitates by nature a methodological construction of a
restricted scope of consciousness, into Nisegane tsukai as a third-person narration
was the ultimate experiment in theory of expression by Shōyō to achieve a sta-
ble ‘place of narration’ based upon the ‘perspective’ of third-person narration,
which was necessary for the modern novel” (“ ‘Hon’yaku’ to iu jiko genkyū,” 83).
 The Novel’s Other 53

stranger appear from under the yellow domino, accuses the narrator of
having been sent by Joe to commit this crime. Rather, suspicions against
the narrator are cleared by the fact of his being a government detective
and, hence, of his being someone who is ‘incapable’ of committing such
a crime irrespective of the evidence that may have incriminated the man
in the yellow domino. Applying his authority—that is, his reliability as a
witness—to full effect, the narrator turns the circumstantial evidence of
the servant’s testimony, which had been used against the man in the yel-
low domino, to incriminate Hartley: the narrator testifies that it was
Hartley who told him to inspect the wineglass to determine whether
Benson had gone to bed or not and thereby holds Hartley accountable
for trying to frame him for Benson’s murder.
In XYZ, then, it is not the actions of the detective that lead to the
actual solving of the case but merely the fact that the narrator-detective
disguises himself as Joe while maintaining his authority/identity as a
government official that proves critical, for this authority guarantees the
truthfulness of the first-person witness account that he experienced as
Joe’s double. But significantly, it is precisely this authority that the narra-
tor himself problematizes through his other first-person narrated account,
namely, his confession that is XYZ, as highlighted by the previously cited
ending of the original work. The first time around, this passage was read
as evidence of the narrator’s deep sense of shame regarding his curiosity
that motivated him to get involved in the Benson affair, which had noth-
ing to do with the counterfeiting case. This time around, however, let us
focus somewhere else, namely, his admission that he did not tell us every-
thing. Why? Because he was “too much ashamed.” What he ‘left’ out, we
will never know, although it might actually change our interpretation
of his story. In fact, this might be the reason for his ‘omissions.’ The end-
ing of Green’s text reminds us that the narrator who exists in the story-
world is hypothetically bound to the same sense of self-interest that ‘pre-
vented’ Imotose kagami’s Oyuki from expressing her true feelings about
Misawa. While the autobiographical recounting style of narration may
‘ensure’ the reality of the experiences it tells by claiming direct experi-
ence, it also exposes the possibility of their untruthfulness, omissions,
and manipulations, putting into question the very authority that it in-
vokes regarding the truthfulness of the narration’s content and the sin-
cerity of its presentation.59
—————
59. Thus, XYZ’s narrator-detective reveals the inherent artificiality of the
first-person narrated story, including the sharing of perspectives between the
54 The Novel’s Other

The employment of the third-person narration in Nisegane tsukai

forecloses such possibilities of doubt arising on the part of the readers
regarding the reality and authenticity of the detective’s story by acting
as a metalanguage that exists outside the story-world. And here the
novel and the detective conspire to legitimate each other’s authority.
On the one hand, the detective draws on his authority as a government
official to function as an example of an ‘objective’ and ‘moral’ bearer of
the gaze of the eavesdropper or voyeur that Shōyō deemed necessary in
the narrating of the modern novel. On the other hand, the third-person
narration, in describing the actions of the detective from an extra-
diegetic position, functions as an authority that ensures, in turn, the au-
thority of the detective and his ‘objective’ and ‘moral’ nature. The pro-
duction of the figure of the detective as the metaphorical double of the
‘moral’ and ‘objective’ novelist simultaneously involves the emergence of
the third-person narrator as an authority figure who ensures such moral-
ity and objectivity on the part of the detective.
But this is not to say that Shōyō expected the shift in narrative
perspective to be enough for such an emergence, as it can be surmised
from the paratextual moves that he made in the process of translation—
including a title change—which function strategically to establish the
authority of the narrator all the while maintaining key aspects of a detec-
tive story intact. XYZ, the title of Green’s text, is the ‘name’ of the re-
cipient of the mysterious letters, the ‘name’ that the detective-narrator
assumes in order to infiltrate Benson’s costume ball. It is a fitting title,
no doubt, for it reflects the desire on the part of the detective to ex-
perience an alternative subjectivity—the criminal—and, as such, is at the
source of the detective’s curiosity. In contrast, the title of Shōyō’s trans-
lation has a double meaning: it is the reason that Kurisu was sent to in-
vestigate as well as the password included in the letter that becomes the
critical clue drawing Kurisu into the Amako affair. And the title change,
—————
narrator and the reader that assists in the production of suspense by enabling
the readers see what the narrator sees and join the latter in analyzing the case
that unfolds before them. While the text may promote the sense that the narra-
tor and the readers are going through the investigation together, this conspira-
torial relationship is only a result of the conscious and active directing and mis-
directing of the readers by the first-person narrator. As Rosemary Jann writes of
Conan Doyle’s first-person narrator: “since Watson narrates all Holmes’s cases
after the fact, in the telling he must suppress his knowledge of how they turned
out in order to re-create the puzzlement and surprise he felt at the time” (The
Adventures of Sherlock Holmes, 24).
 The Novel’s Other 55

as Takahashi Osamu states, had an important effect of prompting the

story to be read in a certain way: “The readers will read the story by bring-
ing together the various information given in the novel around the word
‘nisegane tsukai’ with the expectation that at some point the whole picture
of ‘nisegane tsukai’ will be made clear and that they will be given clues to
that end.”60 To the extent that to “bring together the various informa-
tion” around the word “nisegane tsukai” is exactly what Kurisu does in
his investigation, the change in title functions to reinforce the sharing of
perspective and expectation—the conspiratorial relationship—between
Kurisu and the readers that may have been mitigated by the shift from
XYZ’s first-person narration to Nisegane tsukai’s third-person narration.
At the same time, Nisegane tsukai’s third-person narrator distances
himself from this conspiratorial relationship between the detective and
the readers by utilizing to full effect the fact that this work, first and
foremost, is a work of translation. As many scholars have noted, 1887
was the year in which the translation industry saw its first prewar peak
after a sudden boom the previous year.61 Naturally, this phenomenon
brought on a number of essays regarding the nature of translation in
various media including the Yomiuri shinbun, in which Takada Sanae’s
“Hon’yaku no kairyō” (Reform of translation; March 26, 1887) and Ryō-
goku Dōjin’s “Hon’yaku-sho no dokusha ni ichigen su” (A word to the
readers of translations; October 25, 1887) appeared. Driven by desire to
improve the level of translation in Meiji Japan, these essays like many
others attacked the loose adaptation–style of translation that was cus-
tomary at the time for being insincere to the original text and immature
as a work of translation.
Interestingly, Shōyō, who was no doubt aware of these criticisms,
nonetheless employs a variety of such criticized translation techniques
in the early pages of Nisegane tsukai’s main text, explicitly situating the
narrator as a Japanese translator who is introducing an American work
to his Japanese readers. Like many translations at the time, Nisegane tsu-
kai substitutes Japanese names for Western names; it also emphasizes
the substitution as a conscious decision on the part of the translator, in
both the translator’s introduction and the main text: “for convenience,
—————
60. Takahashi, “ ‘Hon’yaku’ to iu jiko genkyū,” 78.
61. For example, see the chart constructed by Hirata Yumi that plots the
number of literary works in the National Diet Library by year (“ ‘Onna no
monogatari’ to iu seido,” 179). Takahashi Osamu also discusses the relationship
between Nisegane tsukai and translation in “ ‘Hon’yaku’ to iu jiko genkyū,” 84–85.
56 The Novel’s Other

I will make it a Japanese name and call him Kurisu Masamichi” (665).
Moreover, the narrator begins the story in a comparative mode, likening
Washington D.C. to Tokyo of “our country” as well as explaining the
American postal system to provide the readers with the cultural knowl-
edge necessary to digest this foreign text (663–64).
Yet, despite these changes to reframe the story for the Japanese
readers, Shōyō does not forget to make the claim that he has decided to
translate Green’s text “as it is” (arinomama) in the introduction (663),
evoking his use of the same phrase in Shōsetsu shinzui regarding the pre-
sentation of the novelist as an external observer who “depict[s] as it is”
(arinomama o mosha suru). Although it can be argued that such a com-
ment by Shōyō reveals his understanding of translation at the time, it
also plays an important role in establishing the authority of the narrator
via the translator. That is, the phrase “as it is” emphasizes the transla-
tor’s role as a mediator who stands in between the Western text and the
Japanese readers, passively relaying information from the former to the
latter. In this sense, the translator evokes the eavesdropper who also
stands at the border of information and its wanting consumers, but,
unlike the eavesdropping narrator who tries to convey the sense that
he and the readers are sharing the same information, the narrator-as-
translator, as seen in above examples, underscores his difference from
the readers. To the extent that the Japanese readers of the general pub-
lic have no access to the original text nor can they understand it, the
third-person narrator-as-translator is placed in a privileged position of
the knower who provides access to the usually inaccessible. And within
the context of bunmei kaika, the translation of a Western text allows for
the presentation of the content of Kurisu’s story—of prying into peo-
ple’s private lives—not as entertainment but as something important for
the education of the Japanese reading public.62 Like the detective and in
contradistinction to the eavesdropper, the translator promotes the un-
derstanding of the novelist as an authorial figure by providing informa-
tion inaccessible to the readers through the use of his special skills and
through emphasizing education and duty as opposed to curiosity and
entertainment as his motivating factors.
But here, we must also recognize the precarious position in which
the translator finds himself, a position that evokes the eavesdropper in
—————
62. Or to put it in another way, translating is a mode of narration that pre-
supposes and projects the existence of privileged information worth translating
on the other side rather than a simple tale for entertainment.
 The Novel’s Other 57

another way. As mentioned above, various foreign books—whether clas-

sics from the past or recently published pulp fiction—flooded into Ja-
pan toward the end of the 1880s, and we can imagine that Japanese in-
tellectuals were lacking in the knowledge of Western literary histories
and of the source countries that would assist in contextualizing and un-
derstanding the ‘meaning’ of these texts: appearing all at once, these
books must have seemed to the Japanese readers as being out of time
and place. And such sociohistorical conditions most likely had some in-
fluence on Shōyō’s decision to translate a first-person narrative into a
third-person one, for it must have been difficult for him to be interpel-
lated by the “you” that is addressed by the “I” in Green’s XYZ. Like the
narrator-detective whom he will rename Kurisu Masamichi, Shōyō
usurps a text that was not ‘intended’ for him and intrudes upon an ‘I-
you’ relationship in an attempt to decipher the meaning of a text whose
context he has no way of knowing fully. In so doing, Shōyō attempts to
synthesize the two extremes of writing—the first-person narration that
‘ensures’ the reality of its events by recounting the personal experiences
of the narrator and a work of translation in which the translator knows
nothing about the reality of story events—to produce a narrative that
mediates the two realities that are Japan and the West.

D
Central to Shōyō’s strategy to reform the extant fictional narratives of
Meiji Japan was the articulation of a ‘moral’ gaze of the novelist, which
differed from the ‘vulgar’—nonobjective and emotionally invested—gaze
embodied in such stories. As a rightful and fitting subject of eavesdrop-
ping whose actions are dictated by his sense of duty to expose the truth
of the case at hand, the figure of the detective enables the explicit articu-
lation of the ‘objective’ and ‘moral’ nature of this gaze. Thus, he personi-
fies the theoretical difference emphasized by Shōyō between the modern
novel and the objects of his reform, offering itself as a metaphorical sur-
rogate of the novelist.63 At the same time, Shōyō’s rendering of the detec-
tive story enabled him to do much more than legitimize the task of the
novelist metaphorically. By the shift from first- to third-person narration

—————
63. Of course, this does not mean that the readers, through their identifica-
tion with the detective, must adopt the ‘objectivity’ and ‘morality’ of this gaze.
Rather, the figure of the detective merely offers a justification, an apology, for
the curiosity that drives the reading process.
58 The Novel’s Other

as well as through the narrator establishing himself explicitly as a trans-

lator, Nisegane tsukai’s narration extricates itself from the conspiratorial
relationship with the readers promoted by XYZ’s narration and asserts its
role as a metalanguage that treats the story events as objects of knowl-
edge. In the process, the third-person narrator emerges as an authority
figure who, as someone occupying the position of the knower, simply re-
lays ‘reality’ to the readers in an ‘objective’ manner, all the while maintain-
ing the conspiratorial relationship necessary to entice the readers in the
reading process through the surrogate of the detective. The translated
detective story presented itself as a perfect tool to legitimize the inherent
contradiction in Shōyō’s articulation of the novel as a medium that pro-
motes itself as the harbinger of ‘civilized’ and ‘enlightened’ values, includ-
ing that of privacy, and, yet, draws its reason for being in the desire to
penetrate what has become impenetrable in the age of modernity.
As history would have it, however, it was not Tsubouchi Shōyō but
Kuroiwa Ruikō who would maximize this potential of the Western de-
tective story for the Japanese translator and novelist to carve out the
authorial position and perspective necessary within Shōyō’s formulation
of the novel.64 As we will discuss in detail in the next chapter, the content
of Ruikō’s stories reflects this connection, as he introduced to the Japa-
nese readers a world filled with characters who were gossipers, eaves-
droppers, and, most of all, those who sought to penetrate the private lives
and internal thoughts of the characters. Quite ironically, considering the
1893 editorial of Kokumin no tomo with which we began this book, Ruikō’s
detective stories functioned as the immediate heirs to the legacy of
Shōyō’s literary project, and it could be argued that the popularity and
dissemination of the detective story in the late 1880s and the early 1890s
was what made possible the rise of the novel as a socially viable and re-
spectable art form in Meiji Japan. Indeed, as Nakayama Akihiko points
out, the rhetoric and terminology of Shōsetsu shinzui, or what Nakayama

—————
64. Saikun, published in January 1889 in Kokumin no tomo marked Shōyō’s last
serious attempt to write narrative fiction, but he would continue to dabble with
translations of Western stories, including his Daisagishi (The swindler), a story
with a mystery-novel flavor which was serialized during 1892 in the Miyako shin-
bun. Interestingly enough, the Miyako shinbun at this time was looking for works
that would successfully fill the void created by Ruikō when he left the news-
paper in August of the same year and quickly approached Shōyō. For details of
Shōyō’s Daisagishi, see J. Scott Miller, Adaptations of Western Literature in Meiji
Japan, 77–110.
 The Novel’s Other 59

calls “Shōyō-esque clichés,” only began to manifest themselves in the

Japanese literary histories in the early 1890s, displaying the influence and
rooting of Shōyō’s literary worldview in Meiji Japan and concomitant
with them the spreading of the belief in the artistic nature of the novel.65
The vehement criticism of detective fiction in the Kokumin no tomo
editorial, which may appear as an instance of historical blindness regard-
ing the developmental link between the novel and the detective story,
begins to make sense in light of this correlation between the rise of
“Shōyō-esque clichés” and the popularity of Ruikō’s detective stories.
The detective, as a metaphorical double of the novelist within the story-
world, may have legitimated the novelist’s ‘objective’ and ‘moral’ stance,
but he also pointed to the need for such legitimation in the first place
due to the inherent paradox of Shōyō’s formulation of the novel that left
the novelist with the potential to revert back to an immoral eavesdrop-
per. Thus, the detective was a bandage over a wound that protects it
from exposure and further damage but constantly serves as a reminder
that there existed a wound beneath. As such, the intimate connection
between the novel and the detective story had to be suppressed, just as
the former was taking root as an art form, and conscious effort had to
be made to present the latter instead as the enemy of and foil against
the novel. Nonetheless, or precisely because of this, the detective story
as the novel’s Other would cast a dark shadow over the Japanese novel,
exerting a profound effect on its developmental trajectory in modern
Japan.

—————
65. Nakayama, “ ‘Bungakushi’ to nashonaritī,” 85–101.
 TWO

Allegories of Detective Fiction:

Kuroiwa Ruikō and the Refashioning
of a Meiji Subject

On April 28, 1887, the Tōkyō Nichinichi shinbun carried the following
news of seemingly frivolous nature, but its unimportance was quickly
placed in question by the sheer number of newspapers carrying the same
story:
A few nights ago, a rickshaw driver hearing the clock of a nearby university
strike midnight was about to head to his lodgings when a young lady who
seemed to be from a respectable family came running from the direction of
Nagatachō. Approaching the driver in a frantic manner, the lady, who the driver
realized was barefoot, asked to be driven to a mansion in Surugadai. As the rick-
shaw headed toward her destination, it was stopped by a carriage around Hibiya
where a well-dressed maid came out of the carriage to take the lady away.1

At first glance, this news appears to be a trivial story about a man who
has had a mysterious experience, as his account ends with a statement
that he feels he may have been fooled by a fox. However, many scholars
including Maeda Ai attest that this story was understood by its readers
—————
1. Tōkyō Nichinichi shinbun, April 28, 1887. According to Maeda Ai, the news-
papers that reported the news in question were Tōkyō Nichinichi shinbun, E’iri jiyū
shinbun, Yamato shinbun, and E’iri chōya shinbun. For details of this scandal includ-
ing the full article that appeared in the Tōkyō Nichinichi shinbun, see Maeda, “Mi-
shima Michitsune to Rokumeikan jidai.”
 Allegories of Detective Fiction 61

as a scandalous story of political significance. As Maeda states, the am-

biguous nature of this article, in which “the contour of the event is in-
tentionally muddled or skewed to suggest the blunders of the govern-
ment or the scandals of officials . . . [was] one of the last resorts devised
by the Meiji newspaper journalists who were exposed to severe regula-
tions such as the Libel Law [Zanbōritsu] and the Newspaper Ordinance
that suppressed the freedom of press. In addition, the method of taking
apart the name of officials one character by one character and inserting
it here and there within the text was also employed often.”2
Importantly, a comparable practice could be found in the political
novels, a distinct and popular literary genre of the 1880s directly con-
nected to the ideas of the Freedom and People’s Rights movement. As
Asukai Masamichi states, political novels—of which the first work is
most often regarded to be Jōkai haran (A storm on the passionate seas;
1880) by Toda Kindō (1850–1890)—emerged when “the contentions of
people’s rights [movement] were inserted into the text in the form of
‘allegory.’ ”3 In other words, political novels were written or translated
in such a way that readers could identify characters or groups within
the fictional world as idealistic representations of real-life counterparts
and, thus, transpose the turn of events within the fictional world as the
projected but necessary outcome of the movement’s struggles in reality.4
Together with the newspaper reporting about scandals of government
officials, such as the one discussed above, political novels promoted
what I will call the allegorical writing and reading practices during this
period, necessitated by Meiji social reality in which the ‘truth’ of a situa-
tion could not be frankly spoken due to severe publishing regulations or
the ‘truth’ was an unfulfilled political ideal that had to be sought in an
alternate universe.
Read within this allegorical interpretative framework that required a
sort of ‘detective’ work by readers—to decipher the ‘true’ reality of po-
—————
2. Maeda, “Mishima Michitsune to Rokumeikan jidai,” 124–25. For other ex-
amples of this type of reporting, see Yamada Shunji, Taishū shinbun ga tsukuru
Meiji no “Nihon,” 226–27.
3. Asukai, Tennō to Nihon kindai seishinshi, 87.
4. Asukai writes: “The position of the natural rights theory must take the po-
sition that people have rights by nature and the reason it has not surfaced is be-
cause it has not been noticed. If this is the case, then ‘allegory’ should be differ-
ent from that of the Restoration period and should be reasoned by making clear
the ‘reality’ that exists by nature, and this had to take the form of reinterpreting
the past of Japanese history or the ‘realities’ of foreign countries” (ibid., 88).
62 Allegories of Detective Fiction

litical significance hidden beneath seemingly trivial details—the Tōkyō

Nichinichi shinbun’s news becomes a report of an attempted sexual as-
sault on a woman by the Prime Minister and well-known lecher Itō Hi-
robumi (1841–1909) who had held a costume ball at his mansion on April
20. Despite the fact that the widely publicized event at Itō’s mansion a
week before seems unrelated to this report, it was easy, according to
Maeda, to connect the place name Nagatachō, the location of the Prime
Minister’s residence, to Itō Hirobumi and the costume ball.5 Moreover,
it was possible from the place name Surugadai to hypothesize the iden-
tity of the woman in question: the wife of Count Toda, who was famed
as “the beauty of Rokumeikan,” lived in Surugadai.6
In such a way, the seemingly trivial article reveals itself as the scandal
among all political scandals, taking up the favorite subject of the news-
papers at the time, namely, the immorality and ineptitude behind the
so-called Rokumeikan diplomacy. Named as such for the government
building central to its implementation, Rokumeikan diplomacy mani-
fested itself most visibly in the form of fancy balls held at the Rokumei-
kan building on a nightly basis where government officials and members
of Japanese high society along with foreign dignitaries and their families
danced the night away to Western music, wearing Western clothes.
Through such balls, the Meiji government sought to provide a site of
social intercourse where the Japanese could display the extent of their
Westernization to promote a favorable renegotiation of the unequal
treaties that Japan was forced to sign with Western powers in the late
Edo and early Meiji periods.7

—————
5. For an example of the reporting on the costume ball at Itō’s mansion, see
Maeda, “Mishima Michitsune to Rokumeikan jidai,” 115–16.
6. Ibid., 116. This scandal is filled with many complicated factors that cannot
be explored here, but suffice it to say that Count Toda made an unprecedented
political climb during the next couple of months, ultimately becoming a minis-
ter plenipotentiary to Austria. In his examination of this scandal, Maeda hy-
pothesizes a scandal within a scandal, suggesting that this story was leaked to
Kuroiwa Ruikō, the editor in chief of the E’iri jiyū shinbun at the time, by Police
Chief Mishima Michitsune (1835–1888). According to Maeda, Mishima, who was
from the former Satsuma domain and was very close to his clan mate Kuroda
Kiyotaka (1840–1900), sought to bring down Itō so that Kuroda could become
the next prime minister. For details, see ibid.
7. For a detailed discussion of the unequal treaties, see Auslin, Negotiating
with Imperialism.
 Allegories of Detective Fiction 63

While these balls may have had such a noble goal, it was natural that
using taxpayer’s money to host extravagant parties, which appeared to
be nothing but a trivial mingling among the rich and the famous and a
blind worship of all that was Western, led to an unfavorable reception
among the general public. As the accounts of these balls by the French
officer and novelist Pierre Loti (or Julien Viaud [1850–1923]) reveal, more-
over, these balls did not have the intended effect of impressing the for-
eigners with the Western-ness of the Japanese people.8 Consequently,
various rumors and criticisms began to circulate regarding the balls and
their participants. Most of these rumors involved the topic of adultery,
whether involving the philanderer Itō Hirobumi or the wife of the Edu-
cation Minister Mori Arinori (1847–1889), who was said to have bore a
blue-eyed baby. One document that reveals the pervasiveness of these
rumors was the so-called “Rokumeikan intō jidai ni okeru nijukkajō no
kenpakusho” (Letter of petition with twenty articles regarding the lewd
Rokumeikan age) by the politician Katsu Kaishū (1823–1899) that criti-
cized the fancy balls as a breeding ground for rumors.9
Considered within the context of the scandal surrounding the cos-
tume ball held at Itō Hirobumi’s mansion and other pervasive rumors of
Rokumeikan balls in conjunction with the allegorical reading practice
fostered by the political novels and the newspaper, it should be evident
how timely and fraught with implications was Tsubouchi Shōyō’s Nise-
gane tsukai (serialized from November 27 to December 23, 1887). A story
of a detective whose investigations into a money counterfeiting case
exposes, by mistake, a dark scheme hiding behind the façade of a cos-
tume ball, Nisegane tsukai appeared just as Rokumeikan diplomacy ended
in utter failure when the Foreign Minister Inoue Kaoru (1835–1915) re-
signed in September after he had placed treaty renegotiations on indefi-
nite hold. Inflamed at this turn of events, the activists of the Freedom
and People’s Rights movement who had been subdued by government
suppression resurged, as they converged in Tokyo to petition the gov-
ernment for treaty revision, land tax revision, and freedom of speech
and assembly in what came to be known as the “three major issues peti-
tion movement” (Sandai jiken kenpaku undō).
Naturally, the attacks on Rokumeikan diplomacy and its participants
became harsher than ever. It was also natural, I would argue, that a story
—————
8. See Pierre Loti, Japoneries d’Automne (1889) and Madame Chrysanthème (1887)
for details.
9. For more of this petition, see Matsuyama, Uwasa no enkinhō, 83–84.
64 Allegories of Detective Fiction

telling the existence of criminal intent behind the façade of a costume

ball would be read within this flow despite it taking place in a foreign
land. Seen in this light, the role of the detective presented in Nisegane
tsukai takes a more specific form: the detective as one who seeks to de-
termine the truth value of rumors surrounding the fancy balls of Roku-
meikan diplomacy and, in so doing, exposes the criminal/immoral intent
of the organizers, which has nothing to do with the reported or pre-
sumed intention of the fancy balls. Particularly fitting here is that Shōyō
introduces the American detective Kurisu with a disclaimer that “there
are no detectives in our country today that are like him” and thereby
presents him as a figure of wish fulfillment who imparts necessary jus-
tice on the authorities themselves.10 Given the negative connotation of
the Japanese detectives in the first half of the 1880s as pawns of the
unjust and immoral government to suppress the Freedom and People’s
Rights movement, as discussed in the Introduction, it was the substitu-
tion of a Westerner for a Japanese detective within such a social and
literary environment—the total collapse of Rokumeikan diplomacy and
the allegorical mode of literary production and consumption necessi-
tated by the inner logic of the Freedom and People’s Rights movement
and the external threat of government censorship—that appeared nec-
essary for the detective to emerge as fictional hero. In this sense,
Shōyō’s Nisegane tsukai was a pivotal work in the nascent stages of the
detective fiction genre that reflected the conditions of its birth.
But what about the detective stories of the journalist and political ac-
tivist Kuroiwa Ruikō who would popularize the genre in the late 1880s
and the early 1890s? To what extent can we understand them to be a
continuation of Nisegane tsukai? Critical to answering these questions is
the timing of Ruikō’s emergence as an adapter of Western detective
stories. His first serialization Hōtei no bijin in January 1888 came just af-
ter the largest and most absolutist government suppression of political
activists in the short history of the Freedom and People’s Rights move-
ment. In order to quench the “three major issues petition movement,”
the government issued the Public Order Ordinance on December 26,
1887 and banned 570 activists from the capital, effectively eliminating
any political activity within Tokyo.11 Ruikō’s detective stories thus ap-
—————
10. Tsubouchi, Nisegane tsukai, 664.
11. This ordinance prohibited assemblies and made possible for the govern-
ment to banish anyone suspected of conspiring against the government or dis-
turbing the peace out of the approximately twelve kilometer range of the Im-
 Allegories of Detective Fiction 65

peared after the ‘death’ of politics when the attacks on the Rokumeikan
diplomacy had no choice but to subside without running their full
course, forced to become buried in the minds of the people. As such,
Ruikō’s detective stories had to take on a different role than Nisegane
tsukai’s that suited the post-Freedom and People’s Rights age when a
radical redistribution of political energies as collective recuperative
process became necessary.
Through an examination of Ruikō’s early adaptations—in particular,
his Yūzai muzai (Guilty, not guilty; 1888)—as well as his original work
Muzan (Merciless; 1889), this chapter considers how the detective fic-
tion genre figured into such redistribution of political energies at the
critical juncture in the sociopolitical landscape of Meiji Japan. As we
shall see, Ruikō presented his detective stories—selected and adapted
from American dime novel collections that flooded the Japanese market
in the late 1880s—as successor to the political novel, evoking character-
istic tropes of the latter all the while negotiating the resentment and
frustrations of those involved in the Freedom and People’s Rights move-
ment. And he did so by utilizing the various literary and extra-literary
strategies within the allegorical interpretative mode discussed above to
refashion the politically-minded readers as new Meiji subjects whose re-
lationship to the detective was not one tinged with feelings of injustice
and oppression but one defined by his role as fictional hero who sup-
plied their private entertainment.

The Politics of the Falsely Accused

When Kuroiwa Ruikō serialized Hōtei no bijin in the early months of
1888, he was the editor-in-chief of the illustrated political newspaper
E’iri jiyū shinbun, a koshinbun whose official goal was to inculcate the gen-
eral public regarding the ideals of the already dissolved Liberal Party.
Yet, like his next three stories, also published in 1888—Daitōzoku (The
great thief; a translation of Émile Gaboriau’s File No. 113 [1867]), Hito ka
oni ka (Man or devil?; a translation of Gaboriau’s The Widow Lerouge
[1866]), and Tanin no zeni (Other people’s money; a translation of Ga-

—————
perial Palace for up to three years. Requiring no investigation or trial for its
enforcement, the Public Order Ordinance was not an abuse of the judicial sys-
tem that was common during the early Meiji period but a total disregard of the
judicial system. I have taken the number of activists expelled from the capital
from Matsuo, Kindai tennōsei kokka to minshū/Asia, 165.
66 Allegories of Detective Fiction

boriau’s Other People’s Money [1874])—Hōtei no bijin did not appear in the
E’iri jiyū shinbun as we would expect but rather in another newspaper
Konnichi shinbun, which had no political affiliation.12
Although this fact may suggest that Ruikō began the serialization of
Western stories as a side project, there is no doubt that Ruikō’s motiva-
tion behind his adaptations were wholly in line with his background as
a political activist. As he makes explicit in the introduction to his third
story Hito ka oni ka:
This story called Hito ka oni ka that I will translate on this occasion involves the
turn of events regarding a major false imprisonment without precedence which
occurred in France. . . . The reason why I translate this story is to inform the de-
tectives of society regarding the difficulties of their occupation, and to get the
judges of society to understand that verdicts should not be decided without care.
If I were to say this concisely, then [I translate this work] in order to show the
value of human rights and to warn against the careless application of the law.13

With this warning for those involved with the law in Meiji society about
the gravity of their occupations, Ruikō tells a seemingly typical detec-
tive story about a detective who solves a mysterious murder through
the gathering and analyzing of evidence. However, Ruikō is careful to
construct a specific interpretative framework—one that suits his socio-
political purpose—by claiming in the introduction that “this story is not
fiction [shōsetsu] but fact [ jijitsu].”14 The ending paragraphs of the main
text cleverly reinforce this claim, as Ruikō—in an authorial intrusion—
states that he became aware of the existence of the story he translated as
Hito ka oni ka through an actual political pamphlet. Originally produced
and distributed by the story’s characters who have formed an organiza-
tion calling for the end of capital punishment, or so Ruikō claims, the
pamphlet was a result of the characters’ involvement in the criminal case

—————
12. Prolific almost beyond the point of imagination, Ruikō serialized around
100 fictional works during a span of about 20 years. Of these there are 28 long
novels that can be considered detective stories, and most of these appear in the
first six years of his writing career, beginning with Hōtei no bijin in January 1888.
Interestingly, it was the English translations of French novels that seemed to
have caught Ruikō’s interest. While the originals for some of his works remain a
speculation, among the 28 full-length detective stories, 15 are by Boisgobey and
four are by Gaboriau (The figures are from Nakajima Kawatarō’s Nihon suiri
shōsetsu shi, vol. 1, 44).
13. Kuroiwa, Hito ka oni ka, 169.
14. Ibid.
 Allegories of Detective Fiction 67

of this story, which made them painfully aware of the ease with which
the innocent can be found guilty within the court of law and wrongfully
executed.15
Despite the ingenious artifice employed in conveying a message to the
story’s readers, such a concern for the accuracy of the judicial system
expressed by Ruikō and characters alike in Hito ka oni ka was nothing
new in the short history of Meiji Japan. The necessity for Japan to adopt a
new judicial system similar to that of Western nations led to its radical
reorganization during the 1880s, and consequently, various works were
published to guide those in the judicial system through its Westerniza-
tion process. For example, there was Jōkyō shōko gohan roku (Records of
wrong judgments based on circumstantial evidence), a translation of an
American document, which contained numerous examples of court cases
whose defendant was judged guilty only to be found innocent after his or
her execution.16 Published with the support of the Department of Justice
in June 1881, Jōkyō shōko gohan roku intended to warn those involved in the
judicial process of the difficulties of trial within the new law system,
namely, the Criminal Code (Keihō) and the Code of Criminal Procedure
(Chizaihō) promulgated on July 17, 1880 and enforced from January 1,
1882.17 As scholars have noted, moreover, the work quickly trickled down
to intellectual circles, serving as one of the primary source books from
which Meiji writers gained ideas for their detective stories. Indeed, not
only did Ruikō recall in 1905 that this work was one of the reasons why he
—————
15. Mark Silver provides a detailed analysis of this ending, which Ruikō
changed completely in the process of adaptation (Purloined Letters, 74–77).
16. For excerpts and explanation of this work, see Itō Hideo, Meiji no tantei
shōsetsu, 36–40.
17. Devised with the assistance of the French jurist Gustave Emile Boissonade
(1825–1910), the Criminal Code introduced the principle of nulla peona sine lege,
which delineated what acts were crimes, the sentences for these crimes, and the
guarantee that one cannot be charged for acts which were not delineated as
crimes in the law. Moreover, for the first time in Japanese law, the social class of
the defendant did not affect the punishment for the crime. The Code of Criminal
Procedure, in turn, outlined the process of criminal trial and instituted the prac-
tice of lawyers to represent the defendant in a criminal case. Following the lead of
the Revised Law (Kaitei ritsuryō) of 1873 and the prohibition of torture in 1879,
this code also stressed the importance of using evidence rather than torture,
which was the primary investigative method during the Edo period. The Criminal
Code and the Code of Criminal Procedure are now commonly referred together
as kyūkeihō (the old criminal code) in contradistinction to the new criminal code
that took effect in 1908.
68 Allegories of Detective Fiction

began to serialize stories that warned the public of the difficulties of a

trial system and the injustice of public officials, but it was also in this
work that he found the base idea for his original detective story Muzan.18
Of course, it was natural that the interest in and anxiety over the new
Western justice system would carry over into the public sphere in such a
way, particularly with the alarming rise in crimes and growing visibility
of the police in the 1880s.19 Crime reporting—“the police-related topics,
such as murder, robbery, arson, and double suicide”—became the staple
of koshinbun, serving to make the public aware of the workings of the
new justice system as well as the dangers of contemporary society. 20
Moreover, these reports often became the base story for tsuzukimono,
the dominant narrative form of the early Meiji discussed in the previous
chapter, and, in particular, the dokufu-mono that were extremely popular
during the 1880s. Drawing on original news reports not only of the
crime and the trial but also regarding the criminal’s often dark past,
these stories attempted to explain the criminal’s background and, thus,
his or her motivation behind the crime in an entertaining manner to
capture the curiosity of its readers all the while informing them of the
various issues relating to the justice system.21
—————
18. Itō Hideo, Kuroiwa Ruikō: tantei shōsetsu no ganso, 65. Ruikō’s statement
was made in “Yo ga shinbun ni kokorozashita dōki” (The reason why I became
involved with the newspaper), published in the February 1 issue of his newspaper
Yorozu chōhō.
19. Between 1877 to 1885, the number of prisoners increased threefold, signal-
ing the arrival of “the age of the prison” (Yasumaru, “ ‘Kangoku’ no tanjō,” 300–
301). Also, the number of criminals prosecuted was 75,857 in 1882, and this num-
ber increased to 105,844 in 1883 and hovered around 100,000 until 1890, when it
jumped to 145,281 (these figures are from Serizawa, Hō kara kaihō sareru kenryoku,
23).
20. Tsuchiya, Taishūshi no genryū, 241. As many scholars have pointed out,
there exists an intricate relationship between criminal reports in newspapers
and detective fiction. For a discussion of this relationship, see Uchida Ryūzō,
Tantei shōsetsu no shakaigaku, 4, 11–13.
21. As Kamei Hideo argues, the various versions of the story of Takahashi
Oden, one of the most popular dokufu-mono, reveal the intricate relationship be-
tween the public’s anxiety with the rapidly changing justice system and the con-
struction of Oden into the figure of dokufu. For example, the kabuki writer Kawa-
take Mokuami (1816–1893) took interest in Oden’s testimony in court and wrote
the play Toriawase Oden no kanabumi, in which the primary focus was to educate
the public regarding the new justice system. In this play, Mokuami “depict[s]
Oden as a woman who did not understand the philosophy of the new laws, and
 Allegories of Detective Fiction 69

As was the case with many dokufu-mono, the trial—as the display site
for the working of the new justice system in action—also became a fa-
vorite topic of newspapers and fictions alike, including translations of
foreign stories dealing with the trial such as Dokusatsu saiban (The trial
of poison murder) serialized in the Yomiuri shinbun in November 1885. In
the latter half of the 1880s, the readers’ interest in the trial would be
further fueled by more politically oriented real-life events that swept the
nation. The trial of the Normanton Incident of 1886, in which the Brit-
ish ship Normanton sank off the coast of Kishū (present day Wakayama
Prefecture) killing all Japanese passengers while all but one member of
the British crew survived, turned into a public scandal when the British
crew were exonerated of failing to assist the Japanese passengers.22 On
the domestic side, the various trials of political activists in the Freedom
and People’s Rights movement, and especially the trial of the Osaka In-
cident, which took place from May to September 1887, became huge
public events due to the radical nature of their crimes, including an at-
tempted overthrow of the Korean government in the case of the Osaka
Incident, and, consequently, the proceedings were reported by various
newspapers and published in book form to the delight of the readers.23
As these examples should make clear, anxieties and interests regard-
ing the new judicial system gave rise to various literary and discursive
formations, which in turn helped lay the groundwork necessary for the
emergence of detective fiction in Meiji Japan. And given such a geneal-

—————
from this point of view, set[s] up Oden as a poisonous woman.” In contrast, Taka-
hashi Oden yasha monogatari by Kanagaki Robun (1829–1894), by far the most popu-
lar version of Oden’s story, depicts Oden as a woman “who used the new laws as
a shield to assert her rights.” According to Kamei, it was because “the people at
that time could not understand the exhaustive nature of her assertions regarding
her rights” and “feared this thoroughness” that Oden became a poisonous woman
(Meiji bungaku shi, 30). For Kamei’s analysis of Oden’s stories, see ibid., 17–34. Also
for another discussion of Oden, see Marran, Poison Woman, 1–64.
22. For details of the Normanton Incident, see Morinaga, Saiban jiyū minken
jidai, 198–204.
23. For details of the Osaka Incident, see ibid., 213–56 as well as Mertz, Novel
Japan, 113–38. The reports in book form were filled with detailed observations
on the workings of the court and insertions of a comedic nature, making them
extremely popular reading material in the late 1880s. One easily accessible ex-
ample of such records is Kokujihan jiken kōhan bōchō hikki (Records of hearings
on the incident of the crimes against the state) published by Naniwa shinbunsha
in September 1887.
70 Allegories of Detective Fiction

ogy of development, it was natural that these literary and discursive

formations also provided detective fiction with a rich source from which
to draw its narrative and thematic ideas. Like any newly emergent liter-
ary formation, Ruikō’s early stories were a hodgepodge of already ex-
isting literary and discursive forms of the 1880s and, as such, were im-
plicated in a hegemonic struggle for narrative dominance and nominal
uniformity, acting parasitic all the while waiting for the opportunity to
promote their own identity.
For example, the previously discussed presentation of the story as fac-
tual news in Hito ka oni ka reveals Ruikō’s utilization of two essential top-
ics of koshinbun, namely, crime reports (including semi-factual stories
based on these reports) and reports of events in foreign countries, which
also became one of koshinbun’s main staples in 1884 with the start of the
Sino-French War (1884–1885). Another example would be Baikarō (origi-
nal text unknown; serialized from February 17 to April 10, 1889 in E’iri jiyū
shinbun), which tells the story of the protagonist Baikarō, a young man
from a wealthy family in Bordeaux, France, and his quest to solve the
murder of his friend and to save a girl he loves from her evil half-sister.
While the story does involve some elements that are characteristic of
the detective fiction genre, such as gathering and analysis of evidence, it
would be a reach to classify Baikarō as a detective story, considering that
the investigation of the murder of Baikarō’s friend is a secondary plot line
that is resolved passively without an active involvement of a detective-
like figure. Instead, the primary focus of the story seems to be in line with
that of dokufu-mono in the portrayal of the evil half-sister Hatsune who
attempts to murder both her half-sister and her father in order to marry
Baikarō.
That Ruikō sought to utilize the previously existing genres for his own
purposes is also clear from the way in which he promoted his stories. His
second story Daitōzoku as well as Hito ka oni ka had the subtitle of “trial
novel” (saiban shōsetsu), no doubt reflecting Ruikō’s sociopolitical motiva-
tion behind adapting the stories and taking advantage of the growing in-
terest in trials on the part of the reading public in the wake of major trials
of national and international import. In fact, we would have to wait until
the introduction to his fifth story Yūzai muzai (a translation of Gaboriau’s
Within an Inch of His Life [1873], serialized from September 9 to Novem-
ber 28, 1888 in E’iri jiyū shinbun) for Ruikō to use the term “detective
novel” (tantei shōsetsu) to describe his adaptations. But this designation,
too, would be short-lived, as Ruikō redefined and reclassified his adapta-
tions more systematically in a commentary, which appeared in the E’iri
 Allegories of Detective Fiction 71

jiyū shinbun on September 22, 1889 during his serialization of Makkura

(Utter darkness; a translation of Anna Katharine Green’s The Leaven-
worth Case [1878], serialized from August 9 to October 26, 1889) in the
same newspaper. Ruikō writes:
The detective story first presents the crime, next [its] inquiry, and finally the so-
lution or the confession. . . . The criminal romance always presents the trial in
between the inquiry and the solution [of the crime]. . . . The sensational novels
are those by French [writers] Gaboriau and Boisgobey, and they do not require
that there is an inquiry or a trial. . . . To put it plainly, the difference in perspec-
tive is what separates the three. The detective story has the detective as its pro-
tagonist. The criminal romance focuses on the judge and presents his clever de-
cision-making. In the sensational novel, there might appear a judge but he is not
the protagonist; there might appear a detective but he is not the protagonist; its
protagonist is the falsely accused who is involved in the crime and investigated
or tried and progresses through various situations.24

Through its specific mention of Gaboriau and Boisgobey, the authors

whose stories Ruikō adapted most often, this commentary actively posi-
tions his adaptations as sensational novels rather than detective stories.
But while the falsely accused—whether he/she is actually tried (Hoshi-
kawa Takeyasu in Yūzai muzai ), arrested (Komori Arinori in Hito ka oni
ka), or merely kept under police surveillance (Ōsu Eriko in Makkura)—
was no doubt a staple of Ruikō’s early stories, to call the falsely accused
the protagonist would be a reach in many cases, including Hito ka oni ka
and Makkura, the primary focus of which rests on those who try to prove
the innocence of Arinori and Eriko, respectively. Thus, Ruikō’s classifi-
cation of stories about crime into three categories functioned as a strat-
egy to emphasize the falsely accused of his stories. In so doing, Ruikō
sought to promote, I would argue, a certain vector in the reading of his
stories that coincides with—and thus, makes more effective—the socio-
political message expressed in Hito ka oni ka’s introduction, which warns
the difficulties of trial and criticize the state of the judicial system in
Meiji Japan, a message, despite the heterogeneous subject matter and
focus of his early stories, that seemed to be a singular one for Ruikō.25

—————
24. Kuroiwa, E’iri jiyū shinbun, September 19, 1889. Cited in Itō Hideo, Kuro-
iwa Ruikō: tantei shōsetsu no ganso, 89.
25. But Ruikō’s classification of his adaptations as sensational novels did not
last either, as he would come to recognize his adaptations as detective stories
(tantei-dan) in the near future as he makes clear in his 1893 editorial “Tantei-dan
ni tsuite.” This editorial was quoted in length in the book’s introduction.
72 Allegories of Detective Fiction

And in emphasizing the falsely accused—and by extension the un-

justly imprisoned—Ruikō did more than provide a framework through
which to understand his stories within the context of social criticism.
He also positioned his stories to feed off the dominant literary genre of
the time, namely, the political novel, which, despite the collapse of the
Freedom and People’s Rights movement in the late 1880s, was at the
height of its popularity perhaps as a fictional consolation for and an es-
cape from the harsh reality facing the movement. Vividly portrayed in
its representative works like Jiyū no kachidoki (Torch of freedom; Miya-
zaki Muryū’s translation of Alexandre Dumas’s Taking the Bastille [1853],
serialized in Jiyū shinbun from August 12, 1882 to February 8, 1883),
Kishūshū (Demons softly crying; Miyazaki Muryū’s translation of S. M.
Kravchinsky’s Underground Russia [1882], serialized in Jiyū no tomoshibi
from December 10, 1884 to April 3, 1885), and Suehiro Tetchō’s original
story Setchūbai (Plum blossoms in the snow; 1886), the falsely accused
and the unjustly imprisoned was an established trope of the political
novel, providing an allegorical substitute for its readers and comrades as
political activists struggling in their fight against the government.
But if Ruikō’s early stories shared the same trope as the political
novels and were politically motivated, what was the difference between
Ruikō’s adaptations and the political novels? Particularly revealing in an-
swering this question is Yūzai muzai. Telling a story of Baron Hoshikawa
Takeyasu who is falsely accused of shooting Count Kuroda, Yūzai muzai
would become one of Ruikō’s most popular works along with his Hito ka
oni ka, with which the story shares many important characteristics.26 But
unlike Hito ka oni ka, Yūzai muzai was the archetypal sensational novel ac-
—————
26. According to Itō Hideo, the foremost scholar of Kuroiwa Ruikō, the two
stories were the most popular fictions of its time: “This story [Yūzai muzai]
seemed to have been very well received, for after the final 66th installment, Ruikō
states: ‘Because this translation has surprisingly been enjoyed by the readers,
I have taken to heart this utmost fortune and started another translation.’ And
even in the Meiji 30s, this novel was cherished among Ruikō fans, and its reputa-
tion was comparable to the former Hito ka oni ka. As a result, these two novels
were reprinted repeatedly from Ōkawaya, surpassing the popularity of the Robin
Hood novels (batchinbin shōsetsu) of Murakami Namiroku and the sentimental
stories dictated by San’yūtei Enchō, which were said to be the staples of lending
libraries in Tokyo, and became the drawing card of Ruikō’s early detective novels”
(Kuroiwa Ruikō: sono shōsetsu no subete, 28). Also, for anecdotal evidence of Ruikō’s
popularity during the Meiji 30s, see Asaoka, “Meiji kashihon kashidashi daichō no
naka no dokushatachi,” especially 33–41.
 Allegories of Detective Fiction 73

cording to Ruikō’s definition in the aforementioned commentary, for the

story’s primary focus rests on the falsely accused Takeyasu, the investiga-
tion to prove his innocence taking up more pages than the search for the
real criminal. Significantly, Yūzai muzai was the first of his adaptations to
be serialized in the E’iri jiyū shinbun, of which Ruikō was the editor-in-
chief.27 Affiliated with the already dissolved Liberal Party as previously
mentioned, this newspaper still shared and reflected the beliefs of the
party, which was the most radical of all mainstream political parties at the
time. Thus, Yūzai muzai was the first serialization for a newspaper geared
more toward a politically minded audience, and it makes perfect sense
that the sociopolitical motivation behind the serialization of Western
detective stories is particularly explicit in his introduction to Yūzai muzai.
Ruikō writes:
The main purpose [of this novel] lies in showing the difficulties of human trial
and informing the readers about the injustice of those involved with the law
who abuse the law without thought and determine lightly the guilt of people.
What those involved with the law see as evidence is not necessarily true evi-
dence, and because it is common for innocent people to be found guilty by
those who easily believe the evidence, I would be most content if the readers of
this novel would reflect and understand that law should not be applied carelessly
and a person’s guilt should not be judged carelessly.28

Reiterating the ease with which innocent people are found guilty in so-
ciety that he previously discussed in Hito ka oni ka’s introduction, Ruikō
connects this state of affairs to the careless belief in evidence by magis-
trates and judges of the government. In so doing, Ruikō highlights the
difficulties of a Western justice system, which determines a person’s
guilt based upon evidence, precisely because what the officials believe to
be evidence in many cases is actually not “true evidence.”
But there existed a major difference between the judicial problem
expressed in Ruikō’s introduction to Yūzai muzai and the actual state
of things in Meiji society, for Ruiko’s introduction suggests a belief in
the court system—its fairness in the determination of guilt—that was far
from prevalent in Meiji society. While the Meiji government may have
strove hard to Westernize the justice system in the first half of the Meiji
—————
27. Hereafter, most of Ruikō’s stories appeared in this newspaper until he
joined the Miyako shinbun, the later incarnation of the Konnichi shinbun, toward
the end of 1889.
28. Kuroiwa, “Hanrei,” in Yūzai muzai. It originally appeared in the supple-
ment to the E’iri jiyū shinbun on September 9, 1888.
74 Allegories of Detective Fiction

period, Japan certainly did not become the land of the free overnight with
the enforcement of laws such as the Criminal Code and the Code of
Criminal Procedure. As Haruta Kunio observes, high officials of Meiji
government involved in the construction of the Criminal Code “poured
all their energy into emasculating the air of freedom of the French law”
that was reflected in the French jurist Gustave Boissonade’s draft of this
law, all the while preserving the façade of a Western law system.29
For example, the Criminal Code included specific measures—such as
crimes of contempt against officials (kanri bujoku zai ) and crimes of dis-
respect ( fukeizai )—devised for the suppression of the Freedom and Peo-
ple’s Rights movement through ‘lawful’ means. In addition, regulations
such as the Libel Law, the Newspaper Ordinance, and the Assembly
Ordinance (Shūkai jōrei) were issued separately as the need arose for the
same purpose. These regulations were especially powerful and difficult
to evade because their application was left for the most part to the in-
terpretation of judges, who, in turn, were often coerced by high officials
regarding the outcome of a case, especially when the defendant was an
activist in the Freedom and People’s Rights movement.30 As many his-
torians attest, moreover, the practice of torture, although prohibited in
1879, was still the most often employed investigatory technique of the
authorities.31
When laws are created to incarcerate a specific group of people and
judges are coerced to function as executors of the government’s will, the
court cannot be a place to determine whether the law should be applied
to the person in question. It becomes instead a place to invoke whatever
laws necessary in order to send away this enemy of the state. In such an
environment, there is no concern for making a mistake in the verdict: it
is not that officials “easily believe the evidence” or that they “abuse the
law without thought” as Ruikō claims; rather, they exploit the evidence
and abuse the law with thought and intention. And it was precisely this
state of injustice that was allegorically described in numerous political

—————
29. Haruta, Sabakareru hibi, 16.
30. For details of the nature and examples of governmental coercion of judges,
see ibid., 77–82.
31. For example, Morinaga Eizaburō, who has written extensively on trials
during the Freedom and People’s Rights movement, states matter-of-factly re-
garding the prohibition of torture in 1879 that it was only on paper and that “it
goes without saying that torture would rule investigations in Japan long after
this [prohibition]” (Saiban jiyū minken jidai, 5).
 Allegories of Detective Fiction 75

novels during the 1880s, in particular, in those previously mentioned

works that vividly portrayed the falsely accused and the unjustly impris-
oned. The activists of the Freedom and People’s Rights movement had
been suffering government suppression for over a decade. In many cases,
activists were framed for crimes they did not commit or imprisoned for
crimes, which to them, were not crimes. To suggest that the courts were
fair, albeit careless and inept, in the determination of guilt of the activ-
ists was to present a delusion that did not jibe with reality, especially
considering that Ruikō himself was imprisoned as a result of this system
of suppression during the mid-1880s and that the Public Order Ordi-
nance—the most absolutist measure of government suppression of the
movement, which completely disregarded the judicial system—had just
been issued.32
Of course, Ruikō could not help but articulate his criticism of the
Meiji justice system in such terms, given that he would be arrested again
if he were to express his real thoughts on the matter. But this does not
mean that Yūzai muzai’s introduction by Ruikō was simply a passive con-
cession to the government’s publishing laws. On the contrary, it actively
rewrites the history of political injustice as the immaturity of criminal in-
vestigations and judicial procedures; it replaces politics with epistemol-
ogy. Ruikō’s introduction functions to transform the favorite topic of the
political novel—the unjustly accused and imprisoned—into the falsely
accused who is a result of a judicial mishap. It wipes away the malicious
intent of the government in the prosecution and false imprisonment of
political activists. But at the same time, it does not do away with the vic-
tims of political injustice. Rather, it emphasizes the falsely accused as the
protagonist and hero of Yūzai muzai and positions the falsely accused
character of a French story within the Japanese history of injustice during
the Freedom and People’s Rights movement era. While replacing politi-
cal injustice with epistemological failure, the introduction also promotes
—————
32. On January 28, 1882, Ruikō wrote an article entitled “Kaitakushi kanri no
shobun o ronzu” (Argument for the punishment of officials of Colonization Bu-
reau). As a result he was charged with contempt of officials, although he was
found innocent in the first trial. However, he was later recharged with the same
crime. At the time of the second warrant to appear in court, Ruikō was ex-
tremely ill and had disappeared from the public scene for a year. As a result, the
warrant apparently never reached Ruikō. His absence in court was taken as a
sign of flight, and he was found guilty of the charge. When Ruikō returned to
the public scene, his whereabouts were discovered, and he was sent to prison in
Yokohama for 16 days (Itō Hideo, Kuroiwa Ruikō: tantei shōsetsu no ganso, 42).
76 Allegories of Detective Fiction

the allegorical substitution—a substitution which was fostered by the

political novels and by their allegorical mode of production and consump-
tion—of the falsely accused in Yūzai muzai with the Meiji political activ-
ists who were victims of the government’s injustice.
Yūzai muzai’s introduction expressing the epistemological concerns
of the judicial system was a part of the first steps to unite the nation
that had been so divided in the past decade. It tried to make amends
with the many political and moral injustices committed by the govern-
ment against the political activists during the Freedom and People’s
Rights movement. In this sense, it signaled a coming of a new age be-
yond radical activism and violent protests, especially considering that
Yūzai muzai also contains an introduction by Nakae Chōmin (1847–1901),
one of the leading philosophers of the Freedom and People’s Rights
movement who like Ruikō had close ties to the Liberal Party, that ex-
pressed a similar criticism of the Meiji judicial system. Coming about a
year after he was banned from Tokyo as the result of Public Order Or-
dinance, Chōmin’s introduction, like Ruikō’s, suggests that Ruikō’s ad-
aptations were a part of an attempt to reshape the political conscious-
ness of the likes of sōshi, a newly emergent group of nationalistic youths
whose political fervor during the “three major issues petition” move-
ment prompted this ordinance. No doubt an integral part of their ‘po-
litical’ education, the E’iri jiyū shinbun was the venue where Ruikō and
Chōmin could speak to the fervent sōshi who appeared not only boister-
ous but also dangerous and out of control even after December 1887 as
Japan prepared to consolidate itself as a modern state with the promul-
gation of the Meiji Constitution planned for 1889 and the opening of
the Diet for 1890.
Indeed, such criticism was not Ruikō’s alone but had been brewing
in public forums prior to his emergence, with the most vocal advocate
being Tokutomi Sohō. In his “Shin Nihon no seinen” (The youth of new
Japan), an essay published in 1887 of a lecture he gave in 1885 that pro-
pelled him onto the national scene, Sohō writes that “The so-called age
of political parties has passed, and the age of education has arrived.”
The opening editorial in the first issue of Kokumin no tomo (February
1887), which Sohō founded to serve as the editor-in-chief, reiterates and
expands on this sentiment, stating: “The aged of old Japan have left at
last, and the boys [shōnen] of new Japan have arrived indeed. The Eastern
phenomena have passed at last, and the Western phenomena have ar-
 Allegories of Detective Fiction 77

rived indeed. The destructive age has passed at last, and a constructive
age is to come indeed.”33 Marked by a strong desire to separate the pres-
ent age from the past, these passages put to rest the “destructive” activi-
ties backed by “political parties” in the Freedom and People’s Rights
movement and call for the production of new subjects and citizens based
on “Western education.” Sohō and Kokumin no tomo continued to herald
this paradigmatic shift in the sociopolitical landscape, as they called for
the transformation of politically minded and violent sōshi into seinen, or
new youth, characterized by their Western education, apolitical attitude,
and entrepreneurship.
According to Sohō, such a task was not easy and must be carefully
guided because the term sōshi did not simply designate the violent po-
litical activists of the latter half of the 1880s but also “the dangerous
facet of ‘student-youth’ that existed on the flip side of [their] violent
powers.”34 And carefully did Ruikō’s detective stories guide this trans-
formation of the Meiji subject. They did not disappoint, employing var-
ious strategies to ensure the success in this task, not the least of which
was to emphasize them as stories of the falsely accused—as variations of
political novels—via paratexts, including the introductions by Ruikō as
well as Chōmin and Ruikō’s classification of stories about crime dis-
cussed above. In so doing, they functioned as an active force in reorgan-
izing the political energies of their readers that had been thwarted as a
result of the collapse of the Freedom and People’s Rights movement, in
general, and of the absolutism of the Public Order Ordinance, in par-
ticular. And it was in this process that the detective emerged as a hero
in Meiji Japan. By positing his primary task to be the exoneration of the
falsely accused rather than the capturing of the criminal, Ruikō’s stories
transform the detective—once the enemy of the people who, in service
of the government, violated their privacies and caused their false im-
prisonment—into the savior of the falsely accused who fights against
the injustice of the government, proving, or rather reassuring, that such
injustice can be overcome by an epistemological search for the truth.
But the various paratexts discussed in this section provide only a frame
and, as such, can only do so much. The reason that Ruikō’s detective
stories, and especially his Yūzai muzai, were effective in reorganizing the
thwarted political energies in the post–Freedom and People’s Rights era

—————
33. Both passages cited in Kimura Naoe, “Seinen” no tanjō, 20–21.
34. Ibid., 46. For details on Kokumin no tomo’s criticism of sōshi, see ibid., 42–50.
78 Allegories of Detective Fiction

was because the narrative structure of Yūzai muzai also revolved around
this substitution of politics with epistemology.

Rumors, Secrets, and the Shōyō-esque World of Yūzai muzai

Although Ruikō may have placed the trial and the judicial system as a
focal point of his stories for political reasons, Yūzai muzai goes further
than criticize the credibility of the court system; rather, it seems to
dismantle it altogether.35 It is true that the innocent Takeyasu is found
guilty of shooting Count Kuroda, bringing to the fore the inaccuracy of
the trial system, and so the story seemingly reiterates the sociopolitical
concerns expressed in Ruikō’s introduction to the story. But the prob-
lem here is that neither the lawyers, defendant, nor witnesses show any
respect for the truth that is supposedly at stake in a trial. In the trial
scene of Yūzai muzai, the story’s long-awaited climax, everything turns
to rhetoric: lawyers Ōkawa and Makura in Takeyasu’s services concoct a
false story for him to tell the court because they have no evidence that
would prove his innocence, and Count Kuroda, in order to avenge Take-
yasu’s infidelity with his wife, gives false testimony that Takeyasu was
the one who had shot him. Interestingly, the readers are told that the
description of the trial is an excerpt from a special newspaper report:

—————
35. Yūzai muzai begins when Count Kuroda is shot at his mansion in Sawabe
Town near Paris and Baron Hoshikawa Takeyasu, who lives in the next village,
surfaces as a possible suspect. The officials, including the examining court judge
Karumino, who are friends of Takeyasu are doubtful at first, but they arrest him
upon discovering numerous incriminating evidence and upon Takeyasu’s inabil-
ity to provide an alibi. Notified of the arrest of her son, Takeyasu’s mother hires
the lawyer Ōkawa, but Takeyasu’s refusal to disclose his whereabouts on the
night of the crime hinders the investigation. Ultimately, Takeyasu reveals to his
friend Makura that he has been the lover of Countess Kuroda for some time and
that he was at Kuroda’s mansion on the night of the crime to break off his affair
with her. Just before the trial, Takeyasu escapes from his cell for a meeting with
the Countess, where they accuse each other of shooting the Count. While they
eventually realize that neither of them is the culprit, Count Kuroda overhears
their conversation, and, realizing the infidelity of his wife, he, despite not seeing
his attacker, vows to make sure that Takeyasu will be found responsible for the
crime. True to his word, Count Kuroda testifies at the trial that Takeyasu was
the man who had shot him, and Takeyasu, whose lawyers (Ōkawa and Makura)
could not obtain any evidence to prove his innocence, is found guilty of the
crime. The day after the trial, however, various evidence in Takeyasu’s favor
comes to light, and he is quickly exonerated of the crime.
 Allegories of Detective Fiction 79

according to the reporter, people believed Takeyasu’s story and his in-
nocence because of the circumstantial evidence that Ōkawa had gath-
ered in order to support the story, but the court found the testimony
of Count Kuroda against Takeyasu too convincing. In short, the verdict
is decided based on the truth value of two lies, Takeyasu’s and Count
Kuroda’s.
Instead of being a place where truth of the case is exposed, the trial
then becomes a place where the truth value of circumstantial evidence
and witness testimonies are destroyed: constructed evidence and false
testimonies have just as much power as the ‘real’ ones that the magistrate
Karumino had gathered in his preliminary investigations. Indeed, the
newspaper report of the trial barely touches on the physical evidence and
testimonies that Karumino had collected. While the text portrays Karu-
mino as Takeyasu’s friend who betrays him for political ambitions and as
an unjust official who “abuse[s] the law without thought and determine[s]
lightly the guilt of people,” Karumino is the only person who is actually
presenting evidence that he believes to be true. And the problem is not
that Karumino draws incorrect inferences from collected evidence, for
he correctly reasons in light of the evidence that Takeyasu was present
at the scene of the crime around the time that the Count was shot and
that Takeyasu had used his gun on the night of the crime. Rather, the
problem seems to lie with Takeyasu, who refuses to admit these facts
to Karumino, instilling in the latter’s mind that Takeyasu has something
to hide.
If the truth of the case is not determined through physical evidence
and testimonies—the way it is supposed to be done under Western
law—then how is it established in Yūzai muzai? The day after the trial,
several pieces of evidence, most of which concern the relationship be-
tween Takeyasu and Countess Kuroda and the falsity of Count Kuroda’s
testimony, come to light to help exonerate Takeyasu. In theory, how-
ever, such information should not affect the case against Takeyasu. On
the one hand, Count Kuroda’s recanting of his testimony that Takeyasu
was the one who had shot him simply returns the state of affairs to the
end of the preliminary investigation when there was no doubt in many
people’s minds of Takeyasu’s guilt, despite Count Kuroda’s testimony
that he had not seen his assailant. On the other hand, the revelation of
the adulterous relationship between Takeyasu and Countess Kuroda, as
well as their meeting at the Kuroda Mansion on the night of the attack,
seems to worsen Takeyasu’s situation by giving him a major motive for
killing Count Kuroda and by placing him at the scene of the crime.
80 Allegories of Detective Fiction

Of course, these possibilities for interpretation are not explored in the

story because they become pointless when Tatarō, a helper at Kuroda’s
estate, confesses to shooting the Count. Ultimately, the investigation of
Tatarō by the detective Tōda—which leads to the former’s confession—
is the only method through which the truth of the case is established.
Given the cautious attitude toward material and circumstantial evi-
dence expressed in the introduction, Yūzai muzai’s reliance on the crim-
inal’s confession as the ultimate sign of his or her guilt seems natural. At
the same time, it could be construed as a conservative attachment to a
premodern judicial system, which operated under the assumption that
“confession can always be obtained” or, to put it in another way, “insti-
tutionalized torture always brings out the truth.”36 But it is important to
note here that Tatarō does not confess because he has been tortured or
caught, nor does he confess to cleanse his conscience, as in the tradi-
tional sense of the term. Rather, his confession is an act of braggadocio
expressed as a result of his inebriety. Tatarō’s confession is a result of
trickery, of the detective’s befriending him—that is, deceiving him—and
getting him drunk to a point where his inhibitions are wiped away.37
And here, we see the first instance of a connection between Ruikō’s
detective stories and the notion of the novel as espoused in Tsubouchi
Shōyō’s Shōsetsu shinzui. Getting a person drunk is one way to weaken
the power of his/her reason, which would in turn lead to the weakening
of reason’s suppression of the external manifestations of internal thought
and emotion. In this sense, the investigatory method of Detective Tōda,
as commonplace and primitive as it seems, finds relevance in the world
described by Shōyō’s treatise whose fundamental dichotomy is that be-
—————
36. Yasumaru, “ ‘Kangoku’ no tanjō,” 281.
37. A similar reliance on the act of confession as well as the detective’s use of
trickery to induce a confession can also be seen in Ruikō’s other detective sto-
ries. For example, in Makkura, the detective Wakimi stages a false conference
where he first names Eriko as the criminal only to change his mind to name her
sister Mariko as the criminal. What Wakimi is hoping to achieve by this one-
man show is to read the reactions of the two real suspects of the case whom
Wakimi had called to hear this conference in another room. According to Wa-
kimi’s analysis, the murder of Ōsu Senzō was committed by someone who is in
love with either of his daughters, Eriko or Mariko. Thus, Wakimi surmises that
if Eriko or Mariko is named as the criminal, the real criminal will speak up and
confess his crime. Indeed, this is what happens. When Wakimi names Mariko
as the criminal who will be charged with the murder of Ōsu Senzō, Koshie, the
secretary to Ōsu Senzō, charges into the room and confesses his crime.
 Allegories of Detective Fiction 81

tween interior and exterior. Indeed, it is hard to deny that Ruikō’s de-
tective stories more than any other fictional narratives of Meiji Japan—
including Shōyō’s own fictions—took to heart the novelistic worldview
espoused in Shōyō’s Shōsetsu shinzui. For, whether bastardized or not,
Yūzai muzai and Ruikō’s adaptations are relentless, just as Shōyō was in
his treatise, in their portrayal of the world as constituted by epistemo-
logical dichotomies and fragmented identities, and it makes perfect
sense that the proliferation of Ruikō’s detective stories in the late 1880s
and early 1890s preceded the emergence of “Shōyō-esque clichés,” as
mentioned in the conclusion to Chapter 1, as evidence of the institu-
tionalization of Shōyō’s novelistic worldview.
Fittingly, such a worldview lies at the heart of one of the most strik-
ing features of Yūzai muzai: namely, the prominent role that rumors play
in the narrative. Take for instance the introductory description of the
marriage between Count and Countess Kuroda:
Because at the time the Count was 47 years old and the Lady only 20, the people
with mouths that do not know right from wrong started various rumors that the
Lady was very ugly and could not marry anyone else so she promised to marry the
old Count or that, because the Lady’s father was poor, she considered his desper-
ate living situation and became the wife of the Count. However, because the Lady
was none other than the first daughter of the Tazawa Family, said to be one of the
richest among French aristocracy, and because the Tazawa Family presented
150,000 yen as a gift upon her marriage, it didn’t seem to be a case of considering
the living situations. Moreover, the Lady whose name was Baishi was rumored
to be a rare beauty. . . . Because it [such age difference in marriages] was few in
example, people still whispered and rumored that there was a deep secret in this
marriage, but this was certainly not the case for it appeared that the Count re-
ceived Lady Baishi because he loved her, and Lady Baishi promised to serve her
husband because she loved the Count. . . . And within four or five years, they had
two daughters, and people came to revere her as the mirror of chastity.38

And here is the narrative description, this time of Tatarō’s life:

Tatarō was by nature an idiot without equal, not knowing east from west nor even
his own name. . . . When he was 15 or 16, Countess Kuroda felt sorry for his con-
dition and, paying a large amount of money, sent him to Doctor Seki Noboru of
Sawabe Town. There he received as much treatment as possible, but there’s no
medicine for fools, or so they say, and even after one and a half year, there was not
a slight bit of change. . . . Although he was born an idiot to this degree, what
was strange was that sometimes he would say things fluently and listen to reason.
—————
38. Kuroiwa, Yūzai muzai, 4–5. All subsequent reference to this source will
appear in the text in parentheses.
82 Allegories of Detective Fiction

Seeing this, some people rumored that Tatarō was not a real idiot and that he was
pretending to be an idiot to gain people’s sympathy (14–16).

Revolving almost entirely around rumors that the narrator has heard,
these passages show the way in which rumors arise from people’s observa-
tion of phenomena that deviates from the norm. It is the age difference
between Count and Countess Kuroda that starts the rumors because
such age difference is not normal in a marriage. It is Tatarō’s occasional
fluency and display of reason, which go against the normal understanding
of “an idiot without equal” and, thus, produce rumors that he is actually
faking his mental condition. Rumors, then, are not nonsense but a result
of commonsense that understands deviations from the ordinary state of
reality in terms of a depth in reality, that is, that there is something out
of the ordinary hidden beneath the surface, which would explain the
deviations. And it is precisely because people are always suspicious that
others are hiding something—that they are not what they seem to be—
that people resort to interpreting what lies behind the mask of an indi-
vidual: people of Yūzai muzai believe in the existence of a rift between
public and private identities.
But what about the dichotomy between external appearance and in-
ternal thought, which constitutes the other half of the worldview pre-
sented by Shōyō’s Shōsetsu shinzui? Take for example the following pas-
sage, in which Ōkawa warns Takeyasu’s mother as they exit the train
station of Sawabe Town for the first time since Takeyasu’s arrest:
However worried you may be, you must hide your worries and walk through the
crowd with a calm expression on your face. If your eyes show a trace of tears,
then the people in the crowd would no doubt say that even his mother believes
Master Takeyasu to be a criminal. This Sawabe Town is a very small place, and
one person’s rumor immediately spreads all over town, so as long as you are
steady, you will be able to dispel the rumors. There is nothing scarier in a trial
than rumors because jurors determine guilt entirely based on rumors (54).

Indicating that the propensity of people to produce rumors figures

prominently in the minds of the characters, this passage reveals Ōkawa’s
belief in the power of rumors to determine the outcome of a trial because
the judicial system employs jurors from the general public who are easily
manipulated. But more importantly for our purposes, Ōkawa argues here
that tears on the eyes of Takeyasu’s mother would signify to the observer
that she believes her son to be guilty because people would deduce from
her tears a corresponding internal state or thought, which in this case is
her grief that her son has committed a heinous crime. In this sense, Yūzai
muzai posits rumors as being produced according to the belief that ex-
 Allegories of Detective Fiction 83

ternal appearance or demeanor has a corresponding internal state or

thought, although such a relationship between external appearance and
internal emotion is presented here in negative terms, as a producer of
misunderstanding and untruth, because tears as signifiers have multiple
signifieds. The tears of Takeyasu’s mother comes not from her belief in
his guilt but from her concern for him despite her belief in his innocence;
in effect, her tears come from her suspicion of the judicial system that she
shares with Ōkawa.
Nonetheless, this sort of vulgar psychology or psychological reasoning
abounds the pages of Yūzai muzai and provides the fundamental inter-
pretative framework for the characters to understand each other.39 For
instance, the clerk to the magistrate Muchine, who accompanies Karu-
mino to Takeyasu’s mansion to make the latter’s arrest, gives the follow-
ing reason—one based on psychological reasoning—for why he believes
Takeyasu to be innocent: “This crime couldn’t have been committed by
Master Takeyasu. If he was guilty, he wouldn’t be able to suspect that
something is going on and yet still maintain his composure” (35). Indeed,
this sort of analysis, if we can call it that, can be found in most if not all
of Ruikō’s stories and reaches ridiculous proportions in Majutsu no zoku
(Villain of magic; supposedly a translation of Harry Rockwood’s Donald
Dyke [1883], serialized in E’iri jiyū shinbun from January 16 to February 16,
1889) when its detective claims: “I can determine most villains just by
looking at their face.”40
Of course, if the criminals of detective fiction were “most villains”
and could be determined through such a method, then there would be
no story. It is precisely those who can give the appearance of being in-
nocent while being guilty that are fit to play the criminal in a detective
story. Ōkawa is well aware of this, as suggested by the following passage,
in which he explains the reasons for his belief in the innocence of Take-
yasu whom he has yet to meet:
Though it isn’t like I have a deep reason but when the magistrate [Karumino]
first stepped into his room, Master Takeyasu thought it was a joke and said,
“okay, enough, cut it out.” Can someone who is guilty say such bold things? If he
was guilty and still said these words, Master Takeyasu is a big hero. However, he
—————
39. At the same time, the examples of psychological reasoning offer the read-
ers of Yūzai muzai and Ruikō’s adaptations with a code—one that Shōyō never
attempted to produce—by which one can understand internal thoughts and
emotion through external appearance and behavior.
40. Kuroiwa, Majutsu no zoku, 23.
84 Allegories of Detective Fiction

couldn’t defend himself at all after he realized that it wasn’t a joke. A real crimi-
nal definitely would have thought of an excuse in advance to get himself out of
the situation. Anyone who does not think of this is a big fool. So, if Master Ta-
keyasu was the real criminal, then Master Takeyasu was first a big hero and
within an hour, he became a big fool. Because one person cannot become a big
hero then a big fool, this crime was not committed by Master Takeyasu but by
someone else (62).

This passage makes clear Ōkawa’s use of psychological reasoning (“Can

someone who is guilty say such bold things?”), but he goes a step further
than Muchine’s analysis. Unlike Muchine, who believes it to be impos-
sible that a guilty person can maintain his composure under pressure,
Ōkawa believes this type of behavior to be characteristic of a master
criminal (“big hero”). Rather, Ōkawa’s argument for Takeyasu’s inno-
cence revolves around a contradiction in his character—that he appears
as a master criminal one second and a “big fool” in another—which
could be explained only if Takeyasu was indeed innocent but unable to
justify his innocence for one reason or another.41 While Ōkawa under-
stands that the people of Sawabe Town believe in the interior/exterior
correspondence, as suggested by his comments to Takeyasu’s mother,
he does not adhere to it, but believes instead in the unity of identity
whose disruption can only be explained by missing information, namely,
a secret harbored by an individual.42
And if such logic on the part of Ōkawa is so convincing in Yūzai mu-
zai, it is because the harboring of a secret is not for Takeyasu alone. As
the story would have it, all the characters involved in the crime—Tatarō,

—————
41. A similar kind of reasoning founds the detective Chirakura’s realization
of Komori Arinori’s innocence in Hito ka oni ka, although it was Chirakura who
had urged Magistrate Taburo to arrest Arinori in the first place. Hearing from
Taburo that Arinori has not confessed to the crime or made any attempt to
prove his innocence, Chirakura states: “Oh dear! If that’s the case, Arinori is not
the criminal. The true criminal is elsewhere” (Kuroiwa, Hito ka oni ka, 299).
42. Indeed, the refusal to provide explanations that would exonerate himself
or herself is one of the primary characteristics of the falsely accused in Ruikō’s
stories, and it is viewed by the detective as a sign of his or her innocence. The
reasoning here is that a criminal would have thought of false explanations to ar-
gue his or her innocence because the inability to provide explanations such as an
alibi would indicate his/her guilt. However, the detective would argue that to do
something that would be an indication of his/her guilt (in this case, not give any
explanations) is an indication that the accused is innocent precisely because no
one would do something that would incriminate oneself.
 Allegories of Detective Fiction 85

the criminal; Count Kuroda, the victim; Takeyasu, the accused; and
Countess Kuroda, an indirect victim as well as the accused in the eyes of
Takeyasu and Ōkawa—have a secret that they are keeping from the
people of their community. They are all not what they seem. While
some people in Sawabe Town rumor that he is faking his condition, Ta-
tarō has succeeded for the most part in presenting himself as an idiot.
The same can be said for Count and Countess Kuroda, who, despite
past rumors, have been hiding the truth concerning the marriage (that
he ‘bought’ her with money).43 Appropriately enough, the most impor-
tant secret of Yūzai muzai is also the most ‘secret’—without any ru-
mors—as Takeyasu and Countess Kuroda have been extremely careful
in hiding their affair from everyone, the latter being considered “the
mirror of chastity” by many who live in Sawabe.
By hiding their secrets and faking their appearances, these characters
have problematized the truth value of the correspondence between pub-
lic and private identities, a problematization that characterizes the
modern individual in Shōyō’s literary theory (and the woman in his nov-
els) but is directly linked to criminal responsibility in the world of
Ruikō’s adaptations exemplified by Yūzai muzai. While only Tatarō is a
criminal in the court of law, all four characters in question are, thus,
guilty of breaking the social law of correspondence between interior and
exterior that is taken as granted by the members of the Sawabe commu-
nity. It is no surprise then that Takeyasu’s false story is believed by the
court, although upon being recommended to lie to the court by Ōkawa,
he states: “It is true that Mr. Ōkawa’s lies are very well-constructed, but
I can’t tell them as if they were true, knowing in my heart that I am tell-
ing a lie. Even if I lie a little bit, my nature is such that my face immedi-
ately turns red, so I will be found out by the judge in a second” (229). He
may still believe that he is a subject of the law of correspondence, but
Takeyasu has already fallen from grace.
Fittingly within the framework of the detective story marked by the
penetration into private lives, it is the event of the crime and the ensu-
ing investigation that expose these secret harborers as violators of the
—————
43. To the extent that there were rumors surrounding the marriage of Count
and Countess Kuroda as well as Tatarō’s mental condition, Yūzai muzai de-
scribes the process of discovering that rumors are not always empty hogwash.
What starts this process, of course, is the catastrophic event of the crime, and
what catalyzes it is the investigation that ensues, for it is precisely in a criminal
investigation that the truth value of floating claims must be verified.
86 Allegories of Detective Fiction

correspondence between interior and exterior. But such exposure is not

only a result of the crime but also its cause. Tatarō’s assault on the
Count is a repayment for the kindness that Countess Kuroda has shown
him. And the opportunity for such repayment arrives with the overhear-
ing of a conversation between Countess Kuroda and Takeyasu that re-
veals their love affair. It is because Tatarō believes the words of Take-
yasu (“If you were a free woman, I would take you as my wife” [182])—
uttered not in honesty but as a way to end the affair without angering
her—that Tatarō decides to kill Count Kuroda. Thus, it is the newly
gained knowledge of another’s secret that instigates the crime. Indeed,
this is not only true in Yūzai muzai but also in Ruikō’s other stories. In
Hito ka oni ka, Minoru murders Oden upon discovering that she was in-
volved in a plan to switch the baby born out of the adulterous affair be-
tween his mother Lady Sawada and Count Komori with the baby be-
tween Count Komori and his wife.44 In Makkura, Koshie murders Ōsu
Senzō, the father of Mariko, upon realizing that Mariko, with whom he
is in love, has become involved with the British aristocrat Kurihara
against her father’s wishes and that her father has threatened to remove
her from his will.
The exposure of a secret to a third party as the cause of a crime—this
is the form of Ruikō’s early stories. Moreover, the secrets are most often,
if not always, aristocratic secrets involving and harbored by the mem-
bers of the aristocratic class that are discovered by members of the non-
aristocratic class. In this regard, Hito ka oni ka is exemplary, for the story
involves a murder committed by the non-aristocrat Minoru that is insti-
gated by a false hope that he in fact may be the rightful heir of the aris-
tocratic Komori family. Even Makkura, which takes place in New York
City and depicts a crime within the non-aristocratic Ōsu family, seems
to fit into the mold to the extent that their lifestyle, wealth, and social
status—all of which dissuade the hardworking secretary Koshie from
pursuing Mariko as his wife—make them no different from the aristo-
cratic families of Yūzai muzai and Hito ka oni ka, who reside in France.
But what is the significance of this structure made possible by the over-
—————
44. More specifically, Minoru discovers that Oden, who was asked to carry
out this plan of baby-switching, did not carry out this plan at the request of
Lady Sawada. Thus, the direct cause of Minoru’s crime is the realization that
Minoru can claim himself to be the son of Count Komori and his official wife—
that is, the rightful heir of the Komori family—as long as Oden is dead so that
she cannot testify otherwise.
 Allegories of Detective Fiction 87

whelming presence of aristocratic families at the heart of the crime that

constitutes one of the primary textual characteristics of Ruikō’s transla-
tions? What kind of role does it play in constructing the ideological
message of the stories? And how does it affect the stories’ reception by
the Japanese readers? Surprisingly enough, if we were to take Ruikō’s
word, it means nothing, for the question of aristocracy is an insignifi-
cant side effect of his stories.

The Aristocratic Question and Allegories in Conflict

In his foreword to Makkura, Ruikō tells us by way of an anecdote how
he came to adapt this work. One day, the president of the E’iri jiyū shin-
bun notifies Ruikō that the readers have given him the nickname Profes-
sor Count (hakushaku hakase). Ruikō does not understand the reason for
this, but the president calls him a “simple” man with a smirk and leaves
without answering. Ruikō then turns to his coworkers for the reason,
but they only laugh at him. Finally, he learns that he has been dubbed
Professor Count because among the numerous stories that he has
adapted, “there is not one in which a character who is either a count or
countess does not appear.”45 To this ‘accusation’ Ruikō responds:
I prefer to translate French stories. Of the famous stories of France as well as
England, there are hardly any that consist only of people without rank or title.
Then is it the case that we should call all French and English writers Professor
Count? And it is not without reason that aristocrats appear in the story, for in
these countries, aristocrats basically make up the entire high society. Moreover,
because aristocrats without exception come from wealthy families, they often
find themselves in a situation that is fit to be made into a story, and because of
their high social standing, they draw the attention of people. If I were to pick a
story without aristocrats, there is no choice but to look for a story about the
United States. However, American stories tend to be less extraordinary than
those of France. This is the reason why I had to abandon the aristocrat-less sto-
ries of the United States and choose the aristocrat-filled stories of France.46

But hearing this response, one of his co-workers comments that Shōyō’s
Nisegane tsukai is an American story but an interesting one. Thus, Ruikō
goes home to his library and digs out a copy of The Leavenworth Case,
which is also by the author of XYZ Anna Katharine Green. Discovering
that there are no aristocrats in the story, Ruikō translates a few chapters

—————
45. Kuroiwa, Makkura, 1.
46. Ibid., 2.
88 Allegories of Detective Fiction

and shows it to the president asking, “Am I still Professor Count?” But
to this, the president smirks and calls him a “simple” man yet again.47
While there exists an aristocrat in Makkura—the British aristocrat
Kurihara whose secret marriage to Mariko serves as a spark to her fa-
ther’s murder—this factual discrepancy is not what makes this episode
interesting. It is rather Ruikō’s vehement denial of any significance to
the prominence of aristocratic characters in his stories: their promi-
nence is merely a trivial side effect of translating French novels, so triv-
ial that he was unaware of it and could not fathom why his readers
would call him Professor Count. Yet also implicit in his apology is the
suggestion that it is the presence of aristocratic characters, almost a ne-
cessity in European novels and lacking in American ones, that make the
former more interesting for him than the latter. That is, while he be-
lieves the aristocratic prominence to be of no importance within the
context of Meiji Japan, he believes otherwise within a European context
where aristocrats, because of their wealth and social standing, are fitting
subjects of storytelling. And of course, the choice he makes in order to
deny his nickname—to tell of the murder of a millionaire who is equal
to the best of aristocrats in all aspects but an official title—reveals in-
deed that the aristocratic element is crucial to his stories. But why then
the vehement denial?
In presenting this episode, Ruikō is not really a “simple” man as
the president of the E’iri jiyū shinbun claims. He is far from it. The epi-
sode that is included in the foreword to Makkura is not just an inno-
cent anecdote that reveals the behind-the-scenes look at the newspaper/
translation industry. Instead, it is a carefully thought-out story, most
likely fiction, I would argue, that explicitly denies the importance of the
aristocratic element in his stories all the while implying something else.
His argument that aristocrats are fitting subjects for the production of
interesting stories begins with the premise that “in these countries
[France and England] the aristocrats basically make up the entire high
society.” But this premise holds true not only for France and England, as
well as other European countries, but also in Japan, where such an aris-
tocratic class made up “the entire high society” and was characterized by
wealth and high social standing: the members of the newly formed peer-
age system who pretended to lead the life of European aristocrats.

—————
47. Ibid., 3.
 Allegories of Detective Fiction 89

On July 7, 1884, the government issued the Peerage Ordinance (Ka-

zoku rei), in short, “a law that allowed the cutting in of influential mem-
bers with samurai antecedents [shizoku] into the peerage, that is, a law
to make peers out of non-peers.”48 With this ordinance, numerous peo-
ple were added to the peerage, which to this point only consisted of
those of noble birth as defined during the Edo period. Devised primarily
by Itō Hirobumi, this ordinance had in sight the establishment of the
House of Peers in the Diet to be opened in 1890. The members of the
peerage would be stripped of their right to vote or run for the House of
Representatives, but they in turn gained the exclusive right to vote or
run for the House of Peers. In this sense, the Peerage Ordinance sought
to provide titles to those who were deemed fit to make up the House of
Peers, which was a machinery concocted by the government to thwart
radical republicanism in the Diet. That the majority of these ‘qualified’
individuals were from the old Chōshū or Satsuma clan only revealed the
already well-known fact that this new system was another ploy to se-
cure the political dominance of the Chōshū-Satsuma alliance within the
government.49
In addition to their importance as political entities, the new peers
had another more immediate task: namely, their participation in the so-
cial world of Rokumeikan, the venue through which the peers became
known among the general public as we saw in the introduction to this
chapter. And it is within this context that Ruikō’s episode in Makkura’s
foreword begins to make sense, as a defense to deny the possible alle-
gorical reading of his stories, precisely because he understood that such
a mode of reading was part of what made his stories popular. Of course,
the readers’ effecting of the allegorical mode of reading does not depend
merely on the simple conflation of the terms kizoku (aristocracy) as used
in Ruikō’s texts and kazoku (peers) of Meiji society. While the former
term operates as a marker that instigates as well as confirms the possi-
bility of such a reading, it is ultimately the narrated events which must

—————
48. Ōkubo, Kazokusei no sōshutsu, 9. For an English overview of the new peer-
age system, see Jansen, Making of Modern Japan, 391–92.
49. As Ōkubo argues, this did not mean that the peers were independent
group of elites who looked out only for their own interests. Their task consisted
of thwarting radical republicanism in the Diet, but their existence, as “guardians
of the imperial house,” meant that this protection was not only for the gov-
ernment but also, and primarily, for the emperor to have a voice in the Diet
(Kazokusei no sōshutsu, 180–81).
90 Allegories of Detective Fiction

hold up to the realities of context. The readers must be able to make

sense of the secondary narrative produced as the result of a substitution
of peers for aristocrats in terms of the Meiji realities. Thus, the question
becomes: what kind of narrative events in Ruikō’s texts allows for this
substitution? And what kind of secondary narrative is produced as a
result?
As we have seen, the dynamic of identification in Yūzai muzai—the
falsely accused Baron Hoshikawa Takeyasu as its protagonist and hero
is conflated with the political activists of the Freedom and People’s
Rights movement through paratextual materials—is reinforced by the
focus of the majority of the text that lies not in the search for the ‘true’
assailant of Count Kuroda but in the reason that prevents Takeyasu
from disclosing his side of the story to anyone. This reason, of course, is
his infidelity with Countess Kuroda, the knowledge of which instigates
Tatarō’s assault on Count Kuroda. But while it is this assault that con-
stitutes the crime-to-be-solved in Yūzai muzai, Takeyasu’s infidelity was
also a crime in Meiji Japan according to the 354th article of the Criminal
Code, which designates an imprisonment of six months to two years for
adultery.50 It is clear that Ruikō was aware of the article and sought to
emphasize this fact, for the criminal nature of Takeyaku’s infidelity is
made explicit in the text through an alteration made in the process of
translation.
After hearing Takeyasu’s story of his meeting with the Countess on
the night of Count Kuroda’s attack, the lawyer Makura asks Takeyasu:
“That next morning when Karumino and others came to question you,
what did you think?” (185). This translation is almost verbatim to the Eng-
lish text of Within an Inch of His Life that runs: “And the day after, when
they came to arrest you, what was your first impression?” In the English
version, the answer is a simple but ambiguous one: “I thought at once of

—————
50. The article reads: “A woman with a husband who commits adultery is
imprisoned for no less than six months and no more than two years. The same
applies to the man with whom the adultery is performed. The guilt described
in this article is argued after the lawful husband makes a complaint. However,
if the lawful husband has permitted adultery previously, the complaint has no
effect” (Ishii and Mizubayashi, Hō to chitsujo, 402). The misogynistic nature of
this law is evident from the fact that this law makes no mention of husbands
who commit adultery with an unwedded woman.
 Allegories of Detective Fiction 91

Valpinson [the name of the Count’s estate].”51 In the Japanese text, in

contrast, the answer is longer and leaves no doubt regarding Takeyasu’s
thoughts: “I thought it to be a joke, but when I soon realized that it
wasn’t, I thought that the Countess had confessed everything to the
Count, and so they came to question me on the charge of adultery” (185).
In such a way, the Japanese text frames Takeyasu’s affair with Countess
Kuroda within the moral/lawful context of Meiji society, and, in so doing,
presents Takeyasu as a criminal who is aware of the criminality of his
involvement with the Countess.
It is this theme of adultery, I would argue, that served as one provo-
cation to effect the allegorical reading of Takeyasu as a member of peer-
age in the immediate post-Rokumeikan and post–Freedom and People’s
Rights age. Topics involving the sexual immorality of the upper class,
such as adultery (Yūzai muzai ), illicit love affairs (Makkura), and even the
swapping of an illegitimate child (Hito ka oni ka), were precisely the sub-
jects of various rumors and scandalous news surrounding the peers and
the Rokumeikan balls in which they participated. And this equation was
made stronger, I would argue—despite sexual immorality certainly not
being a vice restricted to those at the high echelons of Meiji society as
leaders of Freedom and People’s Rights movement were guilty in this
regard as well—by the relationship between the peers and the ideology
of risshin shusse that had been driving the ambitious youths of Meiji
Japan to go out into the world to seek success.
As Maeda Ai has discussed, this ideology finds its origin in the best-
sellers of early Meiji, Nakamura Masanao’s Saigoku risshi-hen (Success
stories of the West; 1870-1871; a translation of Samuel Smile’s Self-help)
and Fukuzawa Yukichi’s Gakumon no susume (Encouragement of learning;
1872–1876), both of which espoused the notion of human equality and
the universal potential to succeed in life through learning. But while
works such as Kikutei Kōsui’s Sanpū hiu: sero nikki (Walks of life diaries;
1884) reproduced the social ideals of risshin shusse ideology in fictional
format, it was rather the failures to achieve these ideals that became the
subject of many fictional narratives. Maeda writes:
The youths who gathered in cities with their backpacks whose passions for risshin
shusse were incited by Sero nikki—the world that they should encounter was
described in [Tōsei ] shosei katagi, Ukigumo, and Maihime. Let us leave aside Ko-
—————
51. Gaboriau, Within an Inch of His Life, 308. Although the edition cited here
is not that which Ruikō used, it contains the same text as the edition to which
he most likely referred: the Seaside Library version published in 1883 by Munro.
92 Allegories of Detective Fiction

machida Sanji, but it goes without saying that Utsumi Bunzō and Ōta Toyotarō
suffered heavy defeat or were forced a bitter failure, externally by the system of
bureaucracy or by vulgar society and internally by their own introverted personali-
ties. What’s more, behind Utsumi Bunzō and Ōta Toyotarō lay accumulated the
tragedies of those youths who had become mixed up in the ebb of the Freedom
and People’s Rights movement and had lost sight of their goals in life. The design
plan of risshin shusse presented by Sero nikki was exposed by the realities around
Meiji 20 and would fade rapidly.52

As this passage argues, around 1887 (Meiji 20), it was becoming clear to
the Meiji intellectuals and youths that risshin shusse ideology was collaps-
ing, that it was no longer tenable within the realities of Meiji society.
And it was during this period that the peers pranced around in their
Western dresses at their Rokumeikan fancy balls, peers who in a per-
verted way were the emblems of the possibilities of risshin shusse ideology
precisely because the selection of new peers—according to the Peerage
Ordinance in 1885—was not based on family heritage but rather on their
contributions to the nation. Whether consciously or not, the new peer-
age system functioned as a part of the risshin shusse ideology that pro-
duced the ‘illusion’ of social mobility. But this illusion was already be-
ginning to fade a couple of years after the Peerage Ordinance, and what
was left was a façade that revealed itself as such.
Despite being incorporated into the peerage system because of their
important contribution to the nation and, thus, symbolizing success of
the highest honor, the new peers who were invariably high-ranking gov-
ernment officials were not the beacons nor exemplars of Westerniza-
tion, civilization, and enlightenment they claimed to be representing.
And the proof was the scandalous articles in the newspapers that re-
vealed them as immoral persons who were no better, if not worse, than
the ordinary Japanese. After all, as many Meiji intellectuals should have
been aware, what many of the new peers did to achieve their rank and
‘success’ was to commit violent crimes, sometimes even assassinations,
against the Tokugawa shogunate in the waning moments of the Edo
period and against the political activists of the Freedom and People’s
Rights movement. In this sense, it might appear that Ruikō’s detective
stories, in revealing the dark secrets of aristocrats-as-peers and proving
that they are not as high and noble as advertised, had a similar task to
the scandal reporting during the Rokumeikan age. If this were indeed
the case, however, fiction would merely be a support of already existing
—————
52. Maeda, “Meiji risshin shusse shugi no keifu,” 143.
 Allegories of Detective Fiction 93

phenomena in reality. But as a closer look into the text of Yūzai muzai
makes clear, Ruikō’s detective stories, while evoking these newspaper
reports, operated in a very different manner from them.
Takeyasu is an adulterer and, as such, a criminal. But what happens
to him in Yūzai muzai? Count Kuroda—who could have brought adul-
tery charges against Takeyasu—dies, leaving a will stating that the in-
fidelity of his wife should be kept a secret. And the younger daughter of
the Kurodas, who Countess Kuroda claims is her child with Takeyasu,
also dies from an illness from which she had been suffering. With all ob-
stacles out of his way, Takeyasu marries his fiancée Lady Nishiki, his in-
volvement with her having prompted his breakup with Countess Ku-
roda in the first place. The sins of Takeyasu are not atoned but merely
wiped away through the discretions of the authorities and the detec-
tives. It is only Tatarō—the poor fool—who is punished in the story. To
the extent that Tatarō commits the crime with the intention of making
possible the marriage between Countess Kuroda and Takeyasu, that is,
of making lawful their criminal affair, Tatarō functions as a martyr to
whom the guilt of Takeyasu is transferred. Tatarō’s crime makes the
happy end for Takeyasu possible.
It is this narrative structure found not only in Yūzai muzai but many
of Ruikō’s other works—the exposure of a criminal secret that is wiped
away through the criminal act of a third party—that produces a con-
spiratorial relationship between the detective, the authorities, and the
readers as those in the know.53 They are the only ones who realize the
truth of the case. The fact that Takeyasu’s trial is presented to the read-
ers in the form of a newspaper report underscores this point: the fictional
public who read the aforementioned report would have no idea of the
truth that motivates the testimonies of Takeyasu and Count Kuroda.
—————
53. For example, in Hito ka oni ka, the secret does not lie with Arinori, the
falsely accused, but with his father Count Komori, who had switched the baby
between him and his wife (or so he thinks) with the baby he had with his mis-
tress. To prevent his wife from realizing this switch, Count Komori forbids his
wife from having any contact with the baby, resulting in her madness and death.
This secret is exposed to the authorities during the criminal investigation, but it
does not become public because Minoru commits suicide in return for money to
establish a foundation of the falsely accused (the establishment of a foundation
is an addition that Ruikō made in the process of adaptation). Importantly, Mi-
noru receives a large sum of money from Count Komori in exchange for his si-
lence regarding Komori’s criminal secret, a silence that Minoru guarantees by
his own suicide.
94 Allegories of Detective Fiction

To the fictional public, Takeyasu’s criminal secret—the cause of the as-

sault on Count Kuroda—remains just that, a secret, and the readers who
have followed the story through a behind-the-scene perspective that
only the novelistic gaze can provide are actively situated in opposition
to this fictional public. In fact, the newspaper reporting of the trial
makes explicit emphasis of the divide between the fictional public and
the real readers and of the privileged position of the latter in having ac-
cess to the secret that the former does not know yet cannot help sus-
pecting: “Takeyasu and Count Kuroda stared at each other as if to curse
severely with their eyes, and this arose the suspicion that there is a great
secret hidden [between them] that might be seen through by the judge”
(300).
What’s more, the medium-specific characteristic of Yūzai muzai as a
newspaper serialization produces a similar opposition between knowing
and unknowing within the actual reading public. At first glance, a detec-
tive story of significant length, such as Yūzai muzai, seems like a perfect
fit for the newspaper. Having to divide itself into small daily portions,
serialized detective fiction forces its readers to wait for their clues, and
this wait contributes to making readers into devout fans and, thus,
newspaper subscribers: wanting to know what will happen next, the
readers keep reading the newspaper everyday.54 Yet, this characteristic
also has the opposite effect on readership. Because each clue matters
and the story’s end is only satisfying as an untangling of the intricate
web of suspicions and the resulting resolution of suspense produced
through the course of the narrative, the serialized detective story pre-
cludes new readers who may have heard rave reviews of the story from
joining it midpoint: readers who do so will literally have no clue about
what is going on. Thus, a serialized detective story offers its enjoyment
and satisfaction to exclusive readers who had the good fortune of joining
the story from the beginning.
In these ways, Yūzai muzai sets up its readers on the imaginary level
as those in the know on two different but interrelated levels. On the one
hand, it creates an exclusive club of readers (newspaper subscribers)
whose enjoyment of the story partially derives from their privileged posi-
—————
54. The wait that the readers of serialized detective fiction must experience
in consuming the story allows for ingenious ways to promote it among the read-
ing public. For example, Ruikō held a contest where readers sent in their
guesses on the identity of the criminal during the serialization of Makkura. Such
a contest would obviously be impossible in a single-book detective story.
 Allegories of Detective Fiction 95

tion within the reading public, both fictional and actual. On the other
hand, it consciously aligns its readers not on the side of the general pub-
lic, but on the side of authority whose position within the story world—
as those who know the whole of the story just like the readers—prompts
and supports such alignment.
And as holders of exclusive information, readers judge the story of
Yūzai muzai, in which the criminal secret of the falsely accused aristocrat
is forgiven and no social or public consequences result from it in the text.
By positioning the readers in such a manner, Yūzai muzai succeeds in
reproducing the critical narrative structure at the level of story-events—
the exposure of a criminal secret that is wiped away through the crim-
inal act of a third party—on the level of the readers’ reception. In other
words, the sense of moral condemnation that the readers may have had
for the aristocratic Takeyasu as an immoral adulterer allegorical of the
Meiji peers is neutralized through the story’s ending, in exchange for the
privilege of being on the side of the know. For, to punish Takeyasu would
mean public (obviously, on the fictional level) exposure of his dark secret
and, thus, the loss of the exclusive status that the text has constructed
for its readers. Within this mode of allegorical reading, then, the fictional
public uproar that might arise if the adultery between Takeyasu and
Countess Kuroda were exposed is replaced by the private enjoyment of
the real reader. Through their individuation as private readers whose en-
joyment derives from the contrast between their position of knowledge
and the ignorant (both fictional and actual) public, the readers fall to the
side of the authority, sharing their knowledge of the truth behind the
case as depoliticized entities.
And assisting in this process of forgiveness by and depoliticization of
the reader is the other allegorical reading promoted through various para-
textual materials. Given the theme of the falsely accused outlined in
Yūzai muzai’s introductions, the readers know that Takeyasu is innocent
when he is arrested in the early chapters. To the extent that the intro-
ductions promote the identification of Takeyasu as the falsely accused
hero of the Freedom and People’s Rights movement, as we saw earlier, it
is with him that readers’ sympathies lie. The readers’ interests also lie
with Takeyasu because his secret—the reason for not defending himself
despite his innocence—is what keeps the pages turning in the first half
of the story. But when the secret is revealed, Takeyasu, while innocent of
the crime with which he has been charged, proves himself indeed to be a
criminal. It is at this moment, I would argue, that the other allegorical
reading—the aristocrats-as-peers reading—takes effect, and the quality
96 Allegories of Detective Fiction

of being an aristocrat rather than a falsely accused becomes the dominant

characterization of Takeyasu. But almost simultaneously with Takeyasu’s
confession, there begins the search for the real criminal of the assault on
Count Kuroda, redirecting readers’ interest toward the more proper de-
tective story framework of the whodunit. This interest finds its resolu-
tion when the story exposes Tatarō as the true culprit in the assault of
Count Kuroda, and this is when Takeyasu’s innocence becomes most
symbolic. That is, Tatarō’s confession of the crime functions as a foil,
emphasizing Takeyasu’s innocence in the assault on Count Kuroda such
that even his past crime—his affair with Countess Kuroda—is forgiven, if
not forgotten, in the process.
The two allegorical readings of Yūzai muzai—one promoted and the
other suppressed by paratextual materials—operate in their opposition
to weave a text that fosters the production of a ‘national’ subject fit for
the post–Freedom and People’s Right movement age, an apolitical figure
whose allegiance to the nation was based on his identity as a private
reader who, as an individuated subject, conspired with the government to
share the truth that the general public did not know. In promoting the
creation of a new reading public through the depoliticization of his read-
ers, Ruikō’s detective stories were a continuation of Tsubouchi Shōyō’s
literary project. Whereas my examination of Shōyō’s project in the previ-
ous chapter focused on its moral characteristic, his notion of the novel
articulated in his Shōsetsu shinzui was also a political one, providing a fun-
damental criticism of the political novel to redirect the frustrated ener-
gies of political activists. For, in emphasizing the novel’s proper object of
depiction as human feelings and private lives—not of heroes or villains
but of ordinary people with both virtues and vices—Shōsetsu shinzui ar-
gued that what was important and meaningful did not have to be found
in the public or political realm of action but also lay hidden beneath the
surface and behind closed doors in the ordinary world of everyday life.
Just as Ruikō’s stories were responsible for the institutionalization of
Shōyō’s novelistic worldview of epistemological dichotomies and frag-
mentary identities, however, Shōsetsu shinzui had to wait for the prolifera-
tion of Ruikō’s detective stories to complete its political project. Indeed,
the novel as a newly emergent genre seems to have had no immediate
effect on the production and consumption of political novels, which, as
previously mentioned, became more popular as the Freedom and Peo-
ple’s Rights movement waned in the late 1880s. According to Yanagida
Izumi, the number of political novels published, which had hovered
around 30 works a year, suddenly jumped to around 100 works in 1887 and
 Allegories of Detective Fiction 97

peaked at around 120 works in 1888. It was only in 1889, when Ruikō’s de-
tective stories had become popularized, that the number of political nov-
els published dramatically decreased. 55 In this sense, it was not Shōyō’s
Shōsetsu shinzui but Ruikō’s detective stories that served to quench the
popularity of the political novel and, by extension, the political energies
and dreams that were the backbone of its consumption.
As argued above, the key to Ruikō’s success had much to do with the
ingenious manner by which he approached the political project that
he shared with Shōyō. Unlike Shōyō, who presented the novel squarely
against the political novel, Ruikō presented his detective stories, first and
foremost, as political novels and promoted their consumption within the
allegorical interpretative mode characteristic of this literary genre. That
is, he duped his readers, redirecting and reorganizing the qualities char-
acteristic of the political activists of the Freedom and People’s Rights
movement and of sōshi, who were their successors, with those more
suitable for a ‘national’ subject: political indignation and frustration ex-
pressed as public uproars with private enjoyment of individual readers
fueled by an epistemological desire for truth as well as a vulgar interest in
the scandalous. And it was in this process of the production of a ‘national’
subject that the detective emerged as a hero who not only exonerated the
falsely accused–as–political activist but also exposed the dark secrets of
the aristocrat-as-peer. But as his original detective story Muzan makes
clear, it was not so easy to temper the frustrated political energies of
former activists and produce a subject fit for the new age of authoritarian
Meiji state, for, as suggested by the disclaimer with which Ruikō intro-
duces the detective in Muzan—“there is no profession in this world that

—————
55. These publication numbers are from a list of political novels compiled by
Yanagida. According to this list, the number of political novels published in
1889 was around 50 works, decreasing to around 30 works in 1890. The list’s
shortcomings relating to the question of generic boundaries aside, we could
make the argument that 1889–1890 marked the end of politics in Meiji Japan
with the promulgation of the constitution and the opening of the Diet, which,
in turn, led to the decline in the number of political novels published. I would
say, however, that the frustrated political energies of the activists were not dif-
fused so easily by the historical events themselves—especially given the gap that
existed between the activists’ vision of the constitution and the Diet and their
actual manifestations—but required active ideological manipulation, in which
Ruikō’s detective stories played a key part. For further detail, see appendix to
Yanagida, Seiji shōsetsu kenkyū.
98 Allegories of Detective Fiction

is this detestable and this honorable”—the detective would remain a fig-

ure of deep ambivalence in Meiji Japan.56

Logic and Prejudice of Muzan

On September 10, 1889, Ruikō published Muzan, his only original work
of detective fiction of significant length.57 Consisting of three parts—
suspicion, conjecture, and resolution—Muzan deviated from the usual
style of his adaptations and focused on the analytical aspects of crime
solving. Importantly, this tripartite structure corresponded to Ruikō’s
definition of the detective story articulated within the previously cited
commentary that classified stories about crime into the detective story,
criminal romance, and the sensational novel. Given the timing of their
publication, with the commentary appearing just nine days after the pub-
lication of Muzan, it is clear that Ruikō sought to differentiate Muzan
from his adaptations and to present it as a true work of detective fiction,
an attempt that appears have been successful, at least historically.58 For
example, Edogawa Ranpo emphasizes Muzan’s import beyond the history
of Japanese detective fiction, positioning it as a pioneering work in the
genre’s international development as one of the earliest examples of ana-
lytical detective fiction in the short story format that would later be estab-
lished by Arthur Conan Doyle and R. Austin Freeman (1862–1943).59
Reflecting such paratextual strategy and critical reception, the story’s
central focus is the young detective Ōtomo’s analysis of the case, which
—————
56. Kuroiwa, Muzan, 16.
57. Muzan appeared in the first installment of a story collection series Shōsetsu
sō by the publishing house Shōsetsukan, which also published the book versions
of Ruikō’s Hito ka oni ka and Majutsu no zoku.
58. The publication notice of Muzan, which appeared in the E’iri jiyū shinbun
on September 13, 1889, claims that this work is “the beginning of detective fic-
tion in Japan.” Also, the same claim is made in the introduction by Umenoya
Kaoru to the book version of Muzan published in February 1890.
59. Ranpo writes: “Considering that Meiji 22 is 1889 and the first story of
Conan Doyle A Study in Scarlet is 1887 and his first collection of short stories
Adventures of Sherlock Holmes is 1892, Ruikō published a pure detective story in
the short story format in the vein of Conan Doyle or Freeman three years be-
fore the Holmes stories when it was still the golden age of long detective stories
internationally. . . . This is an important aspect that cannot be forgotten by those
who write the history of Japanese detective fiction” (“Ruikō no sōsaku Muzan ni
tsuite,” first appeared in Shin tantei shōsetsu [ July 1947], reprinted in Hitori no Bashō
no mondai, 17).
 Allegories of Detective Fiction 99

begins with his discovery of the strands of curly hair on the victim. Ex-
amining these strands of hair under a microscope, he ascertains that the
curl is not natural but rather made through repetitive weaving. With the
knowledge that hairs have a characteristic of being smooth to the pull in
one way but not in another, Ōtomo discovers that one of the hairs is
aligned in the opposite direction. In light of this finding, he reasons that
the strands of hair must have come from someone who uses false hair to
increase the volume of his/her hair. Because the wounds on the victim
were made from the back, Ōtomo further reasons that the victim was
running away from the criminal. And because it is difficult to think that
a man will run away from a woman, he argues that the criminal must be
a man, despite the fact that the use of false hair is a feminine practice.
What kind of a man uses false hair and weaves his hair in such a way to
create the kind of curl found on the strands of hair in question? Ōtomo
tells the police captain Ogisawa:
This way of curling must be from a Chinese man. You know the head of Chi-
nese men? They separate it [hair] in three and weave it into a string. . . . And
there are no men aside from Chinese men who add false hair. Not only do they
use false hairs, if that is not enough they add strings. The false hair and this
condition of curling—if this is not from a Chinese man, I will resign my job.60

In this way, Ōtomo narrows the suspects, but his analysis continues.
From his observation of the contours of the head wound, which was the
direct cause of death, he argues that the wound was made by a spinning
top and, thus, the criminal must have a young child. Moreover, he discov-
ers that the natural hair found on the victim was actually dyed gray hair.
Reasoning that a person who would commit such a violent crime requir-
ing strength cannot be an old man, he concludes that the murderer must
be a person who dyes his hair because he has “gray hair unfit for his age”
(38). Ultimately, Ōtomo constructs the following profile of the criminal: a
Chinese man who dyes his gray hair but is not old and has a child who
plays with tops. It is through this meticulous process of observation and
reasoning (however flawed they may be to the readers of the twenty-first
century) that he arrives at the identity of the criminal whom he has never
heard of or met. Through Ōtomo’s analysis, then, Muzan reveals the
power of the scientific—that is, Western—methods of investigation to

—————
60. Kuroiwa, Muzan, 35. All subsequent references to this source will appear
in the text in parentheses.
100 Allegories of Detective Fiction

identify criminals and to control criminal activities that disrupt the order
of Japanese society.61
But despite such a narrative structure that would receive the afore-
mentioned praises of Ranpo, this is not to say that Ruikō reproduces
completely the ideological ‘essence’ of Western analytical detective fic-
tion in Meiji Japan through his Muzan, as highlighted by Uchida Ryūzō.
On the one hand, Uchida points out the existence of two contrasting
detectives in Muzan—a “great detective” who employs “logical and sci-
entific reasoning” and a “mediocre detective” who bases his investiga-
tions on “experience”—and, noting that this duality exists as Dupin and
the prefect Monsieur G------ in Poe’s Dupin trilogy, states that Muzan
“follows the form of the classical detective story started by Poe in which
reasoning and analysis are superior to crude empiricism.”62 On the other
hand, Uchida views the fact that the “great” detective of Muzan is a police
detective as a sign of the story’s limitation resulting from the ‘un-modern-
ness’ of Meiji society, for the likes of Dupin and Holmes are private citi-
zens belonging on the side of the public. Uchida states:
Whether the detective attaches himself on the side of state powers or civil soci-
ety is an important issue, but in this work [Muzan] there is not yet a conscious-
ness of a clear distinction regarding the position of the subject who enforces jus-
tice. The absence of this consciousness to distinguish, in one way, relates to the
extent of modern nature (kindai-sei ) of Japanese society at this time, and can be
said to be due to the way in which Ruikō expresses this condition.”63

As this passage indicates, Uchida’s focus lies in the analysis of Muzan as

an imitator of a Western literary form whose level of consciousness re-
garding the significances of its characteristics—whether the detective is
a private citizen or belongs to the police, in this case—reveals the extent
—————
61. Takahashi Osamu states: “The mystery brought about by a ‘Chinese’ in
[Tsukiji] is solved by a ‘Japanese’ detective who has acquired Western logic and
knowledge and is heralded as ‘the Lecoq of the East.’ That is, it repositions
[chaos] on the side of order (nomos). The repositioning of chaos within a Western
order from such an opposition between chaos and nomos—that is, ‘a story that
dissolves chaos within nomos’—can be thought of as the ideology that underpins
western style detective stories” (“ ‘Tantei shōsetsu’ ga inpei suru mono,” 31–32).
62. Uchida Ryūzō, Tantei shōsetsu no shakaigaku, 8. The contrasting investiga-
tory methods of the two detectives are not only observed by critics like Uchida;
indeed, they are emphasized in the text, for example, through a following aside
by Ōtomo: “If he [Tanimada] is going to investigate [tantei sureba] through experi-
ence, experience, and experience, I will investigate with science and logic” (26).
63. Uchida Ryūzō, Tantei shōsetsu no shakaigaku, 10–11.
 Allegories of Detective Fiction 101

of Japan’s modernization. And because Muzan was the only ‘classical de-
tective story’ by Ruikō or any other writer in Meiji Japan, it seems natu-
ral to understand this work, as Uchida does, as an isolated experiment
advanced for its time and, thus, a work lacking in contemporaneity, a
condition brought on by the fact that it is a superficial imitation of a
foreign model and not a cultural artifact that reflects the concerns and
problems of a modern society.
But here I would argue the opposite. The status of the detectives as
belonging to the police is not a failure to imitate a Western model but a
necessity arising out of the sociopolitical conditions of the late 1880s that
interpellated the detective story as a fitting framework to negotiate the
paradigmatic shift taking place during the period in question. In other
words, what is truly significant about Muzan is not the success with which
Ruikō manages to reproduce the ideological ‘essence’ of Western ana-
lytical detective fiction in Meiji Japan. Rather, it is the fact that although
Ruikō appears to be doing just this, he does something completely dif-
ferent, as discerned in the rather surprising narrative developments of
Muzan that force a radical reinterpretation on the part of the readers in
making sense of this story.
Considering the story’s focus on the analytical methods of Ōtomo, it
is amazing that it is not Ōtomo but Tanimada, the old veteran and em-
piricist ‘fool,’ who captures the leading witness Okon whose testimony
reveals the entirety of the criminal case. Okon, a woman who works in
one of the gambling houses of Tsukiji, was suspected by Tanimada of be-
ing involved in the murder. That this suspicion itself is highly suspect is
obvious to Ōtomo as well as to the readers given the simplicity of Tani-
mada’s reasoning: according to his memory, Okon, with whom Tanimada
became acquainted during his past undercover stint in Tsukiji, has curly
hair similar to those found on the victim.64 But regardless of the quality
of his reasoning, Okon was involved in the murder, albeit not criminally
and not in the way Tanimada had imagined, and it is her capture and con-
fession which lead to the revelation of her former husband Chin Shinei
as the murderer. That is, while Ōtomo’s analytical method exposes the ir-
rationality of Tanimada’s method, the former does not prove the ineffec-
tiveness of the latter. How is this possible? And what is the significance

—————
64. Rightfully, then, Ōtomo has this to say to the police captain regarding
Tanimada’s investigation: “Tanimada thought this to be curly hair and thought
of Okon. That is his mistake. If his suspicions are right, then it is a fluke” (31).
102 Allegories of Detective Fiction

of this strange narrative structure of Muzan that seems to go against

Ruikō’s own positioning of this work?
Upon arriving at the crime scene, Tanimada observes the numerous
wounds on the victim and quickly comes to the hypothesis that the vic-
tim was killed by multiple assailants. But since such a way of killing would
create lots of noise and there has been no report of such commotion,
Tanimada argues that the crime must have occurred in a place where such
commotion is commonplace. Ōtomo, however, is full of doubt regarding
this conclusion, not believing in the existence of a place where a fight is
so common that the neighbors would not report it to the police. To this
Tanimada suggests the gambling houses, but Ōtomo does not believe
that such places exist in Tokyo either. He states: “There is no way that a
gambling house like that exists in this world of civilization and enlight-
enment [kaimei sekai ]” (21). Here Ōtomo is a naïve believer in the power
of the law who cannot distinguish between what should be and what is.
With the enforcement of the Criminal Code in 1882, gambling became
illegal in Japan, and gamblers became the target of severe government
prosecution around 1884 when it became clear to the authorities that
there was a strong connection between groups of gamblers and radical
members of the Liberal Party responsible for various violent acts against
the government.65 In this context, Ōtomo’s view of 1889 Japan as a soci-
ety of “civilization and enlightenment” suggests his presumption of the
government’s success in eliminating gamblers and gambling houses
through its laws and, thus, his failure to question the government’s ability
to accomplish what it set out to accomplish.
But Tanimada’s hypotheses regarding the murder case put into ques-
tion not only the effectiveness of the government but also its very au-
thority. According to Tanimada, gambling houses do exist in Tsukiji, a
foreign settlement consisting mainly of Chinese denizens where Japanese
laws are not applicable because of the extraterritoriality clause in the un-
equal treaties.66 To this bit of news, Ōtomo responds in a manner tinged
with nationalistic undertones: “So in Tsukiji, the Chinese are taking ad-
vantage of the fact that Japanese law doesn’t apply there to do disre-
—————
65. A government detective’s report in June 1884 makes this connection ex-
plicit. For details, see Yasumaru, “ ‘Kangoku’ no tanjō,” especially 305–9.
66. Edward Seidensticker states: “Tsukiji was never popular with Europeans
and Americans, except the missionaries among them. The foreign population
wavered around a hundred, and increasingly it was Chinese” (Low City, High City,
36).
 Allegories of Detective Fiction 103

spectful things like that” (22). As a naïve rookie detective who denies the
existence of an unlawful and chaotic space where a murderous commo-
tion would not be reported by its denizens, Ōtomo accepts Tanimada’s
propositions only when he realizes that this space exists within the for-
eign settlements beyond the reach of Japanese law.
Through Tanimada’s hypotheses and Ōtomo’s response to them, then,
Muzan constructs a binary opposition between the ‘enlightened’ and vigi-
lant Japanese citizens who would no doubt report any commotion to the
police and the criminally “disrespectful” Chinese who not only abuse the
extraterritoriality clause of the unequal treaties to dabble in ‘unenlight-
ened’ activities like gambling but who also prey on Japanese citizens—
like the victim—goading them into doing the same and thereby exposing
them to criminal danger. And this binary opposition extends to the re-
spective spaces in which they live: Tokyo as a space of law and order and
Tsukiji as a crime nest located outside it. But precisely because Tsukiji,
while separate from the rest of Tokyo in terms of the law, exists geo-
graphically within the city, Tsukiji and its Chinese denizens are presented
by the text as threats to the development of Japan as a nation of “civiliza-
tion and enlightenment.” The story’s ending assigns Tanimada, despite
his faulty analysis, to the role of the mediator between a mysterious crime
and its truths and confirms these binary oppositions and the underlying
equation of racial/national prejudice that constitute them: Tsukiji = the
Chinese = crime.
By giving such a role to Tanimada, Muzan not only questions the
need for a detective like Ōtomo who employs the analytical method but
also problematizes the analytical nature of his method by bringing at-
tention to the fact that it, too, bases itself on such racial/national ste-
reotypes. This can be seen in his analysis of the hair found on the victim
in the previously cited passage—“this way of curling must be from a
Chinese man . . . there are no men aside from Chinese men who add
false hair”—and is reiterated in the way that he ultimately discovers the
criminal’s identity. After he learns that the criminal also dyes his hair,
Ōtomo simply asks a Chinese seller of ink if he knows anyone who sells
or uses hair dye. That this seller immediately directs Ōtomo to Chin
Shinei in Tsukiji reflects, as does Tanimada’s capture of Okon, the ease
with which the Chinese criminals of Tsukiji can be identified and con-
trolled by Japanese authorities.67 Thus, Ōtomo’s analysis confirms the
—————
67. The highly prejudicial attitude toward the Chinese in this text—and, by
extension, Ruikō, who would reveal his jingoistic tendencies during the Sino-
104 Allegories of Detective Fiction

equation of racial/national prejudice on which Tanimada’s speculations

are based, positing it as the reality that founds the world of Muzan as a
whole.
But the identification of the criminal by Tanimada and Ōtomo alike
does more than provide a seemingly reassuring message regarding the
ability for Japanese authorities to fight crime. By locating the source of
the crime outside the purview of Japanese authorities—that is, the Chi-
nese living in Tsukiji—Muzan leaves the internal order of Japanese soci-
ety and its continued progress toward civilization and enlightenment
briefly disrupted but fundamentally unscathed, despite the violent mur-
der that initiates the story. At the bottom of this mechanism is the extra-
territoriality clause of the unequal treaties that underscores the disrup-
tion of social order brought on by the crime as the result of a problem
whose causes are not only external but also political in origin.68 This em-
phasis, in turn, produces a slippage in Muzan where the crime becomes an
aftereffect of the criminality brought on by the absence of law, a slippage
of the problem-to-be-solved from the crime case to its political cause that
is particularly resonant in Muzan because it manifests itself in the figure
of Ōtomo as the protagonist of the story.
Upon discovering the identity of the criminal but prior to disclosing
his analysis to the police chief and to the readers, Ōtomo suggests the
magnitude of his findings and their political implications. He states:
This isn’t an ordinary crime. Because the criminal is at an unexpected place, the
day I reveal his name, it will cause a flutter; it will move public opinion. If peo-
ple have public speeches because of this, like the time of treaty negotiations, I
will most likely be their orator; I will be like Ōi Kentarō. I can return to my
hometown with success accomplished (30).

—————
Japanese War (1894–1895)—can be inferred from the name that he gives to the
criminal of Muzan Chin Shinei. Although such a name can be found among the
Chinese population, the combination of the surname Chin, one of the most
common surnames, with Shinei, which in phonetic Japanese is the imperative
form of the verb “to die,” reveals a racial slur that was most likely understood as
such by the readers of Muzan.
68. The presentation of the crime’s cause as existing externally to the society
of the detective and the readers is a common practice among the detective stories
of Poe and Conan Doyle, which locate the source of the crime—the origin of the
criminal and/or the motive of the criminal—in the non-Western countries and
colonies. But as I argue below, Muzan develops this characteristic along a dif-
ferent trajectory.
 Allegories of Detective Fiction 105

In this passage, Ōtomo reveals himself as a subject whose investigations

into the murder case bring out his political aspirations. Believing that the
murder case involves the killing of a Japanese citizen by a Chinese na-
tional, Ōtomo fantasizes an international scandal involving the issue of
extraterritoriality and of the unequal treaties that force this condition
on the Japanese authorities. Importantly, his fantasy develops within the
framework of the Freedom and People’s Rights movement as he com-
pares the ‘impending’ scandal to the public uproar during the treaty nego-
tiations of 1887, identifying himself with Ōi Kentarō (1843–1922), one of
the most prominent figures of the movement.69 That is, the police de-
tective Ōtomo views the likes of boisterous sōshi, who were responsible
for the public uproar during the treaty negotiations, not as past enemies
of the state who disrupted the order of Japanese society, but as heroes of
the past whom he hopes to emulate. In so doing, Muzan suggests that the
reorganization of frustrated political energies, as the goal of Ruikō’s
adaptions of Western detective stories, has not been fully successful,
ready to rear its ugly head if given the chance. For, in Muzan, the de-
tective whose task should be the restoration of order disrupted by the
event of the crime reveals himself as a patriot who seeks to use the crime
as an opportunity to disrupt social order by creating public uproar and
political dissension.70
—————
69. Historically speaking, such a view on the part of Ōtomo suggests the suc-
cess of the government to incorporate, rather than to punish, the political activ-
ists of the Freedom and People’s Rights movement into the national program.
On the most visible level, this process took the form of the incorporation of the
movement’s leaders into the cabinet and the peerage system. For example,
Ōkuma Shigenobu (1838–1922), the founder and leader of Rikken kaishintō (the
Constitutional Reform Party) and Gotō Shōjirō (1838–1897), a member of the
Liberal Party and the leader of the nationwide political movement that took
place in the late 1880s, became peers and members of the Kuroda cabinet in the
late 1880s. In conjunction with the promulgation of the Meiji Constitution on
February 11, 1889, moreover, prisoners of political crimes were pardoned and re-
leased. Among the more famous of these prisoners included Kōno Hironaka
(1849–1923) who was serving time for his ‘involvement’ in the Fukushima Inci-
dent, Hoshi Tōru (1850–1901) who was a leading member of the Liberal Party,
and, fittingly enough, Ōi Kentaro who had been imprisoned for his involvement
in the Osaka Incident.
70. The fact that this political fantasy becomes his primary interest behind
the solving of the murder case can be easily discerned by Ōtomo’s repeated em-
phasis of the political magnitude of the case in his comments to the police cap-
tain Ogisawa: “If it was just a murder then it is just a crime, but if [the criminal]
106 Allegories of Detective Fiction

But as the story would have it, such aspirations are shattered, and the
possibility of an international scandal becomes foreclosed when the de-
tectives learn at the end of the story that the victim—presumed to be
Japanese—was actually Chin Shinei’s brother (and Okon’s lover), and,
thus, Chinese. Coming to light through Okon’s confession, the mistake
in the assumption of the victim’s national identity stems from the simple
fact that Chin’s brother was dressed and had a haircut like a Japanese
person. To the extent that the murder involved two Chinese brothers
who shared the same woman, the discovery of the victim’s national iden-
tity negates the nationalistic outrage on the part of Ōtomo—and, by ex-
tension, on the part of the readers—that a Japanese citizen was killed by
a Chinese national whose criminality had been harbored by the extra-
territoriality clause of the unequal treaties.
At the same time, however, it brings out another fear: just by imitating
a Japanese on the most superficial level, any Chinese person—who, ac-
cording to the world of Muzan, is most likely to be criminal in nature—
has the power to blend in with the Japanese, and in so doing, ‘pollute’ the
lawfulness of Japanese society. And here Walter Benjamin’s observation
once again seems relevant, albeit tangentially: “The original social con-
tent of the detective story was the obliteration of the individual’s traces
in the big-city crowd.”71 In Muzan, of course, the obliteration is not of
the individual but of national identity. And in the detective story that
Benjamin discusses, it is precisely the task of the detective to counter this
“obliteration of the individual’s traces” in the actual world and to resur-
rect the individual and its traces in “the big-city crowd” on the level of the
imaginary. In contrast, Muzan works not in individual details but in racial/
national stereotypes, but to the extent that they make a mistake in their
assessment of the victim’s national identity, the detectives of Muzan fail
the task of the detective that Benjamin describes.
In the end, Muzan problematizes the assuring message—that Chinese
stereotypes allow for easy arrests of Chinese criminals—through the
discovery of the victim’s national identity that suggests the ease with
which such stereotypes can be shed. While the ‘solving’ of the crime in
Muzan may assuage the fear of the ‘criminal’ Chinese to spread outside
the foreign settlements, the story also incites the exact same fear by
pointing out the limitations of the investigatory methods of Ōtomo and
—————
is Chinese, it might become a problem between countries” (35); “If the newspa-
pers got a hold of this, it will create a public uproar” (43).
71. Benjamin, “The Paris of the Second Empire in Baudelaire,” 43.
 Allegories of Detective Fiction 107

Tanimada alike. Rather than proposing an investigatory method whose

reproduction will ensure order—albeit at the level of the imaginary—in
the everyday lives of the story’s readers, Muzan posits a social condition
and the coming of an age in which such an investigatory method based
on racial/national stereotypes will no longer be valid. The social condi-
tion is the mixing of Japanese and Chinese citizens; the age is when the
boundaries of superficial national identity have become blurred.
In so doing, Muzan reinforces the popular fear regarding the issue of
cohabitation (naichi zakkyo; literally, mixed residence in the interior) that
was growing during the late 1880s in conjunction with the government’s
renegotiations of the unequal treaties headed by the Foreign Minister
Inoue Kaoru. One of the stipulations in the renegotiations was that, in
return for the partial restoration of Japan’s rights to prosecute and tax
foreigners, Japan would abolish the system of foreign settlements and
open itself up to foreigners. But this stipulation prompted various op-
positions in and out of the government. As Sakamoto Takao notes, be-
hind these oppositions existed “the anxiety triggered by the laws of then
fashionable social Darwinism that if the inland were opened, foreigners
would dominate the Japanese in various social spheres.”72 While the in-
definite postponement of the renegotiations on July 29, 1887 and Inoue’s
resignation on September 17, 1887 assured that cohabitation would not
take place, at least for the time being, this issue would continue to plague
Japan well into the 1890s.
In Muzan, the fear is not of the Westerners as a ‘superior race’ that
would dominate Japan if given the chance. Rather, the fear is of the Chi-
nese as criminals who will ‘pollute’ the order of Japanese society and
threaten Japan’s progress toward “civilization and enlightenment.” By
revealing the ease with which the differentiation between a Japanese and
a Chinese can be made problematic, Muzan fuels this fear and makes it
particularly poignant precisely because such differentiation depends on
national identity rather than racial identity: in the most superficial terms
of Muzan, a Japanese and a Chinese can look alike. But fueling this fear
also does something else. It reorganizes the hierarchy between Japan
and Western nations—a hierarchy that weighed heavily on Meiji officials
and intellectuals alike—as a hierarchy between Japan and China, in which
the latter is posited as the uncivilized and unenlightened nation from
which the former must set itself apart. In short, the fear of the Chinese

—————
72. Sakamoto, Meiji kokka no kensetsu, 316.
108 Allegories of Detective Fiction

reinforces a hierarchical relationship in which Japan and its citizens

can understand themselves as occupying a superior position. And it is
through the figure of the detective Ōtomo who utilizes Western meth-
ods of investigation that Muzan secures this Japanese superiority: al-
though a Japanese and a Chinese may look alike, a Japanese thinks like
a Westerner.

D
In November 1892, Kuroiwa Ruikō left the Miyako shinbun to establish
his own newspaper Yorozu chōhō. By this time, he had amassed a vast
number of fans who craved their daily dose of detective fiction, as vividly
illustrated by the following figure: by December 1892, only a month after
the establishment of Yorozu chōhō, the Miyako shinbun’s readership had
dwindled from 27,000 to 7,000 while the Yorozu chōhō already boasted a
circulation of 35,000.73 But significantly, the Yorozu chōhō would not be-
come known for its detective stories but another project whose prece-
dents played a fundamental role in their emergence. With the reporting
of the House of Sōma scandal in July 1893, the Yorozu chōhō established
itself as the leader of yellow journalism and, through the decade and into
the new millennium, it continued to uncover various scandals of the
upper class, political parties, and religious organizations.74 And comple-
menting the Yorozu chōhō’s project was Ruikō’s turn away from detective
stories to family romance and tales of adventure whose moral world of
values could serve as the criteria by which the subjects of scandal reports
were to be judged.
Indeed, given the historically specific function of the genre, it seems
natural that the golden age of detective fiction was short lived.75 While

—————
73. The figures are from Itō Hideo, Kuroiwa Ruikō: tantei shōsetsu no ganso, 135.
74. The House of Sōma scandal involved the rightful heir of a family of the
peerage who had been imprisoned in his own house by the members of his own
family because of his mental illness. For an overview of the scandals covered in
Yorozu chōhō, including the House of Sōma scandal, see Oku, Sukyandaru no Meiji.
75. The detective fiction boom would continue until around 1895 thanks to
those who tried to cash in on the popularity of detective stories fashioned by
Ruikō. The Miyako shinbun responded to the rapid drop in sales caused by Ruikō’s
departure by serializing what they called “real-life detective stories” (tantei jitsuwa,
stories based loosely on real-life events) beginning in March 1893. As mentioned
in the Introduction, moreover, the literary group Ken’yūsha began publication of
the “detective novel” series in January 1893.
 Allegories of Detective Fiction 109

Ruikō’s translated detective stories would continue to be popular reading

materials, I would argue that their political function had become largely
inoperative by the early 1890s. As much a story of the exposure of dark
secrets of the upper class as the story of the discovery of the criminal,
Ruikō’s adaptations functioned to redirect the unresolved political ener-
gies of the Freedom and People’s Rights movement, which had quickly
deteriorated in the late 1880s. On the one hand, the specific structure of
Ruikō’s detective stories suggested that the members of the upper class,
the victors within risshin shusse ideology, were just as immoral, if not more
so, as those whose sociopolitical ambitions and dreams were shattered by
the harsh realities of Meiji society. On the other hand, by embedding
such a structure within the detective fiction form in which all the ten-
sions developed within the narrative are forcibly resolved in the discovery
of the criminal, Ruikō’s stories sought to temper the readers’ responses
to the immorality of the upper class in the story-world as well as in the
real world and turn frustrated political activists into entertained private
readers.
In this sense, Ruikō’s detective stories ultimately were an ingenious
mechanism of misdirection to weather the period of crisis in the late
1880s just as Japan was consolidating itself as a modern nation. And as
misdirection, they never succeeded in resolving the fundamental prob-
lem created by the collapse of the Freedom and People’s Rights move-
ment, namely, the future of Meiji youths left without ways to be pro-
ductive citizens in an apolitical society. But this is not to say that Ruikō
was oblivious of such issues, as his keen awareness of this problem is
made clear in Muzan through its protagonist Ōtomo. To the extent that
the acquisition of Western learning was one of the primary pursuits of
the Japanese intellectuals in the Meiji period, Ōtomo is a successful fig-
ure of such a pursuit and a model for Meiji students whose goals were to
do the same. But at the same time, his turn toward nationalistic politics
in the course of his investigations reveals Ōtomo to contain elements of
unresolved political energies that could erupt at any moment if given
the chance.
As suggested by the lack of Muzan’s successors, it would be a difficult
task to mediate the ideological fusion between the detective, the student,
and the political activist within the sociohistorical realities of Japan at
the turn of the twentieth century and to present a successful example
of incorporating the Meiji educated class into the national program as
productive citizens. Indeed, as we shall see in the following chapters, the
Japanese novel as the flip side of the detective story developed in the
110 Allegories of Detective Fiction

opposite direction—the interpellation and identification of the educated

with the criminal rather than with the detective—as if in search of a
new ideological mechanism through which the detective can emerge.
And fittingly enough, this search finds its foundation in the example of
an eruption of frustrated political energies that results in a double murder
of an old pawnbroker and her sister in Fyodor Dostoevsky’s masterpiece
Crime and Punishment whose Japanese translation appeared in the same
month that Ruikō established his Yorozu chōhō.
 THREE

Of Crimes and Punishments:

The Tribulations of Meiji Students
in the Writings of Japanese Naturalism

Often touted as the first modern novel of Japan, Futabatei Shimei’s Uki-
gumo already suggests the fundamentally different inflection of the de-
velopment of the Japanese novel to its Western counterpart. Its pro-
tagonist Bunzō—characterized by his “Western learning” and “boarding
house” existence, the two critical traits of the student as described in
the opening passage of Tsubouchi Shōyō’s Tōsei shosei katagi—seems to
have had a bright future.1 But we do not even get a glimpse of this fu-
ture fulfilled, for Ukigumo begins with the destruction of one future
hope, his success in a government post, to tell the chain of events lead-
ing to the destruction of another, his marriage to Osei. And importantly,
in narrating this tragic fate of a Japanese intellectual, Ukigumo squarely
places his characteristic Western learning at the center of his failures,

—————
1. Tsubouchi, Tōsei shosei katagi, 223. This is not to say that Tōsei shosei katagi
simply provides a positive view of the future for Meiji students, for, as Atsuko
Ueda has argued, it depicted the students of private schools dreaming of success
when “an irreversible hierarchy was being instituted between state and private
schools. The future of private-school students was grim: if government were to
succeed in its endeavor, they would have no hope of taking part in politics at the
center” (Concealment of Politics, Politics of Concealment, 119).
112 Of Crimes and Punishments

thereby providing a scathing criticism of risshin shusse ideology that

drove the ambitious Meiji youths in the preceding decade.
Not only does Ukigumo present Bunzō’s idealistic and stubborn belief
in reason and logic as determiners of what is right and wrong—that is,
Western learning as a code of praxis as opposed to nominal credential—
as the reason for his dismissal from his post, but it also reveals the ten-
dencies for such reason and logic to quickly deteriorate into something
different altogether. In the course of the story, Bunzō’s reason-based re-
flection (or so he thinks) regarding Osei turns into rhetoric of fantasy
that enables him to disavow the realities of his relationship to her, pro-
ducing one delusion after another so that he can reclaim his self-worth
in the world from the confines of his second-floor room to which he
has become withdrawn.2 And to the extent that the seemingly large-scale
nature of dismissals that serve as the backdrop of the story must have
evoked in the Meiji readers the major restructuring of the bureaucratic
system in 1885, Ukigumo reframes and represents such a sociopolitical cause
that lies, for the most part, beyond one’s control in individual terms of
his relationship to Western learning.3 In this sense, Ukigumo posited the
Meiji student as a subject of blame who needed rescuing and, through
this sacrifice, maintained the façade that the possibilities for risshin shusse
were still alive and well, despite the primary avenues for advancement—
the bureaucrat and the political activist—no longer being viable choices
for most by the late 1880s.
But if such were the case, then it was logical that a need would arise for
a positive model within risshin shusse ideology, which the detective story
was happy to provide through its hero, the detective, whose knowledge
of Western logic and science assisted in the capture of a criminal and
thereby posited him as a productive citizen within the framework of
the nation. Indeed, this characteristic of the detective and his function
is emphasized in Ruikō’s Muzan, published just a month after the last
installment of Ukigumo appeared in the journal Miyako no hana (The
flower of the capital) in August 1889. Through its detective Ōtomo, Mu-

—————
2. As Komori Yōichi observes: “at the source of the production of Bunzō’s
delusions was precisely the ‘reflection’ and ‘examination’ based on ‘facts’ accord-
ing to ‘reason and learning’ ” (Kōzō to shite no katari, 145).
3. Futabatei seems to suggest a sociopolitical cause behind Bunzō’s dismissal
that stems from his family lineage when the text reveals that Bunzō is from Shizu-
oka, a stronghold of bakufu sympathizers, and that his father served for the old
bakufu. However, this suggestion never finds further support in the text.
 Of Crimes and Punishments 113

zan posits the second-floor room of his lodgings—which would become

an important trope of modern Japanese literature thanks to Ukigumo,
as Maeda Ai has argued—not as an antisocial space of delusion and dis-
avowal but as a productive space of analysis and investigation.4 In so do-
ing, Muzan counters Ukigumo, presenting Ōtomo in direct opposition to
Bunzō.
Like Bunzō, Muzan’s Ōtomo, characterized by his student-like ap-
pearance and described as an educated man who reads Western novels
and is versed in Western science and logic, is a man of contemplation.
But unlike Bunzō, whose Western learning proves useless in getting at
the truth in question (the feelings of Osei), Ōtomo’s knowledge of West-
ern science and logic is revealed as a powerful tool in arriving at the truth
of the murder case. Analyzing evidence and formulating hypotheses, he
concludes the time spent in his room with his praise of the Western ways:
“The power of science and logic is amazing. By examining only three
pieces of hair on the second floor of [my] lodgings, I was able to produce
this many clues.”5 Furthermore, Muzan seems to present Ōtomo’s ‘rise’
to a police detective as a dream come true. Unlike Bunzō who became a
government official out of monetary necessity and contemporary custom,
Ōtomo does not see himself as someone who has been forced to join
the police squad. Ōtomo is a police detective not because he could not
become a government official or a politician; rather, his being a detective
is presented as a conscious choice: “I am a person who was kicked out of
school because [playing] detective was my hobby.”6 In Ōtomo, we seem
to find the dream of making work out of one’s hobby.
But, as we saw in the last chapter, Muzan ultimately is an ambivalent
text that also suggests the difficulty for such a hero to maintain his sym-
bolic power as an apolitical and productive utilization of Western edu-
cation when Ōtomo’s political ambitions that were no doubt thwarted
by the collapse of the Freedom and People’s Rights movement in the late
1880s reemerge as a chauvinistic cry for renewed political action in the
course of his investigations. And if such ambivalence surrounding the de-
tective intimated the need for further ideological operation connecting
him with apolitical productivity within the framework of Meiji Japan,
then such developments were made difficult by the emergence of a new
archetype of the student, which would leave an unforgettable impression
—————
4. For details, see Maeda, “Nikai no geshuku.”
5. Kuroiwa, Muzan, 29.
6. Ibid., 26.
114 Of Crimes and Punishments

on Meiji intellectuals. This figure was Raskolnikov, the protagonist of

Fyodor Dostoevsky’s Crime and Punishment, the translation of which ap-
peared in Japan in the early 1890s. A troubled student who turns to crime
after his hopes of rising in the world through education had been shat-
tered, Raskolnikov foreshadowed the dark future awaiting those who as-
pired to rise in the world through education in 1890s Japan and beyond
and the potential dangers they may pose for the society at large.
The Meiji reception of Crime and Punishment and how the literary
works of modern Japan negotiated the dangers intimated by the Russian
masterpiece are the subjects of this chapter. As I argue, although varying
in their connection to the Russian work in terms of direct influence, key
works within the development of modern Japanese literature utilized
similar narrative structures to that of Crime and Punishment—the focus
on the criminal secret harbored by an individual, the revelation of this
secret, and the resulting banishment from society—to explore the dark
fate awaiting the educated youths in the world that did not operate ac-
cording to ideals and principles. And nowhere was this more evident than
in Shimazaki Tōson’s Hakai and Tayama Katai’s Futon, the groundbreak-
ing works of Japanese Naturalism, which emerged as the dominant lit-
erary trend after the Russo-Japanese War. Although standard literary his-
tories have seen a rift separating these two works due to the difference in
the social significance of their subject matter, I argue that they are in-
timately connected in their attempt to engage critically with the fun-
damental problematics of Crime and Punishment for Meiji Japan, as they
narrated the tribulations of its youths within the ideology of risshin shusse
who, because of their marginalizing marks, are ultimately interpellated as
criminals by the people and communities that surround them.7

—————
7. Tomi Suzuki succinctly summarizes the traditional understanding of Japa-
nese Naturalism as follows: “The standard literary histories divide Japanese Natu-
ralism into two stages: ‘early Naturalism’ (zenki shizenshugi ), which emerged
around 1900 under the direct but undigested influence of Émile Zola, and ‘late
Naturalism’ (kōki shizenshugi ), a more domesticated form of naturalism repre-
sented by such writers as Tōson, Katai, Masamune Hakuchō, and Tokuda Shūsei.
Early Naturalism is generally thought to be a superficial adaptation of Zola-
ism, whereas late Naturalism, whose direction Futon is thought to have irreversi-
bly determined, is characterized as a factual description of the author’s private
life, without the wider social dimension found in European naturalism” (Narrating
the Self, 79).
 Of Crimes and Punishments 115

Raskolnikov in Meiji Japan

In November 1892, the same month that Kuroiwa Ruikō established
his newspaper Yorozu chōhō, Uchida Roan published the first installment
of Tsumi to batsu, the translation of Crime and Punishment (covering up to
Part 2, Chapter 3 of Fredrick Whishaw’s English translation of Crime and
Punishment, the source of Roan’s translation). The second installment
(covering up to the end of Part 3) would be published in February 1893,
leaving just about half of the novel untranslated when Roan abandoned
the project supposedly due to poor sales, a surprising turn of events
in hindsight given the sociocultural environment at the time.8 Despite
focusing on the actions and thoughts of the criminal instead of the detec-
tive, Tsumi to batsu undoubtedly possessed many characteristic elements
of the detective fiction genre, which was enjoying its golden age thanks
to Ruikō, and seemed destined to be consumed within this trend, as Iro-
kawa Daikichi among others has suggested.9
As Takahashi Osamu has argued, moreover, Roan seemed to have
helped such a mode of consumption, whether consciously or not, by “ac-
tively devising elements that would be construed as a ‘detective novel,’ ”
such as translating the phrase “prying eyes” in the English base text of
the Russian work “it was gloomy enough to hide him from prying eyes”
as “the hawk eyes of a detective” when Raskolnikov goes to the pawn-
broker’s apartment to consider the possibilities that his crime would be
detected.10 The psychological battle between Raskolnikov and the police
detective Porfiry in the nineteenth chapter (next to last chapter that was
published) also presented Tsumi to batsu as a successor to Ruikō’s detec-
tive stories to the extent that Porfiry’s first attempt at incriminating
Raskolnikov—by asking him whether he saw painters when he visited the
pawnbroker two days before her murder when the painters were only
working on the day of the murder—constituted the exact kind of trickery
—————
8. Akiyama Yūzō states that Roan’s translation only sold about 400 copies
(Hon’yaku no chihei, 78).
9. Irokawa states that “works like Crime and Punishment were appreciated
simply as detective stories” during the 1890s (The Culture of the Meiji Period, 73).
Takahashi Osamu argues that reviews by Yoda Gakkai and Iwamoto Yoshiharu,
contained in the second installment of Tsumi to batsu, suggest their reading of
Tsumi to batsu within the context of “crime fiction.” For details, see Takahashi,
“ ‘Tantei shōsetsu’ ga inpei suru mono,” 37.
10. Takahashi, “ ‘Tantei shōsetsu’ ga inpei suru mono,” 41. The original text is
the English translation by Fredrick Whishaw.
116 Of Crimes and Punishments

that Ruikō’s detectives often employed. Raskolnikov is not as easily

duped as Ruikō’s criminals, however, instantly discovering “the trap hid-
den within Porfiry’s question” and thereby foreshadowing the psycho-
logical battles that would have continued between the two if Roan had
not abandoned the translation.11
Even more peculiar when considering Roan’s abandonment of the
translation is the overwhelmingly positive critical response that the work
received immediately upon its appearance. Indeed, the second install-
ment of Tsumi to batsu contains a compilation of 18 reviews totaling 49
pages that were written after the publication of its first installment in
various venues by the key figures of Meiji intellectual circles, including
Tsubouchi Shōyō, Aeba Kōson, Iwamoto Yoshiharu (1863–1942), Morita
Shiken (1861–1897), and Kitamura Tōkoku (1868–1894). While obviously
differing from each other in significant ways, the reviews shared their
positive reception, filled with phrases such as “a masterpiece,” “a must-
read among all the recent novels,” and “the best of the psychological nov-
els,” the last of which suggests the work’s appeal to those who shared
Shōyō’s understanding of the novel given the story’s detailed depiction
of Raskolnikov’s internal conflict. Many of the reviewers also expressed
a strong, albeit ambivalent, impression felt upon reading Roan’s transla-
tion. For example, Shōyō states that on the night that he began reading
this work, he had “an unpleasant dream,” which he later discovered was
related to a “pessimistic feeling.” Similarly, Kōson, the translator of Poe’s
“The Murders in the Rue Morgue” and “The Black Cat,” states that he
“grew a feeling of fear as if he was sitting alone in a dark empty room
and felt the eyes of a person from behind” and was “filled with a feeling of
an unspeakable unpleasantness as if [he] had taken on half of the crime
and punishment of the protagonist” with whom he identified.12
In addition to their profound impressions of the story, the reviews
shared their characterizations of Raskolnikov as a student ( gakusei, shosei,
or daigakusei ). Of course, this is not surprising considering that Crime
and Punishment, in short, is a story about a university student who has
fallen on hard times and the dreadful crime he commits as a result. It is
surprising, however, that not a single reviewer of Tsumi to batsu makes
an explicit mention of Ukigumo’s Bunzō—a Meiji exemplar of a student
—————
11. Uchida Roan, Tsumi to batsu, in Meiji hon’yaku bungakushū, 263. All subse-
quent references to this source will appear in the text in parentheses.
12. “Zenkan hihyō,” in Uchida Roan, Tsumi to batsu, vol. 2, 4, 19, 3, 1, and 2–3,
respectively.
 Of Crimes and Punishments 117

down on his luck—especially given their shared characteristic of being

a contemplative subject prone to fantasy and alienated from society. As
described in detail from the first pages of Tsumi to batsu, Raskolnikov is
a man suffering from “a nervous depression similar to hypochondria”
and “completely divorced from society, shutting himself up in his room,
and loathed unbearably to come face to face not only with the landlady
of his lodging but also with anyone” (141). It is true that, Raskolnikov,
unlike Bunzō, seems to be aware of his own condition, but the down-
ward spiral of a contemplative subject is no different in the latter from
the former. When Raskolnikov finally leaves his room, he reflects: “I
just theorize too much. That’s why I don’t do anything. Or rather, it is
because I don’t do anything that I theorize. From day to night, I lie in
the corner of the room and think hard” (142). And when his thoughts
turn to his plan (the murder of the pawnbroker, although the text does
not specify): “No, I am just consoling myself by kindling such fantasies”
(142).
But despite the reviews not making an explicit connection between
the two works, this is not to say that no one sought to get to the bottom
of his unease at reading Tsumi to batsu and its relationship to Raskol-
nikov’s similarities to the likes of Bunzō. In his two reviews of the
Russian work, the poet and critic Kitamura Tōkoku provides a detailed
analysis of Raskolnikov’s character and the motives behind his crime, and
it is in Tōkoku’s arguments—especially those found in the second review
which appeared in Jogaku zasshi ( Journal for women’s education) in Janu-
ary 1893—that we discover the ideological significance of Roan’s trans-
lation within the intellectual circles of 1890s Japan. Written in part as a
response to the Chinese studies scholar and critic Yoda Gakkai (1833–
1909), Tōkoku’s second review states that Tsumi to batsu is not a work that
“entertains the vulgar like the detective novels of Ruikō” and rejects
Gakkai’s criticism that “to develop a murderous intent of the wealthy old
lady just because he becomes angered at her avarice is extremely super-
ficial as an motive for murder.”13 Tōkoku writes:
If a stubborn man cannot obey the sanctions of society and the powers of nature,
and for this reason he is turned away by people and cast away by society, coming
to mock activity and enterprise, think of human beings as inane, think of things
like class order as annoying, believe love and sincerity to be meaningless, suspect
people indiscriminately, bear a great grudge against the heavens; and ultimately
—————
13. “Zenkan hihyō,” in Uchida Roan, Tsumi to batsu, vol. 2, 40, 43; Kitamura,
Kitamura Tōkoku shū, 110, 108 .
118 Of Crimes and Punishments

the peace of his spirit is broken, and he does something he should not do and
commit a crime whose evil is beyond his own knowing—should such crime, a
murder for example, be considered meaningless and without cause? Should a
book that dissects psychologically and describes in detail the process of how this
crime was established be dismissed as superficial and shallow?14

In this long passage in which he outlines the steps through which Ras-
kolnikov came to commit the heinous crime, Tōkoku suggests the social
nature of Raskolnikov’s motivations by describing how a crime is con-
nected to the individual’s alienation from society.15 Unable or unwilling
to “obey the sanctions of society and the powers of nature,” Raskol-
nikov becomes excluded from society, which consists of people who ad-
here to these rules, and, to justify his disobedience, turns to discredit
the social and ‘natural’ values that found society such as activity, enter-
prise, social order, love, and sincerity. It is through this course of alien-
ation that we get to the direct cause of the crime whose “evil is beyond
his own knowing,” namely, that “the peace of his spirit is broken”—
a cause that suggests Tōkoku’s understanding of Raskolnikov’s crime to
be a result of a mental breakdown or shinkei suijaku, a term that was
quickly gaining currency in 1890s Japan and from which Tōkoku himself
was said to suffer.16
Importantly, the key in establishing such line of argument is the in-
timate connection between the causes behind the murder and Raskol-
—————
14. “Zenkan hihyō,” in Uchida Roan, Tsumi to batsu, vol. 2, 41; Kitamura, Kita-
mura Tōkoku shū, 109.
15. Indeed, the issue of the social origins of crime was one of the recurring
topics among the reviewers of Roan’s translation. For example, Iwamoto Yoshi-
haru writes that “the sins of humans come from the social system” (“Zenkan hi-
hyō,” in Uchida Roan, Tsumi to batsu, vol. 2, 10). Also a review that first appeared
in the journal Katei zasshi states the goal of Tsumi to batsu to be “to reveal the
crimes of society and to discuss the relationship between crime and punish-
ment” (“Zenkan hihyō,” in Uchida Roan, Tsumi to batsu, vol. 2, 19).
16. According to Watarai Yoshiichi, the first appearance of the term shinkei
suijaku can be found in Ensei ihō meibutsu kō (On the reputed medicine of the far
west) by the scholar of Dutch studies Udagawa Shinsai (1769–1834) in 1822. How-
ever, this condition, as well as the concept of mental disease in general, became
well known in Japan only in the late 1880s when Waei gorin shūsei ( Japanese-
English dictionary) by the American James Curtis Hepburn (1815–1911) included
the entry for shinkei byō (disease of the nerves) in 1886. Shortly thereafter, various
media, including newspaper articles, advertisements, and fiction, began using the
terms shinkei byō and shinkei suijaku. For details, see Watarai, Meiji no seishin isetsu,
31–33, 63–65.
 Of Crimes and Punishments 119

nikov’s background as a student. Arguing that “a murder does not neces-

sarily occur from a visible cause,” Tōkoku instead describes “the thrust”
of the Russian work as showing “how a horrifying magical power lurks in
the ultimate darkness of society, and how a wrongdoing that even those
without learning and reason would hesitate to devise is plotted inside
the mind of [a person] with learning and reason.”17 In drawing this con-
clusion of the critical connection between education and crime, then,
Tōkoku evokes Raskolnikov’s notion of the “exceptional” man, which
he expounds in his discussion with the detective Porfiry. Upon the de-
tective’s inquiry regarding an essay he published in a journal on the rela-
tionship between crime and social environment, Raskolnikov tells Por-
firy: “The exceptional has a right—of course, it is not from a legal point
of view but from the point of view of individual belief—to violate [the
law] in executing his ideas to the extent that his conscience allows” (259).
In such a way, Raskolnikov argues for the existence of two moralities,
one for the “unexceptional” based on the laws of society and another for
the “exceptional,” exemplified by Napoleon, whose actions are based on
individual ethics.
Raskolnikov’s articulation of the “exceptional” man occurs in the
nineteenth chapter contained in the second installment of Tsumi to batsu,
which was published after Tōkoku had written his two reviews. Because
of this fact, it is questionable that Tōkoku knew of such belief held by
Raskolnikov at the time, although there are many passages leading up
to the murder that foreshadow his notion of the “exceptional” man.18
But whether Tōkoku knew of this notion through other means prior to
his writing of the two reviews or not, what is clear is that lurking behind
—————
17. “Zenkan hihyō,” in Uchida Roan, Tsumi to batsu, vol. 2, 42; Kitamura, Kita-
mura Tōkoku shū, 109. In his first review of Tsumi to batsu, which appeared in Jogaku
zasshi in December 1892, Tōkoku also explicitly links education with a propensity
for mental illness, or, more specifically, hypochondria, from which Raskolnikov
is said to suffer. Tōkoku writes: “What kind of illness is a hypochondrium? Is this
an illness suffered only by those who are physically weak? Cannot a healthy person
also suffer from this illness? The uneducated do not suffer from this [illness]; on
the contrary, learning brings about this illness. The unlearned do not suffer from
this; and there are many with knowledge who suffer from this. The grudge toward
life is one of the biggest elements of this illness” (ibid., 25; 107).
18. According to an anecdote, there existed three copies of the English version
of Crime and Punishment at Maruzen bookstore at the time, which were purchased
by Tsubouchi Shōyō, Morita Shiken, and Uchida Roan. It is believed that the first
two never read the purchased copies (Kimura Ki, Maruzen gaishi, 199).
120 Of Crimes and Punishments

Tōkoku’s reviews was a similar notion of his own, which occupied a cen-
tral place in his philosophy in the early 1890s and finds its most explicit
articulation in the essay “Ensei shika to josei” (Disillusioned poets and
women) that appeared in Jogaku zasshi in February 1892.
A widely influential essay, which begins with the phrase “Love is the
secret key to life,” “Ensei shika to josei” articulates Tōkoku’s idealistic,
albeit narcissistic, notion of love that is crystallized in the statement
“Love is an unerring mirror that reflects the true ‘self’ once one sacrifices
oneself.”19 But more important for our present discussion is the conflict
between “real world” and “imaginary world” facing the individual in life
that buttresses this understanding of love. Tōkoku writes:
It cannot be avoided that there comes a time when that imaginary world, or
the world of innocence, stares at and becomes conflicted with the real world. . . .
The imaginary world can only be maintained by the ignorance of the disharmony
of society; thus, it is inevitable that once it touches the piercing of the real
world, it will be doomed. . . . At this time, the defeated general of the imaginary
world, dispirited and disheartened, will look to satisfy himself by gaining some-
thing. Being the reserves of the real world, things such as labor and duty are always
taking aim at the imaginary world. . . . What then is that which helps and satisfies
him [the defeated general of the imaginary world]? It is love.20

Arguing for love as that which fills the gap created in the defeat of the
imaginary world by the real world, Tōkoku presents life as a conflict be-
tween these two worlds in which the real world necessarily wins and
forces a compromise on the individual. Yet, according to Tōkoku who
would echo the same phrase in his analysis of the downward spiral of
Raskolnikov’s alienation from society less than a year later, the “disillu-
sioned” is comprised precisely of those who cannot make this compro-
mise: “in the first place, the disillusioned are those who cannot obey the
rules of society; those who do not take society as their homes.”21
The connection between Tōkoku’s notion of the “disillusioned” and
his analysis of Raskolnikov grows even stronger in the essay when he
turns to the details of the conflict between individual and society. He
writes: “It is during youth when knowledge and experience become hos-
tile toward each other and imagination and thoughts on reality come
to war that a feeling of suspicion and hostility toward the real world

—————
19. Kitamura Tōkoku, “Ensei shika to josei,” in Kitamura Tōkoku shū, 64.
20. Ibid., 65.
21. Ibid., 67.
 Of Crimes and Punishments 121

arises.”22 Corresponding almost verbatim once again to his understanding

of Raskolnikov’s condition, this description makes clear the deep divide
between the imaginary world of the thinking subject and the real world of
the experiencing subject. To the extent that the imaginary world consists
of “knowledge,” moreover, it is clear that one’s education and learning
have much to do with this world. On the one hand, education and learn-
ing provide individuals with knowledge in various forms and function to
promote reflection: they are sustenance for the growth of the imaginary
world. On the other hand, they bring about its doom, for “the imaginary
world can only be maintained by the ignorance of the disharmonies of
society.” And with learning, individuals not only become more observant
of society’s problems but also come to hold ideas of what society should
be like, ideas such as Raskolnikov’s notion of the “exceptional” man that
come into conflict with the realities of the society in which they exist.
Through such a conflict arising from comparison between the ‘should’
and the ‘is,’ the real world becomes a place filled with “disharmonies” for
the subject.
And here lurks the historically tragic significance of Crime and Pun-
ishment in Russia and Tsumi to batsu in Japan, two later developing coun-
tries that were feverishly trying to catch up with more powerful Western
nations. Central to this catching up process—institutionalized under the
rubric of bunmei kaika in Japan—was the education of the young on the
technologies and values of advanced Western societies, which, in turn,
provided powerful models for comparison that revealed their own socie-
ties as backward and full of contradictions. In this sense, the educated
youths of these countries—Bunzō and Raskolnikov, who are fluent
enough in English and German respectively to be able to work as transla-
tors as their last resorts—were most prone to what might be called the
specter of comparison whose haunting would lead them to become dis-
illusioned with their own societies.23

—————
22. Ibid., 66
23. The power hierarchy between Russia and Germany is illustrated by the
following example in Crime and Punishment: despite the novel’s negative portrayal
of Germans, Raskolnikov is offered a translation job by his friend Razhumikin
that pays three rubles for one page of German translation, whereas the watch of
Raskolnikov’s father nets only one and half ruble at the pawnbroker. Also, Futa-
batei’s Ukigumo contains a scene in which Bunzō translates a British political
tract (Futabatei, Ukigumo, 121, 143).
122 Of Crimes and Punishments

Furthermore, Russia and Japan share another fate. To the extent that
societies are filled with “disharmonies,” their peaceful maintenance re-
quires a certain level of resignation on the part of its people to question
the rights and wrongs of society’s rules. Of course, this is not to say that
society’s rules should not be questioned. In a democratic society, such
questioning should take the form of political action. But Russia and Ja-
pan were two nations whose citizens are excluded for the most part from
the political process, the former of which Tōkoku makes sure to high-
light in his first review of Tsumi to batsu as a country where “there exists an
iron fence between the aristocracy and the ordinary people” before tying
Raskolnikov’s crime to his education.24 The political energies thwarted
by the oppressive government re-manifest as criminal action when social
issues, which should be resolved through political action, are taken into
an individual’s own hands in the name of justice as revealed by Raskol-
nikov’s belief in the “exceptional” man: the “exceptional” man becomes
an educated man’s subjective justification of his helpless alienation from
society that robs its participants of possibilities for political action.
In Ukigumo, Bunzō’s alienation from society was described as a result
of his Western learning and rationalism, which deteriorated from func-
tioning as an ethical standard for his actions to a tool to disavow reality by
producing delusions. Ruikō’s Muzan sought to provide a more positive
view of Western learning and rationalism through the figure of the detec-
tive Ōtomo whose use of Western science and logic leads to the identifi-
cation of the criminal in a murder case. And buttressing this presentation
of Western learning were Ruikō’s wildly popular adaptations of Western
detective stories that portrayed the detective as a hero who served for the
good of society. Roan’s Tsumi to batsu, however, counters the positive
presentation of Western learning at a time when Ruikō’s popularity was
at its peak by portraying a much darker fate of the educated class through
the intimate connection it makes between the student and the criminal.
Despite the fact that it was a translation, the pertinence of this work to
the realities of Meiji intellectuals was undeniable. If Bunzō’s encounter
with the contradictions of society made him into a man of contemplation
and inactivity, then Raskolnikov shows that when such a man comes out
of his shell, the result may be criminally violent. And it was all because
they had studied, read, and thought too much. Like Ukigumo, the Russian
work suggested the possible ‘madness’ awaiting those youths whose road
—————
24. “Zenkan hihyō,” in Uchida Roan, Tsumi to batsu, vol. 2, 25; Kitamura, Ki-
tamura Tōkoku shū, 107.
 Of Crimes and Punishments 123

to social advancement had become foreclosed and how such ‘madness’—

self-quarantined in his second-floor room in Bunzō’s case—could explode
in the form of a heinous crime against society.
And what made the unsettling message of Tsumi to batsu even more
powerful in the first half of the 1890s were the paradigmatic changes in
the theoretical understanding of crime and the criminal during this pe-
riod, which would culminate in the promulgation of the New Criminal
Law (Shin-keihō) in 1907. Establishing itself when criminal cases were
growing more rampant than ever, the new school of criminologists, in-
cluding Tomii Masaakira (1858–1935), Koga Renzō (1858–1942), and Ho-
zumi Nobushige (1855–1926), viewed the criminal law, first and foremost,
as “a necessary tool for the maintenance of public order of a nation,” at-
tacking the prior focus on the notion of universal morality and the law as
a means of just punishment.25 In so doing, the new criminologists turned
their attention to the criminal and society where the internal workings of
the criminal provided the theoretical bridge between the two. As Seri-
zawa Kazuya states in his discussion of this shift: “the threat to society
exists not in the criminal act itself but in the nature of those who com-
mitted the crime and in the dangerous nature of that subjectivity [and]
the danger that the possessor of that subjectivity might bring to society
in the future.”26 No doubt in the same line of thought as Shōyō’s theory of
the novel in their emphasis on the private thoughts of the criminal as ob-
ject of detection and examination rather than on the public act of the
crime, the arguments of the new school criminology suggest the timely or
rather untimely nature of Tsumi to batsu’s publication. In other words, at
a time when the psychology and the inner workings of criminals were be-
coming a major issue, Tsumi to batsu discussed the fundamentally logical
and inherent potential of the criminality of fallen/disillusioned/alienated
intellectuals, especially those with Western education. As such, Tsumi
to batsu had to be repressed, with its translation abandoned after two in-
stallments despite the fact that the foreword to the second installment
already included an announcement of the third installment.
As suggested by the major literary and cultural trends of the 1890s,
moreover, the process of repression went well beyond Roan’s translation,
for these trends were characterized by a turn away from the exploration
of the student/intellectual within the framework of social problematics,
—————
25. From Tomii’s work Keihō-ron kō, which was published in 1889. Cited in
Serizawa, “Hō” kara kaihō sareru kenryoku, 25.
26. Ibid., 32–33.
124 Of Crimes and Punishments

taking up instead issues of the high and low. On the one hand, yellow
journalism became a cultural phenomenon, led by Ruikō’s Yorozu chōhō,
which had emerged as the top selling newspaper in Tokyo only three
years after its establishment, and soon the likes of the Niroku shinpō (est.
1893) followed suit and adopted the ways of the Yorozu chōhō. These
newspapers relentlessly exposed the wrongdoings of the upper class, ex-
emplified by the Yorozu chōhō’s hit series “Chikushō no jitsurei” (The ac-
tual examples of keeping a mistress), which began on July 7, 1898. De-
ploying reporters to spy on the rich and the famous, this column exposed
the adulterous affairs of the upper class, including those by Itō Hirobumi
and Mori Ōgai (1862–1922). The topic of infidelity provided the Yorozu
chōhō’s readers (male readers, at least) who had no hopes of social mobility
or political involvement with a structure of projection and disapproval
crucial to the emergence of yellow journalism as entertainment: they
were able to project their fantasies of having a mistress onto the subjects
of scandals all the while disapproving infidelity as an immoral and un-
enlightened act to gain a sense of moral superiority toward these subjects
who existed ‘above the clouds.’27
On the other hand, reportage writings exemplified by Matsubara
Iwagorō’s Saiankoku no Tokyo (The darkest Tokyo; November 1893) and
Yokoyama Gennosuke’s Nihon no kasō shakai (The lower societies of
Japan; April 1899) depicted the harsh realities of the lower classes as an
emergent problem in Meiji society. Such focus on the lower classes be-
came the trend of literary production, moreover, as the latter half of the

—————
27. In his discussion of the rise of yellow journalism in Meiji Japan, Matsu-
yama Iwao states: “The reason people desire gossip articles of the famous is be-
cause of jealously and envy toward them. That these feelings were fomenting
within society explicitly did not mean that status and class became equal. Rather,
a hierarchy became clear, and whether through wealth or social status, a handful
of elite class began to dominate, and below them grew a group who did not have
either. And this is precisely why people began to talk, sometimes out of spite, of
scandals regarding the elites” (Uwasa no enkinhō, 88). Although this analysis of
scandal journalism is insightful, we should keep in mind that this phenomenon is
not a reflection of an unequal society in general. Rather, scandal journalism is
one of the distinct characteristics of a modern nation that has human equality
and the abolition of a class system as its major premises. It is precisely because
there emerges distinct classes of the haves and the have-nots—despite the fact
that the major premises of a modern nation should allow for social mobility—
that scandal journalism blossoms.
 Of Crimes and Punishments 125

1890s would often be referred to as “the age of misery [hisan] novels.”28

While many of these works examined social problems and contradic-
tions and, in this sense, shared their interest with Crime and Punishment,
their protagonists were characterized by their “non-everydayness,” in-
cluding their belonging to the social group now referred to as hisabetsu
burakumin (hereafter abbreviated burakumin) whose differentiation from
the Meiji intellectuals was guaranteed from the start.29
No doubt, these literary and cultural trends functioned in other im-
portant ways that go beyond the scope of this book. But at the same
time, they operated within the rhetoric of disavowal, serving to repress
collectively the dangers that Crime and Punishment brought to the social
legitimacy of the educated who stood outside the main system of au-
thority in Meiji Japan. The rest of this chapter considers the literary re-
sponses to this problematics of the modern intellectual and his/her rela-
tionship to the ideology of risshin shusse at the heart of this problematics
through the examination of the pivotal works of Japanese Naturalism,
Shimazaki Tōson’s Hakai and Tayama Katai’s Futon.

Hakai and the Criminalization of the Victim

Narrated in the third person with the elementary school teacher Segawa
Ushimatsu as its protagonist, Shimazaki Tōson’s Hakai describes Ushi-
matsu’s inner turmoil about his discriminated burakumin origins and its
eventual exposure, which takes the form of his confession to his stu-
dents and of his subsequent move from Iiyama, Nagano, to Texas. Even
from this most basic synopsis, the influence of Crime and Punishment on
Hakai should be easy to spot for those who have read the Russian work
(although such must have been few at the time of Hakai’s publication
given that Roan’s Tsumi to batsu did not sell many copies). The progres-
sion from inner turmoil to confession to banishment finds its counter-
part in Raskolnikov’s agony over the murder he has committed, his con-
fession at the town marketplace, and his banishment to Siberia. And
just as Raskolnikov was accompanied by Sonia, the daughter of the
drunk Marmeladov, on his banishment to Siberia, Ushimatsu, too, will
—————
28. Nakamaru, “Kindai shōsetsu no tenkai,” 135.
29. Ibid., 136. Hisabetsu burakumin is a modern term that refers to a group of
people derogatorily called eta and hinin (among others terms) who were forced to
exist outside the class system during the Edo period but were officially liberated
in 1871. The term hisabetsu (discriminated) denotes the prejudice with which they
are treated in Japanese society in the past and the present.
126 Of Crimes and Punishments

be accompanied by the sympathetic Oshiho, whose father Keinoshin is

a drunk.30
No doubt, Tōson’s relationship with Kitamura Tōkoku—his mentor
who committed suicide on May 16, 1894 at the age of 25 after a long
bout with depression—must have exercised much influence on his re-
ception of the Russian work. Indeed, Tōson’s autobiographical work
Haru (Spring; 1908), published two years after Hakai, includes a scene in
which Aoki, modeled after Tōkoku, compares himself to Raskolnikov:
It’s in Tsumi to batsu that Uchida-san translated. There is a scene when that pro-
tagonist, when asked by a woman at the lodging what he was doing not going
out to make money, states that he is doing some thinking. I am shocked to hear
that there is already someone who has said something like that. Doing some
thinking—that is exactly what I am doing.31

Uttered in a private conversation with his wife without the presence of

Kishimoto (modeled after Tōson himself ), Aoki’s comments suggest Tō-
son’s active strategy to incorporate the Russian work and its protagonist
into creating the myth of his mentor-friend, a strategy buttressed by Tō-
son’s understanding of the murderer Raskolnikov as a tragic and sympa-
thetic figure. But this is not to say that Tōson’s reception of Crime and
Punishment was simply through his mentor Tōkoku, for there is clear evi-
dence that Tōson engaged critically in his own way to deal with the quiet
yet profound impact of Roan’s Tsumi to batsu through Hakai. In his letters
to other writers, including Ueda Bin (1874–1916) and Tayama Katai, it is
well documented that Tōson not only read Roan’s Tsumi to batsu but also
sought out and completed reading the English translation of Crime and

—————
30. We should note that the narrative motifs of Hakai also closely resemble
those of Shimizu Shikin’s short story “Imin gakuen” (School for émigrés; 1899).
But at the same time, as discussed below, the resemblance between Hakai and
Crime and Punishment struck Hakai’s contemporaries and recent scholars alike.
My interest here does not lie in establishing a direct line of influence between
Hakai and Crime and Punishment but rather in discussing their shared narrative
and conceptual structures and of the differences within these similarities as they
relate to the problematics of Meiji intellectuals. For an English translation of
“Imin gakuen,” see “School for Emigrés,” trans. by Rebecca Jennison, in Cope-
land and Ortabasi, The Modern Murasaki, 240–66. For an example of the discus-
sion of the connection between Hakai and Crime and Punishment, see Walker,
The Japanese Novel of the Meiji Period and the Ideal of Individualism, 183–86.
31. Shimazaki, Haru, 97.
 Of Crimes and Punishments 127

Punishment just before he began working on Hakai.32 In a commentary

sent to the Yomiuri shinbun less than a month after his publication of
Hakai, moreover, Tōson praised the “works of Tolstoy and Dostoevsky”
as “new tragedies” that mix “emotion” and “intelligence,” suggesting that
his Hakai was the Japanese attempt to do the same.33
Given the narrative resemblances not to mention Tōson’s self-
promotion, it was not surprising that, within months of Hakai’s pub-
lication, there appeared two commentaries that specifically discussed the
influence of Crime and Punishment on Hakai. The novelist Morita Sōhei
(1881–1949) praised Hakai as “a work that begins a new era” and viewed
the Russian work only as a facilitator to Tōson’s project, not making
much of the similarities (“[similarities] are just that if one reads this, then
it reminds one of that”).34 In contrast, the literary critic Hasegawa Ten-
kei (1876–1940) stated that the power of the Russian work comes from
murder as a “universal and great moral problem” and criticizes that Hakai
“simply made the fact of being eta into a book.” For Tenkei, “eta” only
connects “the concepts of evil, ugliness, immorality” with “prejudice,”
which, while it still exists in Japan, is “recognized as prejudice” that is
a problem in “rural” areas, and it is this locality that is “one reason that
this work does not bring out an infinite feeling of sorrow” that is charac-
teristic of Crime and Punishment.35
Although Tenkei may be guilty of casually dismissing the prejudices
against burakumin at the time, he does bring out the fundamental dis-
crepancy around which the subsequent debate on the relationship be-
tween the two works will revolve: Ushimatsu as burakumin is a victim of
social prejudice and injustice who, unlike Raskolnikov, has not violated
any laws let alone murder, and his guilt derives from the unjust preju-
dices of society rather than from the immorality of his own actions. In
this sense, there is a slippage in Hakai, which makes clear that the text is
not a mere imitation of the Russian work but a conscious reworking of
it to suit the conditions of early twentieth-century Japan. And the slip-
page, instead of resulting in the failure to reproduce the “universal and
great moral problem” found in Crime and Punishment, shifts the focus of
—————
32. See Kawabata, Hakai no yomikata, 162–63. Also mentioned in Walker, The
Japanese Novel of the Meiji Period and the Ideal of Individualism, 183–84.
33. “Ryokuin zōwa,” Yomiuri shinbun, April 9, 1906. Cited in Kawabata, Hakai
no yomikata, 164.
34. Cited in Kawabata, Hakai no yomikata, 164.
35. Hasegawa, “Handō no genshō,” 160.
128 Of Crimes and Punishments

Ushimatsu’s dilemma of whether to hide or confess his origins from one

of inner moral struggle to that of inner political struggle whose alterna-
tives are exemplified by the two critical figures of the story, namely, his
father and the politician Inoko Rentarō.
On the one hand, Ushimatsu’s father is a herdsman living quietly in
the mountains who warned Ushimatsu that “the secret—the only hope
and only way—for a child of eta to go out into society and establish one-
self is to hide his origins.”36 On the other hand, Inoko Rentarō is an out-
spoken political activist who has built his philosophy and career upon the
fact—that is, the confession—that he is of burakumin origins. Through
Rentarō’s works, which Ushimatsu ardently reads, Ushimatsu comes to
hold the belief that “as same human beings, there is no reason that [bu-
rakumin] should be viewed with such contempt” (49). In this way, Hakai
presents Ushimatsu’s dilemma as one torn between his adherence to his
father’s “commandment” and his becoming a political subject in line with
Rentarō’s belief in the ideals of human rights and equality.
For much of the narrative, Hakai seems to build readers’ anticipation
for Ushimatsu’s development from the former to the latter, even despite
the fact that Ushimatsu’s desire to confess lacks the political thrust of
Rentarō’s teachings because it is only directed to Rentarō who would no
doubt keep his secret from society at large. Ushimatsu never succeeds in
confessing to Rentarō, however, for he is eventually murdered by sōshi
on the payroll of the politician Takayanagi whom Rentarō exposed as
having married a girl of burakumin origins for money. But this tragedy, in
turn, makes Ushimatsu realize the true importance of confessing his
origins to the entire society:
At that time, Ushimatsu for the first time realized it. He had tried to hide it [his
origins] so hard that he had been wearing down the natural characteristics that
he was born with. Because of it, he could not for a moment forget the self.
Thinking back, his life up to now was a life of falsehood. He was deceiving him-
self. Why think and worry? It would be better to just confess to society like a
man that he was eta. Rentarō’s death had made Ushimatsu realize this (306).

Enmeshed in rhetoric of authenticity, this passage suggests Ushimatsu’s

moment of epiphany in a fashion that is highly characteristic of Hakai’s
narrative strategy, which provides detailed depiction of his inner turmoil.
The thoughts and emotions of Ushimatsu are presented to the readers

—————
36. Shimazaki, Hakai, 47. All subsequent references to this source will appear
in the text in parentheses.
 Of Crimes and Punishments 129

in such a way that they seem to collapse with the viewpoint of the third-
person narrator and the border between external and internal reality be-
comes blurred, thereby actively promoting the reader’s identification
with the story’s protagonist.37 And if such identification is achieved, it is
no doubt done so with the anticipation of Ushimatsu’s rise as a political
subject who may follow in the footsteps of Rentarō.
Yet, when the time comes for Ushimatsu to confess, the message of
rebirth contained in the above passage and the moment of triumph an-
ticipated by the readers become negated by the way in which he does so
to his students. In his confession, he does not assert the equality of hu-
man beings nor does he criticize the society that enforces prejudices
against those of burakumin origins. Instead, he apologizes for hiding his
origins, stating: “Truly, I am eta; I am chōri [another pejorative term for
burakumin]; I am an unclean human being” (321). To conclude his confes-
sion, moreover, Ushimatsu gets on his knees and begs forgiveness, “as if
he thought that he still hadn’t apologized enough” (321). Although his
decision to confess may have been prompted by the realization of social
injustice against those of burakumin origins, Ushimatsu confesses not as
a means of protest against social injustice but to apologize for hiding his
“unclean” origins: despite being a victim and not a criminal, Ushimatsu
nonetheless confesses as a criminal might. In so doing, he seems to ac-
quiesce to the social prejudices surrounding burakumin, sucking the life
out of the political energy that has been developing in the course of the
narrative, an acquiescence that struck many of Hakai’s contemporary
readers as unnatural and, thus, one of the biggest problem spots of the
story.38
—————
37. Regarding Hakai’s narration, Itō Ujitaka writes that “the overall tone of
Hakai lacks the sense of distance from the object [of depiction]” and “despite it
being a third-person narrated novel, Hakai is a work in which the narrator roars
and wails with the protagonist” (Kokuhaku no bungaku, 71).
38. In the collection of reviews that appeared in the May issue of Waseda bun-
gaku in 1907, five out of the seven reviewers question Ushimatsu’s confession. For
example, Ōtsuka Kusuoko questions “whether Ushimatsu himself had to say that
he was sorry by putting his head on the wooden floor” and views the confession as
“a bit strange”; Yanagita Kunio also states that “the way [Ushimatsu] confessed
feels odd”; and Shimamura Hōgetsu points out the confession scene as one of
the “poor” spots of the story and wonders if “the excessive self-abasement about
his being eta does not hurt the sympathy [toward Ushimatsu]” (“Hakai gappyō,”
Waseda bungaku, May 1906. Reprinted in Yoshida Seiichi et al., Kindai bungaku
hyōron taikei, vol. 3, 408, 410, and 417). Fittingly, the confession scene is also at the
130 Of Crimes and Punishments

But this ‘problem’ is not a problem at all. Rather, it constitutes a fun-

damental part of the slippage previously mentioned in relation to Ten-
kei’s criticism of Hakai that enabled Tōson to enact a political criticism
of a different nature. While the way Ushimatsu confesses may strip
Hakai’s possibility as a story of the rebirth of Ushimatsu as a discrimi-
nated individual, there is also no denying that such a method of confes-
sion produces a powerful political message at the level of the text. Ushi-
matsu’s confession reveals that he judges himself according to the social
prejudices surrounding his origins and identifies with the piercing gaze,
social and unlocalizable, which has been haunting him throughout the
narrative. And the key here is that such prejudices went directly against
the official law of the Meiji government whose so-called Emancipation
Edict (Kaihō rei) of 1871 “disposed of the designation of eta, hinin, and
others” and proclaimed that persons previously of these classes “shall
be the same as commoners in terms of rank and occupation.”39 In other
words, it is the social prejudices, rather than the official policies of the
Meiji government, that produce Ushimatsu as a subject, and such a result
functions to reveal the powerlessness of Meiji government to produce
citizens according to its own vision through its policies.
The tragic fate of Ushimatsu (and Rentarō) marks the contradiction
between the ideals of Meiji government expressed through its laws and
the realities of their sphere of influence and exposes the falsity of the
government’s official promise of a classless society.40 And the contradic-
tion manifests itself even more vividly in Hakai precisely because Ushi-
matsu, thanks to his father who “did not forget to send Ushimatsu who
was eight to an elementary school” (50), does exactly what he was
prompted to do through the ideology of risshin shusse by working hard at
school and trying to rise in the world through education as propounded
by such Meiji bestsellers as Fukuzawa Yukichi’s Gakumon no susume.
That Hakai takes place at a public school also functions to underscore
—————
heart of the critical consideration of Crime and Punishment’s influence on Hakai,
with the dominant criticism often taking the form of a permutation of Kataoka
Ryōichi’s statement: because Tōson “modeled [Hakai ] after the frame and scen-
ery of Crime and Punishment too much . . . this work, which should have been
[about] a dignified proclamation of new life, became peculiar at its most impor-
tant moment” (cited in Kawabata, Hakai no yomikata, 165).
39. Reprinted in Hirota, Sabetsu no shosō, 78.
40. The criticism of Meiji government regarding its promise of classless soci-
ety is reiterated by the episode of Heita, also of burakumin origins, who is teased
by his classmates during the celebration of the Meiji emperor’s birthday.
 Of Crimes and Punishments 131

the point, for, despite the remaining prejudices of the people, the school
system should have been a safe haven for people like Ushimatsu to the
extent that the school system is under the direct jurisdiction of the gov-
ernment, which issued the Emancipation Edict. But if Ushimatsu’s con-
fession scene functions as a moment of radical political criticism of the
Meiji government and its ideologies in such a manner, then it is also im-
portant to recognize that this criticism is countered by another more
conservative message that emerges within the detective fiction frame-
work that is embedded in the text.
In Nihon kindai bungaku to “sabetsu” (Modern Japanese literature and
“discrimination”), Watanabe Naomi notes the rise from the 1890s in the
number of fictional works depicting burakumin (including the aforemen-
tioned “misery novels”) and points out that their primary characteristic
lies in the recognizable attributes—whether extraordinary physical fea-
tures or extreme wealth—which mark their protagonists and distinguish
these characters from the ordinary Japanese. Watanabe sees this textual
characteristic as a “clear inversion” of the fact that their “foreign blood
line,” which is the hypothetical reason of the difference of burakumin
from the ordinary Japanese, is “something that cannot be seen by the
eye.”41 When considered within this narrative lineage, Hakai’s biggest
characteristic, as Watanabe argues, becomes Tōson’s elimination of any
recognizable ‘mark’ from its marginalized protagonists. While their
names Segawa Ushi-matsu and Ino-ko Rentarō contain the characters for
animals (bull and boar, respectively) and set them apart from others, this
‘mark’ is literally nominal and, thus, functions to highlight the sub-
stance-less nature of the prejudice against burakumin, especially consid-
ering that this nominal difference exists only for the readers to discern,
as no characters make this observation within the text.
This is not to say, however, that the characters of Hakai share such
critical understanding of the prejudice. In fact, they are no different from
the burakumin literature of the 1890s, believing that those of burakumin
origins are easily distinguishable from others via physical characteristics.
Even Ginnosuke, the closest friend and biggest supporter of Ushimatsu,
upon hearing the rumors of Ushimatsu being burakumin, states:

—————
41. Watanabe Naomi, Nihon kindai bungaku to “sabetsu,” 24. Michael Bour-
daghs also argues this point within in the framework of disease (The Dawn that
Never Comes, 57).
132 Of Crimes and Punishments

Does that Segawa Ushimatsu have features that are eta-like . . . I, too, have seen
many new commoners [shin heimin, another derogatory term for burakumin that
appeared after the Emancipation Edict]. From that skin color, they are different
from ordinary humans. Indeed, it’s obvious from the facial features whether one
is a new commoner or not. And, because they are ostracized from society, their
disposition is very jaundiced. See, there is no way that a manly steadfast youth
will be borne out of the new commoners. How can the likes of them take inter-
est in education? (275–76).

Despite being wholly different in significance, such views on buraku-

min cannot help calling to mind the detective stories of Kuroiwa Ruikō
from the second chapter. On the one hand, we have the confident de-
tective of Majutsu no zoku who claims that he “can determine most vil-
lains just by looking at their face.”42 On the other hand, we have Muzan
whose ultra-nationalistic message is the danger of foreign criminality that
may spread within Japanese society if the system of cohabitation (naichi
zakkyo) is enacted precisely because other Asian nationals—the Chinese
in this case—have no inherent recognizable features that set themselves
apart from Japanese citizens. On this point, in fact, the connection to the
rhetoric of fictional narratives depicting the ‘newly emancipated’ com-
moner seems particularly vivid. One result of the promulgation of the
Emancipation Edict in 1871 was the liberation of burakumin from the spe-
cific occupations to which they were tied in the Edo period. Although
this measure often did more harm than good on the level of reality—
many were unable to find jobs due to resilient prejudice—it enabled the
‘newly emancipated’ to travel freely in Japan. In this sense, the Meiji-
period liberation of burakumin posed the same prejudicial concerns ex-
pressed in Muzan, that is, a foreign element circulating within society
without being recognized as such. But it is not that Hakai, like Muzan,
simply presents the possibility that a certain group may be unrecogniz-
able from others, whether it is to argue the dangers of such a situation
or the substance-less nature of the prejudice against such a group in the
first place. Rather, there is a process of re-marking taking place in Hakai
by something other than physical features employed to distinguish the
marginalized characters in the burakumin fictions from the 1890s.
Hakai tells a story of how Ushimatsu’s disreputable origins become
exposed. And while the narrative events and strategies prior to the con-
fession scene may force the readers to experience it as problematic, there

—————
42. Kuroiwa, Majutsu no zoku, 23.
 Of Crimes and Punishments 133

is also no doubt that the text prepares for the specific mode of Ushi-
matsu’s confession—that is, as a repentant criminal—in the course of
the narrative. At the most surface level of plot, the story begins when
Ōhinata, also a burakumin and Ushimatsu’s fellow lodger, is evicted from
their lodging after his origins become exposed, and Ushimatsu quickly
moves from the lodging to the temple Rengeji with fears that his origins
too will become known. Already in the first chapter, then, the exposure
of his disreputable origins and resulting banishment that are to happen to
Ushimatsu are foreshadowed through the fate of Ōhinata. And a similar
process of preparation takes place on the level of narration whose de-
tailed depiction of Ushimatsu’s internal turmoil is characteristic of this
text but not uniform in following the actions, thoughts, and emotions of
Ushimatsu exclusively, for the story, from the very beginning, includes
scenes that occur without Ushimatsu. Such scenes are limited in number,
no doubt, but precisely because such is the case (and because they are
systematically laid out and developed), it is easy to discern the strategic
intent of their inclusion, namely, to frame Ushimatsu as an object of de-
tection and exposure.
Already in the second chapter (out of 23 chapters), we encounter a
perfect example in the conversation between the school principal and
the inspector from the district board of education. In this conversation,
the principal complains how his control of the school is being compro-
mised because of Ushimatsu’s attitude. The inspector, in reply, suggests
that the principal may want to find a way to get rid of Ushimatsu, for
example, by transferring him to another school. The principal is hesi-
tant, however, because of Ushimatsu’s popularity among the students
and states that for such to happen, “there needs to be some kind of pre-
text” (57). Importantly, this line of conversation naturally leads to why
Ushimatsu is the way he is, and the principal brings up the “thoughts of
Inoko Rentarō or thereabouts” to which the inspector responds, “Oh,
that eta” (57). Of course, the principal does not suspect Ushimatsu’s ori-
gins at this point, but the link between Ushimatsu’s behavior and Ren-
tarō’s philosophies are enough to suggest to the readers who already
know of Ushimatsu’s secret of the story’s dynamic where a casual con-
nection between Ushimatsu and Rentarō develops into the exposure of
Ushimatsu as “eta,” thereby providing the principal with a perfect pre-
text to get rid of Ushimatsu and establish his kingdom at a country ele-
mentary school. Indeed, Tōson makes sure to promote this cat-and-
mouse game—unknown to Ushimatsu but recognized by the readers
who are provided with information beyond that held by the protago-
134 Of Crimes and Punishments

nist—by having the unsuspecting Ushimatsu walk into this conversation

upon which conspiring parties feign ignorance of their dubious plans.
In the course of the narrative, similar scenes will be repeated, each
time with the principal coming closer to his wish of discovering the “pre-
text” to rid of Ushimatsu. On the one hand, these scenes give reality to
Ushimatsu’s fear of having his origins exposed through the presentation
of a specific subject who is motivated to get rid of Ushimatsu’s presence
at the school. Thus, these scenes promote the understanding of Ushi-
matsu as a victim of persecution who deserves sympathy, an understand-
ing augmented by the text’s negative portrayal of the principal as a con-
niving villain who is characterized by his “vulgar considerations” typical
of a provincial bureaucrat (54). On the other hand, these scenes, in de-
viating from the characteristic narrative perspective of Hakai that closely
depicts Ushimatsu’s thoughts and feelings, offer the critical distance nec-
essary to grasp him not as a subject of suffering and persecution but as
an object of detection and exposure: because the readers know that
Ushimatsu does have a secret to hide, the depictions of a persecuting
gaze function to promote the readers’ anticipation of when and how
Ushimatsu will be exposed.43 As Chida Hiroyuki states regarding these
scenes: “Although these dialogues that could be said to be unnecessary
if the purpose is to depict Ushimatsu’s anguish are a maneuver to mark
the principal and Bunpei as villains who persecute Ushimatsu, they at the
same time naturally cannot help but foster in the readers’ interior interest
and anxiety regarding when Ushimatsu’s heritage will be exposed [and
foster the readers’] interest towards Ushimatsu that is similar to reading
a popular crime novel.”44
These scenes forming around the principal without the presence of
Ushimatsu actively evoke the framework of detective fiction with the
principal as the subject of detecting and Ushimatsu as the object of de-
tection. When the principal’s gaze to persecute Ushimatsu is aligned
with the vulgar interest of the readers who anticipate his impending ex-
posure, Ushimatsu as victim is criminalized, and his origins become a

—————
43. Interestingly, the only extended scene in which Ushimatsu is not present
aside from those involving the principal occurs between Ushimatsu’s aunt and
Rentarō who came to visit Ushimatsu in his hometown during his father’s funeral.
Here, too, it is significant that Rentarō is there as a detective, to collect evidence
against the politician Takayanagi, who is running against Ichimura, whom Ren-
tarō supports.
44. Chida, “ ‘Yomu’ koto no sabetsu,” 80–81.
 Of Crimes and Punishments 135

‘crime’ he must hide. If social prejudices produce Ushimatsu as a ‘crimi-

nal’ within the story world, then these scenes produce Ushimatsu as a
‘criminal’ at the level of the text in the minds of the readers. For Chida,
the interest of the readers necessary to produce Ushimatsu as a ‘crimi-
nal’ within the framework of a detective story is directly related to the
prejudice against burakumin: “The readers, by being consumed by the
illusion that they have completely shared the suffering of burakumin
Ushimatsu, forget the vulgarity of their own reading process that is in-
terested in when Ushimatsu’s secret will be exposed and maintain [the
illusion] without clearly realizing the prejudice that exists within the
self.”45
I agree with Chida regarding the predominantly unconscious nature
of the reader’s understanding of Ushimatsu as a criminal during the
reading process, but I am not sure if such scenes construct the “discur-
sive structure” of Hakai characterized by its “promotion of prejudicial
consciousness.” 46 As the unnaturalness that strikes readers (both con-
temporary to Hakai and not) upon reading Hakai’s denouement suggests,
the over-the-top quality of the confession has the function of making
the readers question why Ushimatsu, who is a victim of social prejudice,
must confess as if he were a criminal.47 By doing so, the readers realize
the vulgarity of their own interests that had been anticipating Ushi-
matsu’s exposure precisely because the manner in which Ushimatsu is
produced as a subject through his internalization of the social prejudice
against him parallels the positioning of Ushimatsu as an object of an-
ticipation for exposure that promotes the understanding of Ushimatsu
as criminal—at least, structurally speaking—in the reading process.
But while Ushimatsu’s confession scene might be a moment of self-
realization on the part of the readers regarding the vulgarity of their
interest in him, it is also a moment of forgetting in the sense that the
natural focus given to the issue of his origins—both by the text and by
readers—mask another narrative strand developed through the story of
the principal. That is, the readers forget that the beginning of the prin-
cipal’s machinations to rid Ushimatsu from the school—the conversa-
tion with the inspector from the district school board that we discussed
above—had nothing to do with Ushimatsu’s origins. Rather, the princi-
—————
45. Ibid., 81.
46. Ibid., 79.
47. For reactions by contemporary reviewers on the confession scene, see foot-
note 38 above.
136 Of Crimes and Punishments

pal’s desire to rid of Ushimatsu stems from his ‘disrespectful’ attitude,

and, more specifically, the comments he made upon learning that the
principal has been awarded a gold medal for his contribution to educa-
tion. According to the principal, Ushimatsu is said to have commented:
“It is a big mistake for an educator to believe that he has captured the
head of a demon just because he has received a gold medal” (56).
It is this anti-authority attitude that sets Ushimatsu apart from oth-
ers within the world of Hakai but places him in the literary lineage of
Ukigumo’s Bunzō, who is fired from his job for insubordination because
he operates upon his belief based on his Western education (rationality)
and not upon the power relations within which he exists. And the tex-
tual introduction of the principal seems to reiterate this connection
through his belief—“education is rules. The order of the inspector of
the district board of education is the order of a superior officer” (52)—
that expresses his adherence to militaristic vertical hierarchy. According
to the principal, however, Ushimatsu is not a man who honors such a
hierarchy, acting instead upon what he believes. But what forms the ba-
sis of Ushimatsu’s beliefs? As we saw, the principal is quick to point out:
“most likely, it is the thoughts of Inoko Rentarō.”
In such a way, Ushimatsu’s resistance to authority is connected to
the thoughts of “that eta” Rentarō, but, at the same time, there is no
connection made between Rentarō’s thoughts and the ‘questionable’ or-
igins of his followers. The text makes sure to emphasize this point
through the principal’s lumping together of Ushimatsu with Ginnosuke
in his complaint to the inspector: “It is frustrating for me to do anything
when Mr. Segawa and Mr. Tsuchiya hang about in that way. . . . If Mr.
Katsuno [the nephew of the inspector] was the head teacher, then it
would be a great peace of mind for me” (56). Moreover, the principal is
quick to point out that he clearly sees the anti-authority attitudes as a
trend of the times by comparing his own beliefs with those held by the
rebellious youths of today like Ushimatsu and Ginnosuke: “Considering
this day and age, it might be us who are a bit behind. But it is not neces-
sarily the case that the new is always better” (56).
Importantly, the principal’s view of Ushimatsu does not seem to
change when he learns of Ushimatsu’s secret, as illustrated at the end of
the story when he has a discussion with the member of the town council
regarding Ushimatsu. As if to evoke the first introduction of the principal,
Tōson uses the phrase “according to the principal” to portray his internal
thoughts, which only occurs on these two instances in the text. Here are
his thoughts regarding his involvement in the case of Ushimatsu:
 Of Crimes and Punishments 137

It is not that I am removing a foreign element with malice. I am someone who

is said to be an educator of the old school and am completely of a different gen-
eration from the likes of Ushimatsu and Ginnosuke. . . . There is nothing scarier
than the new generation. . . . I want to hold on to the same position and honor
forever. I don’t want to surrender by removing my helmet to the students of the
next generation. . . . Unlike Bunpei, Ushimatsu and Ginnosuke do not accept
my wishes. Every time there is a teacher’s meeting, our opinions clash. . . . That
the students admire such inexperienced people more than me bothers me in the
first place. It’s not that I am removing a foreign element with malice, but from
the perspective of the unity of the school, this, too, cannot be helped (312–13).

This internal monologue, which significantly does not include a single

mention of Ushimatsu’s origins, displays the principal’s surprising clar-
ity regarding his motives behind supporting the removal of Ushimatsu.
Rather than justifying Ushimatsu’s removal from the perspective of an a
priori necessity—his “unclean” blood—which would eliminate the need
for the principal to acquiesce his selfish motives, the principal readily
admits to himself of his selfish desire to hold on to his position of power.
And even despite the revelation of Ushimatsu’s origins, which set him
apart from others of the new generation, the principal, as was the case
at the beginning of the story, lumps Ushimatsu with Ginnosuke. For the
principal, who in the end has not much to do with the actual exposure
or banishment of Ushimatsu, Ushimatsu’s secret seems to matter only
to the extent that it would enable him to get rid of Ushimatsu without
making it seem like the principal had forced him out.
But the same cannot be said of Ushimatsu’s colleague Katsuno Bunpei
who provides a stark contrast to the principal and serves as the subject
who comes to represent the social prejudices against Ushimatsu as bu-
rakumin. Significantly, Bunpei was hesitant in becoming part of the prin-
cipal’s machinations to rid Ushimatsu from the school, but everything
changes upon learning the secret of his origins from the politician Taka-
yanagi. From this point onward, Bunpei actively spreads rumors around
school and town, ultimately confronting Ushimatsu to prove the rumor’s
veracity. In a scene at the teacher’s lounge after Rentarō’s death, Bunpei
engages Ushimatsu in a conversation to question why Ushimatsu “be-
came interested in studying the things that teacher [Rentarō] wrote,” of-
fering his own hypothesis before Ushimatsu can speak: “When you think
about life’s problems, you take note of the suffering of Inoko sensei. Isn’t
this because there is something about which you are suffering as well?”
(281). In this way, Bunpei, in contradistinction to the principal, argues
Ushimatsu’s fondness for Rentarō’s works—which he criticizes as that of
a “daydreamer” and a “madman,” going as far as stating that “there is no
138 Of Crimes and Punishments

way that anyone of value would come out of an inferior race like that”
(283)—as evidence of Ushimatsu’s origins that he shares with Rentarō.
And at the conclusion of the scene, the text highlights Bunpei’s preju-
dice, as Bunpei stares at Ushimatsu with hatred (“ ‘What did you say? You,
eta,’ his [Bunpei’s] eyes said with anger”), after which Bunpei tells another
teacher: “Did you hear the conversation just now? Didn’t you? Mr. Se-
gawa has confessed his secret on his own” (285).
In the course of Hakai, there is a passing of the torch from the prin-
cipal to Bunpei as the story’s primary villain who seeks to persecute
Ushimatsu, coupled with a shift in the primary motivation for doing so.
If the principal was motivated by self-interest and ambition because of
Ushimatsu’s anti-establishment tendencies, then Bunpei seems moti-
vated by his pure hatred for burakumin in general. Moreover, the fact
that Bunpei—akin to the worldly Noboru of Ukigumo—is of the same
generation as Ushimatsu presents him as a counterexample to the prin-
cipal’s argument that the insubordinate nature of Ushimatsu is genera-
tional. And as Bunpei would have it, what separates Ushimatsu and him
is Ushimatsu’s adherence to the teachings of Rentarō, the source of
anti-establishment thought, and the reason behind his adherence, his
burakumin status. If, as Suga Hidemi informed by Watanabe’s aforemen-
tioned analysis states, Hakai is “a story that makes the Other who lacks
stigma conspicuous as an other once more,” then I would argue that this
process of marking involves the textual construction of the direct con-
nection between Ushimatsu’s anti-establishment tendencies originating
in Rentarō’s teachings and Ushimatsu’s familial heritage that he shares
with Rentarō.48
In this line of argument, moreover, Ushimatsu’s confession, which
lacks a shred of defiance that set him apart from others in the eyes of the
principal and became evidence of his origins in the eyes of Bunpei, posits
itself as a moment of his rebirth, as he recants his anti-establishment
tendencies to adopt establishment viewpoints on what he should do (and
how he should confess). And the same could be said for Ushimatsu’s self-
imposed banishment to Texas. Although Rentarō’s death may have led
Ushimatsu to realize that he should “confess to society” of his origins,
Ushimatsu does not even give momentary thought to following in Ren-
tarō’s footsteps to fight against the injustices of society. Instead, Ushi-
matsu chooses to go to Texas with Ōhinata, whose eviction from his

—————
48. Suga, “Teikoku” no bungaku, 34.
 Of Crimes and Punishments 139

lodgings began the story of Hakai. Significantly, it is Rentarō’s colleague

Ichimura, the politician and a proponent for the rights of the lower
classes, who brings to Ushimatsu this proposal and Ginnosuke who “fer-
vently agrees” with the plan (337). Indeed, Ichimura suggests that Ushi-
matsu continue to seek achievement through education, even if he must
go to Texas to do so, stating that “depending on the mindset, he might
be able to study considerably” (337). Thus, Ushimatsu embarks on his
journey to continue pursuing “learning for learning’s sake,” which Ren-
tarō abandoned in favor of becoming a political figure and an advocate
of the lower classes (50). Through his confession and banishment, Ushi-
matsu betrays his mentor and severs ties with his anti-establishment poli-
tics that got him in trouble in the first place to continue his pursuit of
an official ideal—risshin shusse, about which we will have more to say in
the next section—promoted by the Meiji society that had already broken
its promise to him.

Of Failures and Martyrs in Futon and Hakai

In his commentaries on the masterpieces of the Meiji period in the
April 1907 issue of Bunshō sekai (The world of texts), Tayama Katai, who,
as mentioned in the last section, corresponded with Shimazaki Tōson
about Crime and Punishment, reminisces about a famous author’s com-
ment regarding Roan’s Tsumi to batsu upon its appearance: “What? A
masterpiece? You can say that it’s a masterpiece, but it’s nothing but a
detective story with good form.”49 While such a comment implies the
naiveté and superficiality of reading as exercised by the Meiji intellectu-
als in the 1890s, it must be taken with a grain of salt as historical evi-
dence, for it no doubt functioned simultaneously as a strategy to affirm
that such is no longer the case in 1907, the intellectuals as readers having
become enlightened in their appreciation of Western literature. And if
Tōson had invoked the name Dostoevsky immediately following the
publication of his groundbreaking work Hakai, then Katai’s comments
on Crime and Punishment precedes his groundbreaking work Futon by a
few months, suggesting that this work was the result or a sign of such
enlightenment. Indeed, Katai’s Futon, despite its frequent consideration
as a major departure from Tōson’s Hakai within traditional literary his-
tories, exhibits important structural similarities with Hakai that reflect
their shared interest in the Russian masterpiece.
—————
49. Cited in Takahashi, “ ‘Tantei shōsetsu’ ga inpei suru mono,” 42.
140 Of Crimes and Punishments

Telling the tenuous relationship between the novelist Takenaka To-

kio and his female pupil Yokoyama Yoshiko that revolves primarily
around the former’s ponderings of the latter’s feelings for him, Futon on
the surface not only lacks the seriousness of Hakai’s sociopolitical subject
matter but also deviates from the narrative perspective of Tōson’s work.
Futon’s protagonist is Tokio rather than Yoshiko whose feelings for him
posit themselves as objects of his analysis from the first pages of the story
when he wonders whether she loved him as a man or a teacher. And by
positing Yoshiko, his love interest, as a mystery-to-be-solved, it is clear
that Futon presents Tokio in the lineage of Japanese intellectuals exem-
plified by Ukigumo’s Bunzō who understand their love interest in such a
manner. But try as he might, Yoshiko—in particular, her face—confronts
him as an “enigma” (“There was certainly something very mysterious con-
tained in that powdered face of hers”), preventing him from understand-
ing her internal thoughts and emotions by means of external appearance
and thereby asserting her status, in turn, as a modern individual within
the Shōyō-esque paradigm characterized by the non-correspondence of
interior and exterior.50
Learning that Yoshiko has found a boyfriend, the young minister-
to-be Tanaka, Tokio’s focus shifts from her face that may hide her true
feelings for him to her letters that may contain clues to suggest the physi-
cal nature of Yoshiko’s relationship with Tanaka. In this shift, Tokio’s
interest in understanding Yoshiko takes on a more investigatory feel, es-
pecially considering that Tokio not only analyzes letters written to him
but those written to her by Tanaka as he goes “furtively through her writ-
ing-case and the drawers of her desk” (156; 64), in what Indra Levy calls
the “virtually pornographic invasion of Yoshiko’s privacy.”51 To the ex-
tent that Tokio in committing such an “invasion” attempts to “placat[e]
his conscience with the pretext of supervision,” Tokio represents the
reversal of operations enacted by Tsubouchi Shōyō’s Nisegane tsukai, in
—————
50. The passage in parentheses is from Tayama, Futon, in Tayama Katai shū,
135. I have used the English translation from Tayama Katai, The Quilt and Other
Stories, 46. All subsequent references to these sources will appear in the text in
parentheses, with the page numbers from the Japanese edition followed by
those from English translation. The term “enigma” is used by Indra Levy in her
insightful discussion of Futon: “What enabled Futon to marshal sympathy from a
readership that had been largely dismissive of Katai’s maidenitis was its un-
precedented representation of modern female interiority as enigma” (Sirens on
the Western Shore, 172).
51. Levy, Sirens on the Western Shore, 182.
 Of Crimes and Punishments 141

which the vulgar invasion of privacy by the detective fueled by his curios-
ity is legitimated by the need for “supervision” necessary to keep crimes
in check.
If Futon describes Tokio’s development from a psychologist to a spy
as the two poles of the detective in the course of its narrative, then what
remains constant is his psychic world that is defined by his “fallacious
identification” with characters from Western novels such as those by
Hauptmann, Turgenev, and Maupassant.52 And within this psychic dy-
namic, which gets played out at critical junctures of the narrative, Yo-
shiko seems to bear only a secondary status as Tokio’s object of desire,
for her function is first and foremost as a facilitator of Tokio’s identifi-
cation with the Western protagonists through her occupying of the po-
sition of the heroines. In this sense, Yoshiko might be called a supple-
mentary object of identification who actively sutures “an unbridgeable
gap” Tokio feels “between himself and the ‘modern’ younger generation”
precisely because Yoshiko appeals to him as a modern woman who has,
at least in the eyes of Tokio, successfully overcome the gap between a
Japanese woman of the actual world and the Western heroines of the
fictional world.53

—————
52. On the topic of “fallacious identification,” Tomi Suzuki writes: “When-
ever he feels lonely or depressed, he recalls the fate of the tragic characters in
the novels of Hauptmann, Turgenev, and Maupassant. Although Tokio himself
believes that he is deeply alienated, the manner in which he superimposes his
‘agony’ on that of his favorite literary heroes makes him appear to be a compla-
cent narcissist enraptured with his own ‘tragic’ and literary image” (Narrating the
Self, 85). In fact, the text reveals that Tokio not only recalls the tragic characters
with whom he identifies but actively seeks them through reading Western nov-
els. For example, after meeting Tanaka for the first time, Tokio asks himself
whether he can act as a protector of her relationship with Tanaka and questions
the value of wife and children. This scene ends with the sentence, “De Maupas-
sant’s ‘As Strong as Death’ lay open on the desk,” indicating that Tokio is pres-
ently reading a novel which tells a story similar to his situation (165; 71).
53 . Tomi Suzuki, Narrating the Self, 73. The teacher/student relationship
within which Tokio encounters Yoshiko has much to do with enhancing her
value as his supplementary object of identification. Not only is she able to pro-
vide the necessary narrative movement in their daily interactions for him to
situate himself in subject positions similar to those found in Western novels,
but also by teaching her about “Ibsen’s Nora and Turgenev’s Elena” and “the
women in Russia and Germany,” he can mold her into these literary images that
he views as representing the ideal modern woman (133; 44).
142 Of Crimes and Punishments

But to the extent that this system of identification is facilitated by the

tension that Tokio feels in his relationship with Yoshiko, Tokio seems to
endanger it by desperately seeking out the truth about the relationship
between Yoshiko and Tanaka. In a sense, of course, Tokio’s search for
truth is just the opposite: an opportunity to be relieved, at least for an
instant, that Yoshiko is not physically involved with Tanaka. Thus, To-
kio is more of a reader of detective fiction than a detective, engrossing
himself in the signs provided to him on a page in search for clues that will
reveal the truth of the case but hoping that such revelation will be sus-
pended so that he can maintain the pleasure of searching and anticipating.
Fittingly, the absence of the letter—her inability to provide Tokio with
a text full of signs as potential clues for Tokio’s reading pleasure—that
is brought to light through Yoshiko’s claim to have burned the letters
during a confrontation with Tokio and her father ultimately becomes the
damning evidence of her physical involvement with Tanaka.54 Also fit-
tingly, Yoshiko, rather than admitting her guilt on the spot, confesses her
sin to Tokio in a letter, which she begins by calling herself a “fallen
schoolgirl” (daraku jogakusei ), a phrase that was becoming a cultural phe-
nomenon around the time of Futon’s publication.55
In such a way, Yoshiko confesses her secret that she had been hiding
from Tokio only to be banished from Tokyo as punishment and, thereby,
presents herself as a fitting successor to Hakai’s Ushimatsu. From secret,
to confession, and then to banishment, this course of narrative devel-
opment found in Crime and Punishment and Hakai also underlies Futon.
And the connection between Hakai and Futon—and the two to Crime and
Punishment—grows even stronger when we consider that banishment for
Yoshiko means her removal from the path to become a writer, the pro-
fession that she had been pursuing. In other words, when we understand
Futon as a story that tells of the failure that arises in the process of rising
in the world and of establishing oneself in society, it becomes clear that
Yoshiko and Ushimatsu share their relationship to the ideology of risshin

—————
54. On the anger Tokio expresses in this scene, Levy writes: “Ostensibly, the
cause for his rage is the belated realization that Yoshiko has been deceiving him,
that she must have already ‘had relations’ with Tanaka. But it is also possible
that his rage is sparked by the burning of the letters themselves: now he has
been deprived of the primary object of his fetish, Yoshiko as text” (Levy, Sirens
on the Western Shore, 183).
55. For an overview regarding the cultural context of the phrase “fallen
schoolgirl,” see Nagai, Shizenshugi no retorikku, 252–76.
 Of Crimes and Punishments 143

shusse that was becoming ever more difficult each day to fulfill in Meiji
Japan.
As we saw in the previous section, Ushimatsu ultimately chooses to
pursue learning in Texas rather than to follow in Rentarō’s footsteps.
While this choice may strike the readers of today as rather unrealistic,
going to the United States, as Earl Kinmonth has discussed, was “much
in vogue” in Japan around the turn of the century as “the most extreme
choice available to those seeking higher education.”56 The leading pro-
ponent of this choice was Katayama Sen (1859–1933) who wrote the im-
mensely popular Gakusei to-Bei annai (Student guide for going to America)
in 1901 and published his own magazine called To-Bei (Going to America).
In these works, Katayama described the United States as “a country
where self-help really worked the way it should, the way the biographies
all said it did,” stating that the “best-qualified” candidates to become
“self-supporting students” were “the sons of poor peasants” who had the
“necessary perseverance to stand up under the hardships that came with
study in America.”57 Given such presentation of the United States as the
land where everyone, as long as they worked hard, had the same opportu-
nities to succeed regardless of their race, nationality, or gender, it makes
sense that Ōhinata and Ushimatsu who were banished from Japan be-
cause of their burakumin origins choose to move to Texas.58

—————
56. Kinmonth, The Self-Made Man in Meiji Japanese Thought, 188.
57. Ibid., 188, 191. Although idealistic in his vision, Katayama was not utopian
in the sense that he also spoke of hardships and racial discrimination that Japa-
nese students will surely face in the United States.
58. In his discussion of the history of burakumin, Suga discusses Shakai gai no
shakai: eta hinin (Society outside society) by the anthropologist Yanase Keisuke
published in 1901, which argues that, while the members of this social group
should attempt to become national citizens through education, the best course
of action for the members of this discriminated group may lie in immigration to
another country. In Suga’s words, Yanase recognizes that, despite the Emancia-
tion Edict, those of burakumin origins are discriminated as the Other, and only
when they go abroad as immigrants do they become “a national citizen” as “the
subject of the Great Imperial Japan,” that is, immigration functions “to make
into ‘national subjects’ those which cannot be ‘national subjects’ on the inside
by expelling them to the outside” (Suga, “Teikoku” no bungaku, 49). But it is also
important to note that the United States was rapidly fading around the time
of Hakai’s publication as a potential destination of Japanese immigration, for,
under “the spector [sic] of a ‘Yellow Peril,’ ” there was “effective exclusion [of
new Japanese immigrants in the United States] in the form of the so-called
144 Of Crimes and Punishments

Of course, that such extreme measures would gain currency suggests

the harsh realities facing the Meiji students and revealed “the generali-
zation of the desire for personal advancement through education” across
all socioeconomic classes and, at the same time, “the narrowing of op-
portunities within Japan.”59 Importantly, these conditions were brought
about in part because of governmental policies in the 1890s that actively
sought to position the graduates of middle schools as the future con-
stituents of the Japanese middle class and resulted in the rapid expan-
sion of the middle-school system after the Sino-Japanese War (1894–
1895). The number of middle-school students nationwide, which was
around 15,000 in 1885, had increased to 61,000 by 1898, and to over
100,000 in 1904.60 Yet, despite this increase in the number of middle
school students, the government did not increase the number of stu-
dents admitted to its higher schools (kōtō gakkō ). The result was in-
creased competition to enter these higher schools, which would basi-
cally guarantee the students an elite status in society: 67 percent of
higher-school applicants were admitted in 1895, but this rate decreased
to 34 percent in 1901 and to as low as 20 percent in 1908.61
By the latter half of the 1890s, more and more students were able to
dream of a future success gained through education, but such success
was becoming less and less achievable in reality, many experiencing the
bitter taste of failure and loss of their dreams actively promoted by the
government. Fittingly, then, riding the wave of economic growth as re-
sult of the Sino-Japanese War, business, as we will discuss in more detail
in the next chapter in our discussion of Natsume Sōseki’s Wagahai wa
neko de aru (I am a cat; 1905–1906), became understood in the 1890s as
an alternate mode of rising in the world that catered to the educated
but, at the same time, did not require a degree from an elite institution.
And it seems natural, given the harsh conditions facing those who aspire
to learn, that literature was not only the medium through which stories
of rising in the world were described but would also become an institu-
tion through which success was achieved. In other words, fiction writing

—————
Gentlemen’s Agreement (Nichibei shinshi kyōyaku)” by 1907 (Kinmonth, The Self-
Made Man in Meiji Japanese Thought, 193).
59. Kinmonth, The Self-Made Man in Meiji Japanese Thought, 188.
60. These figures are from Kōno, Tōki to shite no bungaku, 97.
61. These figures are from Kinmonth, The Self-Made Man in Meiji Japanese
Thought, 187.
 Of Crimes and Punishments 145

began to be promoted around the turn of the century as a viable path

for someone who aspired to succeed in the world.
Kōno Kensuke has described in detail how literature as an institution
emerged in Meiji Japan, arguing the critical role played by newspapers
and journals that promoted the institutions of reader correspondence,
which was popular from the early Meiji, and, more specifically, of the
novel-writing contests that emerged in the mid-1890s. Here again, Kuro-
iwa Ruikō and his Yorozu chōhō take center stage as the forerunners of a
cultural phenomenon, as the Yorozu chōhō began hosting a weekly novel-
writing contest in January 1897.62 Other newspapers and journals, such
as Ōsaka Mainichi shinbun and Shinshōsetsu (The new novel), quickly fol-
lowed the Yorozu chōhō’s lead and established novel-writing contests of
their own, fostering what Kōno calls “the age of novel-writing contests”
around the turn of the century.63
Importantly for our present discussion, “the age of novel-writing con-
tests” and struggling middle-school students were intimately connected
through various educational magazines, such as Chūgaku sekai (World of
middle school; est. 1898), that specifically targeted these students and
consisted largely of their correspondence. Although the main issues of
Chūgaku sekai reflected the middle-school curriculum and, as such, did
not include novel-writing, the supplementary issues that began to be pub-
lished on a quarterly basis in 1899 took up the subject of novel writing and
established its own novel-writing contest, with Tayama Katai becoming
the sole judge of the contest in the winter issue of 1899. As judge, Katai
went beyond making simple comments about the winning entry, actively
criticizing contemporary literary trends and discussing his own views of
literature. This was especially the case when he returned as judge in 1905
after a hiatus of the magazine’s supplementary issues caused by the
Russo-Japanese War, as he began his first review of the winning entry
after his return with the sentence “I am a believer of Naturalism” and

—————
62. Kōno, Tōki to shite no bungaku, 44. The first winner announced on January
31 was chosen from 95 submissions and awarded ten yen, and, in February, the
prize money was expanded to award five yen to second-prize winners and three
yen to third-prize winners. The contest continued until 1924 and amassed over
1,700 winners. Takagi Takeo’s Shinbun shōsetsushi nenpyō contains a list of the
winners in this contest (331–77).
63. Kōno, Tōki to shite no bungaku, 30. On May 6, 1897, the Yorozu chōhō wrote
that “the flourishing of awarding prizes is a new phenomenon of the literary
world” (cited in ibid., 58).
146 Of Crimes and Punishments

went on to discuss its foundations.64 In such a manner, Katai utilized the

educational angle of the novel-writing contest—seen as supplementing
middle-school education and, as such, vital to the construction of the cul-
tured members of the middle class—to promote novel writing and help
shape the course of literary production and reception among his middle-
school readers.
Whether middle-school student or not, the novel-writing contest
boom around the turn of the century no doubt produced aspiring writ-
ers nationwide. Through these contests, the profession of novelist be-
came the goal within an alternative mode of risshin shusse ideology that
differed from those based on education yet built itself on the education
that students had received.65 In many ways, in fact, the novel-writing
contest symbolized the essence of ability-based risshin shusse ideology:
anyone could enter the contest; the winner was decided based on the
quality of the writing and not based on the applicant’s origins, sex, or
age; and the winner gained instant fame and fortune through the publi-
cation of his or her story and the awarding of a monetary prize.66
It is within this context of the development of novel writing as a
mode of rising in the world that Futon’s Yoshiko asserts her historical

—————
64. Cited in ibid., 103. Katai had actually moved to Shōnen sekai (Boys’ world),
an affiliate magazine of Chūgaku sekai, in the summer of 1901 before returning
to Chūgaku sekai in 1905. His influence on the literary-minded readers would in-
crease when he became the editor-in-chief of the newly established literary jour-
nal Bunshō sekai, which was established in March 1906 and became the central
venue for the Japanese Naturalist movement.
65. Citing the scene from Mori Ōgai’s Seinen (Youth; 1910–1911), in which a
character reads the literary column of the newspaper, Komori Yōichi states:
“An age had arrived when a provincial reader of the newspaper’s literature col-
umn could mistake his going to Tokyo in the hopes of becoming a contributor
to the column as being something similar to the past belief that going to Tokyo
to study would lead to risshin shusse” (“Bungaku no jidai,” 3).
66. Of course, this was the novel-writing contest in its ideal state, when no
behind-the-scene dealings compromised the contests. Kōno hypothesizes that
“in reality the novel-writing contests may not have been a system of discovering
writers completely open to the general reading public, but rather a place to step
up or an occasion to make some extra money for up-and-coming writers who
were already pupils to famous writers or working as reporters or editors” (Tōki
to shite no bungaku, 148). Although this is a question that needs to be examined
further, the important point for our present discussion is not the credibility of
these contests but their effect on the reading public.
 Of Crimes and Punishments 147

value, as made clear by the way in which Futon describes the first con-
tact between Yoshiko and Tokio:
It was at that time that he had received an absolutely idolizing letter from a girl
named Yokoyama Yoshiko, a great admirer of his works from Niimimachi in
Bitchū, and a pupil at the Kobe Girls’ Academy. Under the name of Takenaka
Kojō he wrote novels of elegant style, and was not unknown in the world, so he
quite frequently received letters from various devotees and admirers in the prov-
inces. He didn’t concern himself overmuch even with letters asking him to cor-
rect the sender’s texts, or asking permission for the sender to become his pupil.
And so, even when he received this girl’s letter, his curiosity hadn’t especially
prompted him to reply. But after receiving three such enthusiastic letters from
this same person, even Tokio had to take notice. . . . Her [Yoshiko’s] one great
hope, she said, was to become his pupil and devote her whole life to literature
(128; 39).

As the passage states, Tokio often receives letters from his “devotees”
and “admirers,” who ask either for his suggestions on writing or to be-
come his pupil, and, as such, Yoshiko’s desire to become Tokio’s pu-
pil—and to ultimately become a novelist—is revealed not as a special
case but a common phenomenon. Just as Ushimatsu was part of a group
that aspired to establish themselves through education, Futon presents
Yoshiko as belonging to a group of youths from the provinces who
dream of becoming writers.
Granted, unlike Ushimatsu, who was shackled to the education sys-
tem because of his socioeconomic situation, Yoshiko comes from a
wealthy and respected family, and, in this regard, her decision to move
to Tokyo and study literature has nothing to do with the economic re-
strictions placed on her. As Tokio’s response to Yoshiko’s letters reveals,
however, Yoshiko also bears a ‘mark’ that she cannot escape: “He ex-
plained in detail in the letter the imprudence of a woman getting in-
volved in literature, the need for a woman to fulfill her biological role
of motherhood, the risk involved in a girl becoming a writer, and then
added a few insulting phrases” (128–29; 39). Intended as a rejection of
Yoshiko’s solicitation to become his pupil, Tokio’s response focuses on
the fact that she is a woman, and in suggesting to her that she should
“fulfill her biological role of motherhood,” he echoes the ideology of ryō-
sai kenbo (good wife, wise mother) that began to be promoted actively
within Meiji society around the turn of the century.
Central to the spreading of this ideology was the girl’s school system
that saw a major reorganization when the Upper Girls’ School Act (Kōtō
148 Of Crimes and Punishments

jogakkō rei) was issued in 1899 to establish a secondary-school system

consisting of four years of education after elementary school.67 As the
following words of its designer Kabayama Sukenori (1837-1922) reveal,
this act did not have much to do with education as a path to women’s
independence in society or equality with men:
A healthy middle society cannot be nurtured by the education of boys alone.
Only after serving the house together with a good wife and a wise mother can
[they] promote the welfare of society. . . . [The upper girls’ school] should equip
[girls] to become a good wife and wise mother. Thus, it is necessary for them
not only to cultivate a graceful and refined character along with a moderate and
chaste nature but also to gain knowledge of learning and arts necessary for a life
of the middle class.68

As this passage makes clear, the act was devised to complement the re-
vised middle-school system that sought to foster the establishment of a
middle class in Japan. At least on the level of ideology, such acts excluded
women from the path to social success regardless of their education, for
the primary purpose of women’s education was to make them into good
wives and wise mothers whose service to the nation was confined within
the family unit outside the public realm of society.
But novel writing posited itself as one possible avenue—and a widely
publicized one at that—within which women could imagine an exis-
tence outside of this ideology to succeed based on one’s talents in a so-
ciety ruled by the opposite sex. And such imaginings were possible not
only because the fashionable novel-writing contests theoretically offered
a venue where the sex of the participants did not matter, but also be-
cause there were numerous female writers who had made their mark on
society, such as Miyake Kaho (1868–1943), Higuchi Ichiyō (1872–1896),
and Yosano Akiko (1878–1942), whether in prose or in poetry. In this
sense, just like Ushimatsu, whose choice of being a teacher was a fitting
one at least theoretically given his origins and economic condition, Yo-
shiko’s decision to become a novelist, too, is intimately connected to a
profession where her ‘mark’ would not be a detriment.
—————
67. As suggested by the establishment of various women’s journals such as
Jogaku zasshi, women’s education was one of the hot topics for debate during
the 1880s. However, the rate of school attendance for girls steadily decreased in
the late 1880s to the early 1890s, and it was only after the Sino-Japanese War that
the issue of women’s education resurfaced in various newspapers and journals. For
more details, see Fukaya, Ryōsai kenbo shugi no kyōiku, 116.
68. Cited in ibid., 155.
 Of Crimes and Punishments 149

Just as Hakai asserted on the fictional level how difficult it was for
Ushimatsu and Rentarō to escape their ‘marks’ whatever the actual state
of reality may have been, however, Futon also tells of how escaping her
‘mark’ is a difficult if not impossible task, as Yoshiko’s stay in Tokyo
clearly shows.69 Her modern dress and hairstyle and her casual fraterni-
zation with male friends are not only sources of concern and vexation
for Tokio’s wife and his wife’s sister but also catch the eyes of a patrol-
man—a representative of the authorial gaze—who mistakes her for a
prostitute.70 To Tokio, she appears firstly as an object of desire and his
interest in her for much of the story involves getting to the bottom of
the truth behind her relationship with Tanaka. In this sense, it seems
natural that Futon ends the way it does. Not only is Yoshiko’s confes-
sion that she has had a sexual encounter with Tanaka considered a sin
by Tokio precisely because she is a woman, but her confession also
completes her branding as a sexualized body, which has no place in the
world of risshin shusse. Ultimately, the text frames and defines her within
the confines of ryōsai kenbo to judge her as a failure within this ideology
from which she sought to escape in the first place.

—————
69. This is not to say that the difficulties of these characters accurately reflect
the historical reality of Meiji society. For example, as many scholars have noted,
a person of burakumin origins who served as the model for Rentarō did not die
as Rentarō did but ultimately became a principal of a school. While this example
should not be taken as a sign that there existed no prejudices toward burakumin in
Japan at the time of Hakai’s publication, I would argue that there is a conscious
literary effort on the part of Tōson to present the fate of Ushimatsu and Rentarō
in such terms regardless of the specific reality of Meiji society as it relates to bu-
rakumin as a social group. And I would also argue that the same can be said for
Katai’s literary concern in Futon as it relates to Yoshiko’s tragic fate as a woman,
for, as Rebecca Copeland has illustrated, there were available models of success,
both in real life and in the fictional world, for the educated women in Meiji soci-
ety. For details, see Copeland, Lost Leaves.
70. That the patrolman mistakes Yoshiko as a prostitute is not explicit in
the text but is suggested in the following words of Tokio’s sister-in-law: “There’s
nothing really bad about her, and she’s bright and intelligent and a rare sort of
person, but if she does have a fault then it’s this habit of hers of walking non-
chalantly around at night with her men friends. . . . And then I hear how, at the
police-box on the corner, they felt it suspicious that she was always hanging
around with these men and how a plainclothes detective had been stationed
outside the house” (149; 57).
150 Of Crimes and Punishments

In Hakai and Futon, youths who aspire to establish themselves in so-

ciety are forced to abandon their chosen paths to success, not because
of their abilities as teachers or writers, but because of their secrets that
become exposed despite their best efforts to hide them from others, an
exposure that takes the form of a confession in a manner similar to that
of a criminal admitting guilt. Yet, in both stories, the secret that be-
comes exposed should have no bearing on what happens to Ushimatsu
and Yoshiko. Ushimatsu’s burakumin origins should not have anything
to do with his job as a teacher after the dissolution of the class system.
And in the case of Futon, Tokio’s response to Yoshiko’s confession,
“with things as they are now, it’s only right for you to go back home”
(187; 89), is more illogical than contradictory, and the illogicality of the
situation—that is, the male-centered logic—is clearly indicated by the
fact that Tanaka, who comes after Yoshiko and whose future as a writer
does not seem as bright as Yoshiko’s, is allowed to remain while Yo-
shiko goes back to her hometown with her father.
As we saw in the first section of this chapter, Raskolnikov’s turn to
crime had much to do with his expulsion from the world of social mobil-
ity through education, especially within the interpretative framework of
1890s Japan, which had already foreshadowed the coming of Raskolnikov
in the figure of Bunzō whose dismissal from his governmental post sends
him spiraling down a road to delusion and madness. The historical de-
velopments of 1890s Japan must have augmented the potential dangers
facing Meiji students in becoming another Bunzō or Raskolnikov, as the
path to success through education became harder and harder to navigate
yet the desire to do so was being actively fueled through the expansion of
the middle-school system, which enabled many more students to at least
stand at the start line. But whereas Raskolnikov commits the crime be-
cause he fails to rise in the world, Ushimatsu and Yoshiko fail to rise
because of their crimes. Thus, we have a reversal of cause and effect, the
primary mechanism by which the two representative works of Japanese
Naturalism sought to tackle and neutralize the dangers that were sug-
gested by a Russian work of fiction and were becoming clearer by the
day in the realities of Meiji society. If Crime and Punishment suggested
the potential for intellectuals as a whole to turn criminal in a later-
developing country like Russia and Japan where contradictions between
social ideals and realities were particularly vivid, then Hakai and Futon
function to connect the failures of Ushimatsu and Yoshiko to their
‘criminal’ secrets—made so by the prejudices of society—to affirm their
tragic existence and experience, in turn, as marginal in nature.
 Of Crimes and Punishments 151

But in their execution of this ideological operation, the two works

move in different ways. Through its presentation of the contrasting
fates of Ushimatsu and Ginnosuke that function to emphasize the non-
connection between failure and ability, Hakai asserts Ushimatsu’s mar-
ginality beyond one established through the connection made in the
text between his origins and his failure. For Ushimatsu, who believes
that “if he had volunteered [for the higher teacher’s college], he would
have already been selected,” there is no sense of competition or doubts
of his ability to obtain a higher education (185).71 It is only the perceived
social prejudices against his origins that shackle Ushimatsu to his cur-
rent position. In contrast, Ginnosuke who is not shackled by any limita-
tions quickly obtains a job in the Agricultural Branch of the Tokyo Im-
perial University upon becoming disillusioned with Iiyama’s elementary
school and thereby highlights the external limitations placed on Ushi-
matsu that thwarts his advancement.
In this sense, Ushimatsu, despite being the “son of a poor peasant,”
would not have been a likely candidate to go abroad to the extent that
Katayama’s works were geared primarily toward those who could not
succeed in the Japanese school system because of their abilities. Ushi-
matsu leaves because he is forced out through prejudice and not failure.
Thus, if Hakai evoked the contradiction between the ideology of risshin
shusse and the real difficulties Meiji students faced in achieving its goals—
—————
71. The phrase appears within the most vividly described passage of Ushi-
matsu’s desire for advancement after he learns that Ginnosuke will be leaving
the elementary school for the Agricultural Branch of the Tokyo Imperial Uni-
versity: “The passion that yearns for achievement and fame violently stimulated
Ushimatsu’s heart as he read his friend’s letter. Truly, the reason that Ushimatsu
entered the teacher’s college, like that of many other students, was to gain a way
to support oneself. . . . Certainly, Ushimatsu was not satisfied with the current
position. But besides a special case like Ginnosuke’s, there was no way other
than to go to the higher teacher’s college [kōtō shihan] for a schoolteacher to ad-
vance. If not, then, there’s the long ten years of service. During that mandatory
period, one had to be bound and work. If he had volunteered [for the higher
teacher’s college], he would have already been selected. That was the sad thing
about eta. For some reason, he did not want to go that way. According to Ushi-
matsu, even if he graduated the higher teacher’s college and became a teacher at
a middle school or a teacher’s college, what would he do if he encountered a sit-
uation like Rentarō’s? Wherever he might go, he won’t be able to relax. Rather
than that, [it would be better] to hide patiently in the country like Iiyama and
wait for the end of mandatory service. [It would be better] to study meanwhile
and prepare the groundwork to go out in another direction” (184–85).
152 Of Crimes and Punishments

as the sociopolitical source of the intellectual’s criminality as suggested

by Crime and Punishment—then it does so in order to marginalize this con-
tradiction through the figure of Ushimatsu. For, by actively tying his fail-
ure within this ideology to his discriminated origins, Hakai posits this
contradiction as that between the ideal of classless society specific to
the liberation of burakumin and the persistent social prejudices of Meiji
society despite such official liberation, that is, in terms that have nothing
to do with the average aspirers within the risshin shusse ideology. In so do-
ing, Hakai rewrites the realities of ability-based failure with a fiction
of prejudice-based banishment within which Ushimatsu functions as a
martyr for the ordinary Meiji students in the 1890s and beyond who must
face the realities of their internal lack of ability brought on by the socio-
political conditions of the society in which they exist.
In contrast, Futon does not deal explicitly with the ability-based fail-
ure side of the equation beyond the tying of Yoshiko’s banishment to
her sex and not to her abilities as a writer. Rather, Futon goes a step fur-
ther within the context of our discussions through its presentation of a
figure of success within the path to success chosen by Yoshiko. That is,
if Yoshiko represents failure to become a writer, then naturally Tokio as
a writer is a figure of success whose abilities and status are sought by
those who also desire to become writers, as we previously saw. But what
is striking when considering Tokio as a figure of success is his modest
life. Indeed, the portrait of Tokio that we get in the first pages of the
story is that of a struggling writer:
It was in one of those many factories that he went to work every afternoon, in a
large Western-style room upstairs with a single large table standing in the mid-
dle and a Western-style bookcase, full of all sorts of geographical works, at its
side. He was helping, on a part-time basis, with the editing of some geographical
works for a certain publishing house. A man of letters editing geographical
works. . . . What with his rather tardy literary career, his despair at only having
produced odds and ends without an opportunity for putting all he had into a
work, the painful abuse he received every month from the young men’s maga-
zines, his own awareness of what he ought to do some day—it was inevitable he
should feel upset. . . . Every day, then, he would go mechanically along the same
route, in through the same big gate, along the same narrow passage with its mix-
ture of vibrating noise from the rotary press and smelly sweat from the factory-
hands. He would casually greet the employees in the office, climb laboriously up
the long and narrow steps, and finally enter that room. The east and south sides
were open to the sun, and in the afternoon, when the sun was at its strongest, it
grew unbearably hot in there. To add to it all the office-boy was lazy and didn’t
clean, so the table was covered with an unpleasant layer of white dust (125–26;
36–37)
 Of Crimes and Punishments 153

Editing geographical works most likely to make ends meet, Tokio views
his literary career as a tardy and frustrating one: he cannot produce a
work in which he has given it his all, and, as for the works he produces,
he receives poor reviews. As the lengthy description of his working envi-
ronment reveals, moreover, his life is portrayed as being no different
from that of a regular office worker, characterized by routine and mo-
notony. Yet, the fact of the matter is that he has a pupil in Yoshiko and
that he “quite frequently received letters from various devotees and ad-
mirers in the provinces,” asking him to “correct the sender’s texts, or
asking permission for the sender to become his pupil.”
The early chapters of Futon provide a contrasting portrayal of Tokio
as a struggling writer and an office worker versus a writer and a teacher
who is admired by many aspiring youths. At first glance, such a portrayal
seems to deter from the allure of the profession of a novelist. How can
Tokio’s modest life inspire others to follow in his footsteps? If it fails to
inspire, then does the portrayal of Tokio’s life in these terms function to
warn of the harsh realities of the writing profession and to encourage
the aspiring novelists to seek other means of living? Does Futon serve to
shut the door on the road to success through fiction writing? While an-
swers to these questions must ultimately lie with individual readers, the
proliferation of stories about novelists from around the time of Futon’s
publication, as Hibi Yoshitaka demonstrates, suggests that Futon had a
profound impact not only on literary production but also on literary
consumption, addressing and promoting the desires of its readers to
identify with struggling novelists.72
Indeed, I would argue that it was precisely the modest portrayal of
Tokio’s life as a writer which had the profound effect on the contem-
porary readers of Futon because such a portrayal functioned to position
Tokio on the side of the ordinary man, offering a figure of success that
fundamentally differed from those appearing in and criticized by the
most popular newspapers of the late Meiji period such as Yorozu chōhō
and Niroku shinpō. And the effectiveness of such a presentation was no

—————
72. For details, see Hibi, ‘Jiko hyōshō’ no bungakushi. As Hibi argues, there was
a surge in the number of works between the publication of Futon in September
1907 and the end of 1908 that can be read within the context of the authors’ ac-
tual lives, which, for Hibi, demonstrates the impact of Futon whose newness was
to be found in the fact that it tells a story surrounding Katai’s actual life. But I
would argue that the impact of Futon lay more in its portrayal of a struggling
writer as hero, whether this hero had the real-life author as model or not.
154 Of Crimes and Punishments

doubt augmented by the fact that Futon operated within the framework
of yellow journalism in the nature of its central conflict, which the intro-
duction to the collection of criticisms on Futon published in the October
issue of the literary journal Waseda bungaku in 1907 describes in the fol-
lowing manner: “He [Tokio] by nature had a strong self-awareness and
could not indulge himself in anything and stands at the contradiction
between sexual desire on the one hand and morality on the other and
experiences extreme anguish.”73 That is, in pitting sexual desire against
morality, Futon took up the favorite theme of yellow journalism, namely,
the illicit affairs of successful figures, whether it was the Prime Minister
Itō Hirobumi or the writer Mori Ōgai.
Yet, despite evoking the framework of yellow journalism, Futon dif-
fers fundamentally from this medium, for, as Nakamura Mitsuo dismiss-
ively but accurately describes, Futon is about a “failed affair,” and as such
is a story about a non-scandal, at least as it relates to Tokio.74 In this
sense, Futon is a story about a man who chose not to commit a common
but immoral scandal despite numerous opportunities. And if scandals
exposed in various newspapers functioned to alleviate the jealousy and
anger felt by the ordinary citizens toward the members of the upper
class as the successors within the risshin shusse ideology, then Futon posi-
tions Tokio on the side of the ordinary man who, despite, or precisely
because of, his modest life, is superior to the ‘truly successful’ in terms
of his morality. In the figure of Tokio, the writer is elevated into a hero
of the common people by exemplifying the understanding of the ordi-
nary man that was implied by Ruikō’s detective stories and by scandal
journalism.
Furthermore, the emergence of such a figure is supported by another
characteristic of Futon that differs fundamentally from Hakai. In Hakai,
Ushimatsu’s fate symbolizes the failure of the official Meiji promise to
the extent that being of burakumin origins should have no bearing at all
according to the government. In Futon, in contrast, Yoshiko becomes
judged by the Meiji ideology of ryōsai kenbo supported and propounded by
the state to produce young girls as complements to the middle-school-
educated boys who would become the pillar of the nation by forming the
middle class, a class that must be formed through the inevitable failure of
social advancement via education as the official state ladder of success.
—————
73. “Futon gappyō,” in Yoshida Seiichi et al., Kindai bungaku hyōron taikei, vol.
3, 417.
74. Nakamura, “Tayama Katai ron,” 277.
 Of Crimes and Punishments 155

Whereas Hakai criticized the Meiji government through the criminaliza-

tion of a victim in Ushimatsu, Futon criticizes Yoshiko as criminal by in-
voking state ideology.
In this context, Tokio’s choice to relentlessly pursue the truth of Yo-
shiko’s affair takes on another significance. As we saw, Tokio’s search
for truth goes against his psychic system of “fallacious identification”
with Western characters, which is fundamental to his identity. By mak-
ing Yoshiko confess and thereby banishing her not only from Tokyo
but also from his psychic life (at least as an active and immediate part of
it), Tokio ‘chooses’ to embody the gaze of state authority and ideology
rather than to continue reproducing his fantastic relationship with the
West. In other words, Futon posits Tokio as an ordinary man of morals
who takes on the role of the detective, going as far as to sacrifice his
intimate, fundamental ties to Western influence, in order to complete
his ‘official’ duty to enforce state ideology. And considering that pri-
mary objects of his identification—as Western influence—are Russian
characters, the timing of Futon seems quite suggestive. Futon appeared
in the immediate aftermath of Japan’s victory over Russia in the Russo-
Japanese War, which signaled, at least on the surface, that Japan had
arrived onto the international scene and that the Japanese had caught
up with the Western powers.75 As such, it was a fitting time for Japan
to shed its connection to the West and assert its own nationalistic iden-
tity. Of course, as we shall see in the coming chapters, it was not so easy
to get rid of Western influence, as suggested by the fact that the notion
of chastity that Tokio uses to punish Yoshiko within the framework of
ryōsai kenbo derived itself from the notion of platonic love and virginity
as ideals of distinctively Western origin.

—————
75. The superficial nature of Japan’s victory over Russia can already be dis-
cerned from the stipulations of the Treaty of Portsmouth, which did not grant
Japan the ‘typical’ spoils received by the victor, most notably, monetary repara-
tion and territorial transfer. The frustrations and anger over the stipulations of
the treaty immediately led to political protests in Japan, erupting in the Hibiya
Riots in September 1905 during which protestors burned a majority of the police
boxes in Tokyo.
 FOUR

Mysteries of the Modern Subject:

The Detective and the Detective Fiction
Framework in the Writings
of Natsume Sōseki

In January 1903, Natsume Sōseki, who would soon start on the path to
becoming the most famous writer of modern Japan, returned to his na-
tive country after a 26-month stay in England ordered by the Ministry of
Education. Well documented by himself and by numerous scholars as a
very unhappy sojourn, his life in London was not only economically de-
manding due to his meager stipend but also intellectually and culturally
unfulfilling, leaving him with “a dislike for England and even for English
literature.”1 Furthermore, his mental health, which was already in ques-
tion prior to his trip, worsened abroad, and there arose rumors that he
had suffered a nervous breakdown. The source of such rumors was a
student who had visited Sōseki’s lodgings in London. Inquiring about
Sōseki to his landlady—who, according to Sōseki, constantly spied on
him—the student discovered that Sōseki often shut himself up in his
room and cried in the dark. The student reported his findings to the
Ministry of Education whereupon news quickly spread among the pub-

—————
1. Keene, Dawn to the West, 310.
 Mysteries of the Modern Subject 157

lic that Sōseki had gone mad, and his acquaintances in Tokyo often ap-
proached his unwitting wife about the health of her husband.2
Many Sōseki scholars have pointed out this biographical experience—
rumors about his mental health triggered by the spying landlady and
student—as one of the primary reasons for Sōseki’s hatred of detectives.
Indeed, Sōseki, more than any other writer in the modern Japanese lit-
erary canon, argued the evils and immorality of the detective as a pro-
fession.3 But whatever his reasons may have been, he put his hatred of the
detective to good use, employing the detective as a powerful metaphor
with which to reflect upon the various phenomena of Japanese modernity
and modernization, including the development of literature, as exem-
plified by his essay “Bungei no tetsugaku-teki kiso” (The philosophical
foundations of literary arts), originally given as a lecture and later serial-
ized in Tōkyō Asahi shinbun from May 4 to June 4, 1907.
Arguing that the foundations of literature consist of the four ideals of
beauty, truth, love/morality, and solemnity, this essay criticizes the state
of contemporary literature for its unbalanced emphasis on the search for
truth. And in making his point, Sōseki quickly turns to a vehement at-
tack of the detective as a profession whose “essence is to search for the
truth in the most vulgar sense,” going as far as stating that the detective
cannot “pass as a human being” and is only “important as a machine.” It
is only after this ‘rant’ that he turns to the topic at hand:
It is extremely rude to compare the contemporary literati to the detective, but
if a writer is proud to openly publish works that only profess truth and do not
care what happens to the other ideals, then he must be a person with a defect,
perhaps not as an individual, but certainly as a writer. We must say that he is
unhealthy.

While Sōseki only names foreign writers like Maupassant and Zola to be
“just as vulgar as a detective,” it is easily understandable that his criti-
cism extended to Japanese writers, especially considering that, around
—————
2. For more details on this anecdote, see Natsume Kyōko’s Natsume no omoide,
123–29. According to this memoir, Sōseki is said to have said the following about
his landlady and her sister: “The landlady and her sister are very kind to me, but
they say bad things about me behind my back. . . . They keep an eye on me as if
they were detectives. How detestable they are!” (126).
3. For example, Uchida Ryūzō writes: “In the beginning of the twentieth cen-
tury, there was none other than Natsume Sōseki who reacted more sensitively
and bore more ill will toward the mysterious existence of the ‘detective’ ” (Tantei
shōsetsu no shakaigaku, 21).
158 Mysteries of the Modern Subject

1907, a literary movement heavily influenced by the works of these

French writers—Japanese Naturalism whose ‘obsession’ for truth was
examined in the previous chapter—was gaining momentum in Japan.4
Yet, as already seen in his first work Wagahai wa neko de aru (hereafter
referred to as Neko) in which the cat, though critical of the detective,
cannot help being detective-like, Sōseki’s relationship to the detective
was always characterized by ambivalence.5 By examining his later works
Higan sugi made (Until after the equinox; 1912) and Kokoro (1914) in con-
junction with Neko, this chapter considers this ambivalence surrounding
the figure of the detective that also manifests itself in Sōseki’s repeated
equating of the detective with the criminal, which, in turn, problematizes
the polarizing subjective positions offered by the detective story. In so
doing, I argue that the detective and the detective fiction framework
were not only targets through which Sōseki criticized modern society
but also sites within which he sought solutions to the ills such society
brought to its subjects, however maddening such a search became. And
here, Sōseki’s project posits itself as the flip side of Japanese Naturalism
by taking up the issue of risshin shusse: if the latter sought to deal with
those who were failing within this ideological system through the pre-
sentation of marginalized martyrs—that is, by circumvention through
substitution—then Sōseki got at the heart of the matter by his relentless
portrayal of those who should be elites of their society given their educa-
tional and socioeconomic backgrounds but nonetheless—or rather, pre-
cisely because such backgrounds lead to their predilection for being
detective-like—fail to be productive citizens in society.

—————
4. Natsume Sōseki, “Bungei no tetsugaku-teki kiso,” in Sōseki zenshū, vol. 11,
76–77.
5. On this point, Ara Masahito states: “The most curious thing [about Neko]
is that the cat effectively plays the role of the detective that Sōseki detested
most. The mystery of this unconventional story probably lies in the fact that the
cat is the sublimated figure of the detective. Solving this mystery will no doubt
lead to a better understanding of the fundamental nature of Wagahai wa neko de
aru” (Natsume Sōseki, 136). Uchida Ryūzō makes a similar observation: “this novel,
on the one hand, is a criticism against the existential form of the detective, and,
on the other hand, is founded on the detective-like perspective and actions per-
formed by the cat” (Tantei shōsetsu no shakaigaku, 29).
 Mysteries of the Modern Subject 159

Spying Cat, Narrating Cat

Originally written to conclude in one installment but continued for ten
more because of its popularity in the literary journal Hototogisu (Cuckoo;
est. 1897), Neko takes the form of a series of vignettes that describe the
everyday lives of Kushami, a school teacher, and his friends and former
students who gather at his home. Made clear by the title—also the story’s
opening sentence—from the very beginning, the story’s first-person nar-
rator is a cat who proclaims himself to be a writer of shaseibun.6 As Sōseki
would later articulate, shaseibun (which can be translated as sketch writ-
ings) was a form of writing that Sōseki set against the novel. Its primary
characteristics were the lack of plot (“What is plot? Does the world have
a plot? It is no use to create a plot within something that doesn’t have
plot”) and the distant yet sympathetic and humorous attitude toward the
object of depiction, which Sōseki describes as that of “an adult looking at
a child” and of “parents facing their children.”7
True to his word, the cat’s narrative, consisting of numerous anec-
dotes and infused with humor, seems to fulfill these characteristics of
shaseibun, no doubt assisted by the absurd premise of the cat as narrator
that makes possible a viewpoint outside the social and moral confines of
the human world from which to criticize and relativize human habits and
customs in a comical way. Yet, despite the cat’s self-conscious presen-
tation of the text as shaseibun and the unplanned nature of Neko’s seriali-
zation, there does exist a consistent thread that runs through the work’s
eleven chapters, namely, the supposed courtship between Kushami’s
former student Kangetsu and the daughter of the neighborhood entre-
preneur Kaneda. Fittingly enough, this courtship finds its resolution in
the final chapter when Kangetsu tells Kushami’s salon that he has actu-
ally married a girl from his hometown during a recent trip there. In light
of this information, Kushami suggests to Kangetsu that he should inform
the Kanedas of the marriage, but Kangetsu rejects this suggestion, stating
that the Kanedas would surely know of this fact already thanks to their
“detectives,” who have been snooping around the Kushami household to

—————
6. Shaseibun was a form of writing originally developed by Sōseki’s friend Masa-
oka Shiki (1867–1902) and Shiki’s disciple and the editor of Hototogisu Takahama
Kyoshi (1874–1959). Shaseibun grew out of Shiki’s efforts in the field of tanka and
haiku to provide objective descriptions of subject matter.
7. Natsume Sōseki, “Shaseibun,” in Sōseki zenshū, vol. 11, 22–23.
160 Mysteries of the Modern Subject

get information on Kangetsu.8 Kushami agrees with Kangetsu, but this

use of the word “detective” sets Kushami off into a rant regarding the
detective:
A pickpocket is someone who picks people’s pockets on the occasion of their
carelessness; a detective is someone who fishes the thoughts and feelings on the
occasion of their carelessness. A thief is someone who takes off the shutters and
steals people’s belongings without their knowledge; a detective is someone who
makes people slip their tongue and reads their hearts without their knowledge.
A robber is someone who stabs a knife into a tatami-mat and grabs people’s
money by force; a detective is someone who talks threatening words excessively
and forces people’s wills. So the creature called detective is a kindred of pick-
pockets, thieves, and robbers and cannot be placed windward to a person (501).

After this rant by Kushami, his friend Dokusen asks an out-of-the-blue

question: “Speaking of detectives, how is it that the people of the twen-
tieth century have a general tendency to become detective-like?” (502).
Kushami’s friends give their curt, smart answers, but Kushami takes this
question as an occasion to rant further. He states:
According to my interpretation, the reason for the detective-like tendency of the
people today is definitely because the individual’s self-awareness is too strong. . . .
By the self-awareness of people today, I mean that people are too aware of the
existence of a distinct gap in terms of the interests between oneself and others.
And this self-awareness becomes acute day by day with the advancement of civili-
zation so in the end, you will not be able to make any little move naturally. . . . On
this account, the people of today are detective-like, thief-like. The detective is a
profession that tries to do well just for oneself by doing things behind people’s
backs, so, of course, [it] can only be done [by someone] with a strong self-
awareness. Because the worry of being caught and being discovered never leaves a
thief, he too is forced to have a strong self-awareness. The people of today are al-
ways thinking about what is to one’s advantage/profit and one’s disadvantage/
loss whether they are sleeping or awake, they too cannot help but have strong self-
awareness like the detective and the thief. Looking and sneaking around restlessly
day and night without a moment of relief until they enter the grave—this is the
hearts of people today and the curse of civilization (502–4).

In these long monologues, Kushami equates the detective with crimi-

nals, seeing them as two sides of the same coin in their need for “self-
awareness,” which results from their desire to access something that
they are not entitled to from others. It is not the murderer—the favor-
ite criminal of detective fiction—but a pickpocket, thief, and robber
—————
8. Natsume Sōseki, Wagahai wa neko de aru, in Sōseki zenshū, vol. 1, 501. All sub-
sequent references to this source will appear in the text in parentheses.
 Mysteries of the Modern Subject 161

who are compared to the detective. That is, Kushami compares the
detective to ‘professions’ whose essential characteristic is the unlawful
usurpation of private property via a transgression of the boundary be-
tween public and private realms in order to describe the immoral and
despicable nature of the detective who pickpockets, steals, and robs the
private thoughts of individuals against their will. In so doing, Kushami’s
rant clearly places Sōseki’s criticism of the detective within Tsubouchi
Shōyō’s novelistic worldview in which the novelist becomes a privileged
mediator between the individual’s external actions/behaviors and inter-
nal thoughts/emotions whose correspondence has become severed in
the modern age.
This criticism of the detective finds further elaboration in the second
passage when Kushami discusses the reason why modern individuals
have a heightened sense of self-awareness. For him, the heightened
sense of self-awareness is a result of the awareness that there exists “a
distinct gap in terms of the interests between oneself and others,” an
awareness that increases “day by day with the advancement of civiliza-
tion” and leads to a modern condition where no one can go “without a
moment of relief.” Modern individuals turn detective thanks to their
constant analysis of the Other to assess what is advantageous to the self
or not, which, in turn, is necessitated by the framework of social evolu-
tion where one person’s success may mean another’s failure. The pri-
mary form of social competition in Meiji Japan, social advancement
through education, no doubt fostered such “self-awareness,” as govern-
ment policies in the 1890s actively promoted the escalation of competi-
tion, as we discussed in the previous chapter. Indeed, the members of
Kushami’s salon, despite their witty but mostly substance-less chatter
that suggests their “moment of relief,” are precisely the victors within
the social ladder of success through education that makes individuals
self-aware. Yet, they are not presented as such in Neko, and in their
stead, the textual representation of self-interest and self-awareness takes
the specific form of the Kanedas, whose mention prompted Kushami’s
rant in the first place.
Fittingly, then, it is the cat’s encounter with Kaneda’s wife when she
visits Kushami’s house uninvited in the third chapter that prompts the
cat to use the word “detective” for the first time (117). In her conversation
with Kushami, Kaneda’s wife shamelessly reveals that she has asked his
neighbors to spy on his relationship with Kangetsu, whom she hopes to
have as her daughter’s husband, a desire admitted as being based wholly
on self-interest: although Kangetsu is not rich, the Kanedas would like
162 Mysteries of the Modern Subject

the status that he might bring to the family, and, thus, their stipulation
for the marriage is that he obtain his doctorate degree and thereby reach
the pinnacle of the educational ladder of success in Meiji society.9 In
Neko, the Kanedas function as the epitome of the twentieth-century in-
dividual as schemers who are always thinking about advantages and dis-
advantages, profits and losses. And this is hardly surprising precisely be-
cause heightened self-awareness in monetary terms, as Kushami suggests,
was not a unique characteristic of the Kanedas but a common one among
the people of Kushami’s time, when the belief in social success through
education was quickly diminishing. In other words, the Kanedas whose
name contains the character ‘money,’ literally symbolizes such way of
thinking about profit and loss that had become a sociohistorical phe-
nomenon in the first decades of the twentieth century characterized by
the catchword seikō (success).
As Earl Kinmonth has argued, concomitant with the official attempt
in the 1890s to expand the middle class through the expansion of the
middle school system, which in turn made advancement within the edu-
cational system extremely competitive, was a radical shift in the way
people thought about success. He writes:
Far more important than the stimulus given to militaristic or expansionistic vi-
sions of advancement was the contribution the war made to the growth of the
economy and the subsequent definition of advancement in monetary terms. In
the short run the war gave rise to a speculative boom of considerable intensity.
Kokumin no tomo lamented that energy generated by the war, rather than being
turned to science, religion, or academia, had ended up in speculation and get-rich-
quick schemes. People’s heads were full of stock prices. . . . Whereas the past had
seen a surplus of youths dreaming of politics, the postwar era saw them shouting
“Gold! Gold!” and “Make Money! Make Money!” or so the editorial claimed. . . .
the economic growth stimulated by the war had in turn stimulated a new interest
in business among even relatively well-educated youths who would previously
have only considered government affiliation worthy of their efforts.10

—————
9. In this instance, then, the word “detective” (tantei) is used as a verb rather
than as a noun (variation of the form tantei suru). Although this practice was
already common in the 1880s and there was and still is the propensity within the
Japanese language to create a verb by simply attaching the verb-ending suru (to do)
to the noun, the use of the word tantei as a verb, a use that is impossible in English
(“detective” does not equal “detect”), detaches the word from the profession of
the detective, enabling it to describe actions of ordinary persons.
10. Kinmonth, The Self-Made Man in Meiji Japanese Thought, 154, 157.
 Mysteries of the Modern Subject 163

As Kinmonth describes in this passage, the newly and rapidly develop-

ing capitalistic system in the aftermath of the Sino-Japanese War pro-
vided the “relatively well-educated youth” for whom success through
education was becoming harder and harder to achieve with an alterna-
tive mode of rising in the world. But while such a mode of success be-
came widely spread among various economic classes and social groups
by the turn of the century, the real possibilities of succeeding in society
within this mode of rising in the world, too, were short-lived as Japan
experienced “a severe depression with substantial unemployment” dur-
ing the first years of the new millennium, leaving only the dreams of
striking it rich intact.11
It was within such a sociohistorical reality that the Kanedas, as fig-
ures of success in a new mode of rising in the world, pranced around the
neighborhood with a haughty air, demanding obedience and command-
ing respect from their neighbors. Kaneda was a successful embodiment
of a dream in a society where such a dream had already become very dif-
ficult to achieve. It is also within such an atmosphere that Kushami’s
characterization of the twentieth-century individual as always worrying
about profits and losses must be understood. The twentieth-century in-
dividual is detective-like, always aware of one’s actions, to the extent that
he is a participant in the social Darwinian struggle for money as success.
For Kushami, however, such an attempt at entrepreneurship as lawful ac-
cumulation of private property is no different from stealing as unlawful
usurpation of private property. And Kangetsu, his star student around
whom the discourse on the detective in Neko revolves, rejects the most
traditional (underhanded) route to material success by refusing to marry
into wealth.
But while the members of Kushami’s salon may be immune to such
self-awareness bred through competition, the same cannot be said for
the cat, whose encounter with Kaneda’s scheming wife prompts him not
—————
11. Ibid., 162. Importantly, it was only when the market became harsh and
money-making difficult that journals like Jitsugyō no Nihon (Business Japan) and
Seikō (Success) gained popularity and general-interest magazines like Taiyō (The
sun) and Chūō kōron established columns on success and money-making. As such,
it was natural that the underlying framework of these journals and columns was
one of a social Darwinian struggle where coming out on top in a competition
required not a straightforward approach but ‘secrets’ to acquiring wealth. In a
sense, these journals offered ways to succeed economically in a dire condition.
In another sense, they promoted people to hang on to a dream when the dream
was quickly becoming a fantasy.
164 Mysteries of the Modern Subject

only to use the word “detective” but also to spy on the Kanedas—that is,
to act like a detective—and to become conscious of the detective-like
nature of his previous and present actions. From the fourth chapter on,
the cat repeatedly uses the word “detective” as a verb to describe his
own actions, whether they involve spying on the Kanedas or simply fol-
lowing Kushami around the house. Together with this use of the word
“detective” is the use of the word jiken (affair, incident, case) to describe
the mundane events surrounding Kushami’s life. The prevalence of the
word jiken, which is used to designate criminal cases in Japanese, sug-
gests the cat’s conscious framing of his narrative within the discourse of
the detective and of criminal investigations.
Even before such a shift in the cat’s narration, there is no denying
that the early chapters of Neko present the cat as a natural detective.
Not only is he better suited than humans to play the role of the detec-
tive because of his stealthy and nimble nature, as he himself points out,
but he can also easily circulate within the private lives of people pre-
cisely because the cat does not appear to them as the Other whose pres-
ence requires a heightened sense of “self-awareness.” For the cat, there
is no such thing as a transgression of someone’s private sphere, because
his presence, even when recognized, does not disturb the privacy of the
space, as characters go on with their actions and conversations as if he
did not exist. Moreover, the cat seems to enjoy prying into the private
details of others, as already made clear in the first chapter, when he
reads Kushami’s diary—a private object understood to contain the in-
ternal thoughts of a person—to divulge his thoughts, such as his envy
for a geisha wife, that “should not be uttered by a teacher” (19).
This is not to say, however, that the cat is fully comfortable with his
detective-like actions or nature. He also shares the hatred for the detec-
tive—at least in theory—expressed by Kushami and his friends at vari-
ous points in the narrative, stating that “there is no profession in this
world that is more vulgar than a detective and a loan shark” and thereby
foreshadowing the connection Kushami will make between the detec-
tive and private property in the final chapter of the story (134–35). In
fact, the cat’s narrative is filled, even before the above statement, with
his repeated attempts to justify the contradiction between this hatred of
the detective and the awareness of his own actions as detective-like. For
example, after learning that Kaneda’s wife has devised a plan to spy on
Kushami and Kangetsu, the cat decides to go to the Kanedas to spy on
them in turn for Kangetsu’s sake. But upon realizing that he will not be
able to pass on the information to Kangetsu because he cannot commu-
 Mysteries of the Modern Subject 165

nicate with human beings, his justification of selfless duty quickly turns
into that of narcissistic pleasure and self-edification as he states: “It is
pleasant in itself to accomplish something that others cannot do” (119).
Ultimately, the cat’s justification evolves into one of defiance, as he
rejects the idea of private property and privacy—critical to the criticism
of the detective in Neko—as contractual constructs of human society that
have nothing to do with him. For him, the repeated visits to Kaneda’s
mansion are an assertion of his right to roam wherever and observe what-
ever he pleases, and it cannot be helped if in asserting his inherent right,
“the circumstances at Kaneda’s house naturally reflect in my eyes that
don’t want to see and leave an impression in my brain that doesn’t want
to remember” (136). In such a way, the cat turns his aforementioned abili-
ties as a natural detective into an excuse or justification for his conscious
attempt to spy on the Kanedas and presents himself as a supra-moral fig-
ure who should not be condemned—at least in theory—for his detective-
like acts.
But what about writing about such acts? As a narrated self, the cat may
be a physical entity free from human rules and morality, but, as a narrator,
the cat is a linguistic entity who can communicate with his human readers.
Ironically, the cat’s explanation of his supra-moral status based on his
lack of ties to human society must take the form of human language, the
use of which undermines the premise on which he justifies his detective-
like actions. Given the progression (or regression) of the cat as a user of
language in the course of Neko, moreover, we could make the argument
that the story tells how a cat comes to terms with his inherently detec-
tive-like nature to become a perfect detective. In the course of the nar-
rative, the cat, who could not shed his subjective involvement with the
objects of his investigations as the narrated self in the early pages of the
story—unnecessary information for a detective’s report—gradually dis-
appears from the text, replaced by the narrating cat as gaze and perspec-
tive. 12 By the final chapter, when the prolonged conversation on the

—————
12. The cat’s development into a perfect detective can also be seen in the
supra-human abilities that he obtains in the course of the narrative, namely, the
ability to access information that exists outside the reach of a first-person nar-
rator’s limited viewpoint—that is, the inner thoughts of Kushami and others.
Despite stating that “There is nothing more difficult to understand than the
psychology of human beings. I have no idea whether this master is now upset,
merry, or seeking comfort in the way of the philosopher’s work” (32) in the
aforementioned scene when he reads Kushami’s diary, the cat has no such trou-
166 Mysteries of the Modern Subject

detective takes place at Kushami’s house, the narrated cat is nowhere to

be seen, and the narrating cat is no different from a third-person narrator
who ‘faithfully’ records the conversation that is taking place. And if the
cat’s inherent detective-like nature was brought to the fore of his con-
sciousness with the introduction of Kaneda’s wife, who willingly admits
her hiring of spies to report about the ongoing affairs of the Kushami
household as they relate to Kangetsu, then the cat’s narrative posits itself
as precisely that which she was seeking from her spies, making the cat out
to be the ultimate detective that the Kanedas have (not) hired to spy on
Kushami and Kangetsu.13 Fittingly, the cat dies and his narrative ends
when the Kanedas no longer need a detective to spy on Kangetsu as a
result of his marriage to a girl from his hometown.14
As we saw in the first chapter of this study, Shōyō’s introduction of
the detective was intricately tied to his need for the moral legitimation of
his notion of the novel. To the extent that the primary focus of Shōyō’s
novel was the private lives of individuals, the author/narrator of the mod-
ern novel was already implicated as an eavesdropper and a voyeur. Unlike
the real-life detectives of the 1880s who were no different from an eaves-
dropper/voyeur, Shōyō’s detective was an idealized figure of distinctively
foreign origin who exposed the wrongdoings of society that would have
gone unnoticed otherwise. In short, Shōyō appealed to the social benefits
of the detective in order to legitimate the author/narrator of the modern
novel. In Neko, however, the detective is not an idealized figure of justice
and morality. He is real and ubiquitous, synonymous with the eavesdrop-

—————
ble by the ninth chapter when he states: “I am a cat. There may be those who
are questioning why I despite being a cat can record with precision my master’s
innermost thoughts in such a way, but for a cat, such things are nothing. I am
versed in the art of mind reading. You don’t have to ask an unnecessary thing
like when I learned such a thing. In any case, I am versed in it” (384).
13. The irony of the situation is reflected in the fact that various characters in
Neko including the cat refer to the hired spies of the Kanedas as dogs, as linguis-
tic antonym to the cat, and the Kanedas as pet owners (kainushi). That is, if the
dog is associated with servility and obedience and the cat with curiosity, then
Neko tells the process of how the cat’s curiosity ends up making him into an
obedient dog of the Kanedas.
14. The cat dies when he gets drunk on beer and falls into a large pail. Unlike
his previous crisis, when he choked on a rice cake in the second chapter, no one
comes to rescue him. While it is true that his drowning takes place at night af-
ter people at Kushami’s house have gone to sleep, it is also symbolic of the fact
that the cat has become invisible to the people of the story world.
 Mysteries of the Modern Subject 167

per and spy. This is not to say, though, that Sōseki did not share Shōyō’s
concern regarding the fundamental nature—that is, the fundamental im-
morality—of the author/narrator and of novel writing. If Shōyō sought to
disentangle the connection between the author/narrator and the eaves-
dropper through the introduction of the detective as an idealized figure
of justice and morality, then Sōseki reveals the absurdity and impossibil-
ity of such a figure through the talking/writing cat, whose story provides
an allegory of how difficult it is to not become a detective as a narrator.
That Sōseki considered the figure of the detective as a necessary start-
ing point to his literary project is evident from his repeated return to
this topic in his other early works, including “Shumi no iden” (The he-
redity of taste; January 1906), Botchan (The young master; April 1906),
and Kusamakura (Pillow of grass; September 1906). For example, the nar-
rator-protagonist of “Shumi no iden,” in a similar manner to the cat,
states: “It is an extremely absurd phenomenon that I, who have always
thought to myself and proclaimed to others that there is no business
more inferior than a detective, would come to treat things with a purely
detective-like attitude.” 15 And in Kusamakura, its artist-protagonist—
who claims that “ordinary novels are all invented by detectives”—fore-
shadows the criticism of the novel articulated in “Bungaku no tetsugaku-
teki kiso” when he states: “[I]t will become vulgar if I, like an ordinary
novelist, investigate the root of their [people of the village] arbitrary
behavior, delve into [their] mental operations, and examine conflicts of
human affairs. . . . To the people that I will meet now, I will try to watch
them from far above with detachment and not to let the electricity of
human feelings arise in any party.”16
As these examples show, the detective was an ubiquitous figure in
Sōseki’s early works. But such an articulation of the detective disappears
completely, at least on the surface level of the text, around the time Sō-
seki joined the Tōkyō Asahi shinbun to become a full-time writer in April
1907. According to the index volume of Sōseki zenshū, in fact, the word
tantei, which appeared repeatedly in his early works, does not appear at
all in his fictional writings after Nowaki (Autumn wind; January 1907),
the last fictional work Sōseki wrote before joining the newspaper.17 But
this is not to say that Sōseki abandoned his exploration of the funda-
mental issues embodied by the figure of the detective, for his literary
—————
15. Natsume Sōseki, “Shumi no iden,” in Sōseki zenshū, vol. 2, 216
16. Natsume Sōseki, Kusamakura, in Sōseki zenshū, vol. 2, 489, 396.
17. Natsume Sōseki, Sōseki zenshū, vol. 17, 478.
168 Mysteries of the Modern Subject

works after Nowaki continued to tell how modern society inevitably

turns one into a detective without using the term. And when Sōseki
brings back the detective in Higan sugi made, he does so with a venge-
ance, tackling the problem of the detective head on to examine the in-
timate connection—ignored by Sōseki in Neko—between the detective
and the modern Japanese intellectual characterized by his penchant for
curiosity and reflection.

The Rhetoric of the Secret

On New Year’s Day, 1912, Natsume Sōseki began the serialization of
Higan sugi made in Tōkyo Asahi shinbun after a year-and-a-half hiatus from
fiction writing caused primarily by the aggravation of a stomach ulcer
from which he had been suffering. As such, it is understandable that his
introduction to the story expresses a resolve that grew out of this hiatus,
as Sōseki writes that “there is a certain feeling that it would be inexcus-
able if I didn’t write something interesting . . . [and] didn’t repay my col-
leagues who treated me with generous spirit regarding my health.”18 And
if Sōseki returned from a long hiatus determined to write an interesting
story, then the choice he makes for the story’s subject matter—the de-
tective—is significant within the understanding of his literary oeuvre,
for it reiterates his deep-seated predilection to gravitate to the detective
as the most suitable metaphor to discuss the problematics of modern
Japanese society and its individual, the two issues with which he was
primarily concerned.
Revisiting the paradoxical ambivalence toward the detective found in
Neko, Higan sugi made tells the story of Tagawa Keitarō, a young man
who aspires to do things that “a detective of the metropolitan police
department” might do, but, at the same time, feels that he cannot (43).
As he describes to his friend Sunaga, who would become Keitarō’s pri-
mary object of investigation in the course of the story:
Primarily a detective is something like a diver of society who dives from the sur-
face of the world into its depths, so there are not many professions like it that
grasp the mysteries of people. And because his job is to simply observe the dark
aspects of others and does not require him to be endangered by becoming cor-
rupted himself, it is even more convenient. However, because his objective,
from the beginning, is to expose the wrongdoings [of people], it is a profession

—————
18. Natsume Sōseki, Higan sugi made, in Sōseki zenshū, vol. 5, 6. All subsequent
references to this source will appear in the text in parentheses.
 Mysteries of the Modern Subject 169

that is founded upon the preconceived idea of ensnaring people. I cannot do

something as bad as that to people. I just want to be a researcher of people, or,
rather, I just want to gaze with a sense of wonder at the way in which the ab-
normal mechanisms of people operate in the darkness of the night (44).

As this passage reveals, Keitarō’s hesitancy to become a detective stems

from moral reasons: rather than “expose the wrongdoings” of people as
an active agent, Keitarō instead wants to “gaze” at their most private
and extraordinary moments as a passive observer—an eavesdropper and
a voyeur—who in his eyes is less morally offensive than a crime-fighting
detective. Such a view of the detective, to the extent that it lacks a sense
of social justice, presents itself as diametrically opposed to those put
forth in Shōyō’s Nisegane tsukai and Ruikō’s Muzan, in which the social
function of the detective as the executor of justice morally justifies
the personally questionable potential of the detective as a violator of
privacy.19
Whether logically sound or not, Keitarō’s asocial understanding of
the detective seems appropriate considering that his interest in being a
detective is introduced as constituted by his primary characteristic,
namely, his romanticism, which began to rear its head when he was in-
troduced to Robert Louis Stevenson’s New Arabian Nights (1882) in high
school. Indeed, the specific influence of Stevenson’s text can be seen in
the otherworldliness and exoticism of Keitarō’s fantasies, which include
a plan to open a “rubber plant farm in Singapore” (18). To draw from our
discussions from the previous chapter, such exoticism sets Higan sugi
made against Tōson’s Hakai, exposing the elitist naiveté of the former’s
protagonist: if Ushimatsu is banished against his will to a foreign land to
work on a farm, then Keitarō views that land—whether the rubber plant
forests of Singapore or Manchuria, where his fellow lodger Morimoto
fled, leaving unpaid rent—as objects of romantic musing and yearning.
At the same time, it is also true that Keitarō’s romanticism points to
a problem similar to that of Ushimatsu: namely, the difficulty of finding

—————
19. As Karatani Kōjin has argued, such a view of the detective completely de-
tached from a sense of social justice exposes Keitarō as someone who is “more
indifferent to morality than a criminal” (Sōseki ron shūsei, 308). In this sense,
Keitarō can be compared to the cat in Neko. Fittingly, like the cat who trans-
forms into a narrative perspective towards the end of Neko, Keitarō gradually
shifts from an active agent to a passive observer who disappears from the text.
170 Mysteries of the Modern Subject

success in Japan. While Keitarō, unlike Ushimatsu, is an elite member

of Japanese society as a graduate of the university (presumably Tokyo
Imperial University), he does not see himself as a figure of real success:
He had no awareness up to today that he had advanced forward on his own
powers. Whether it was his studies, sports, or whatever, he had never managed
to take them on seriously and see them through to the end. The only thing he
had done as far as he could was that he graduated from the university. Even that,
they dragged him out although he did not put forth the effort and was inclined
to just be lazy, so, in return for there not being a feeling of stagnation, there also
wasn’t a sense of relief as if one had finally dug through a well (75).

No doubt, such a feeling of drifting through life has much to do with his
upbringing in a well-to-do family that enabled him to grow up without
experiencing the financial constraints and hardships of average citizens.
But it is also brought on by the humbling ‘view’ from the pinnacle of
this ‘mountain’ of social advancement through education, for Keitarō is
left without a suitable job after obtaining a university degree, leading
him, in turn, to contemplate a speculative venture abroad.
In this context, although the first half of the story until Keitarō finally
gets to play detective at Taguchi’s orders has often been criticized for
being gratuitous, the slowness of narrative development was perhaps Sō-
seki’s point.20 That is, Keitarō’s repeated failure even to get to meet with
the successful businessman Taguchi, being stood up and insulted in the
process, suggests Keitarō’s desperation to find a job and his awareness
that the best way to do so is to use not his education but his connection
with Sunaga to get in with his entrepreneurial uncle. And just when he
seems to have received his perfect job from Taguchi of playing detec-
tive—that is, the fusion of his romantic dreams and real-world aspira-
tions—it turns out that he is made to play the fool instead by spying on a
dinner date between Taguchi’s daughter Chiyoko and her uncle Matsu-
moto for Taguchi’s entertainment. Through this turn of events, the first
half of Higan sugi made offers a radical criticism of the value of education
and presents Keitarō’s romanticism and his love of the detective as the
flip side to his desperation in the harsh realities of 1910s Japan. In the
end, as Keitarō is fully aware, he does exactly what his delinquent

—————
20. In his analysis of Higan sugi made, Maeda Ai criticizes the first half as
“elaborate to the point of being slightly verbose.” He also presents as general
opinion that the first half was “an unnecessary service for the newspaper readers
forced upon Sōseki after his illness” (“Kashō no machi,” 215, 201).
 Mysteries of the Modern Subject 171

neighbor Morimoto said any university graduate would do, choosing re-
ality and status over romantic adventure.21
But Keitarō’s detective work does not end here, as he thereafter delves
into “the complex situation” between Sunaga and Chiyoko, his cousin
whom his mother had asked her father (Taguchi) to make Sunaga’s wife
upon her birth (201).22 The following exemplifies Sunaga’s tumultuous
relationship—psychologically speaking—with Chiyoko, which, in turn,
reveals Sunaga as a modern Japanese intellectual in the lineage of Uki-
gumo’s Bunzō and Futon’s Tokio, whose penchant for analysis posits the
woman as mystery-to-be-solved:
On occasion, she seemed as if I was the only one she loved in this world. . . . But
as I contemplated whether I should take resolute action, she would escape from
my grasp in an instant, and she would take on the face of someone who was no
different from a complete stranger. . . . Sometimes, my heart would become
cloudy with the slightest suspicion that she controlled this with her own will, ap-
proaching me and then becoming distant on purpose. Not only that. There were
many examples when I felt the fruitless frustration after I had interpreted her
words and actions as one meaning only to immediately reinterpret the same words
and actions as having a complete opposite meaning and, in the end, not knowing
which one was correct (266–67).

As made clear by this passage, which takes place after the introduction
of Takagi (an extrovert in contrast to Sunaga who emerges, at least in
the eyes of Sunaga, as Chiyoko’s future husband), Chiyoko’s words and
actions lead Sunaga to analysis but such analysis only leads to multiple
interpretations. Not only that, such analysis often ends up in self-doubt
and the presentation of himself as a mystery: “I am of the type who is

—————
21. Matsumoto tells Keitarō: “There are many interesting things in this world
aside from hurricanes, and you seem to be trying hard to encounter such inter-
esting things, but it’s no good once you have graduated the university. When
push comes to shove, you will recall your status. . . . In this day and age, there
isn’t a whimsical person who would seriously go as far as giving up one’s status to
wander” (31). Also, Keitarō later tells Sunaga: “I thought that education was a
privilege but actually it is one type of constraint” (43).
22. The following comment Keitarō makes upon his decision to delve into the
story of Sunaga and Chiyoko reveals his vulgar curiosity as well as his audacity
and arrogance regarding his right to such action that resemble the cat’s argument
of why he is not a detective: “Of course, it was nothing but simple curiosity. He
clearly recognized it as such. But he also recognized that if it was against Sunaga,
then satisfying this curiosity would not be considered offensive. Not only that, he
believed that he had the right to satisfy this curiosity” (201–2).
172 Mysteries of the Modern Subject

often suspicious of others but at the same time must be suspicious of

the self that is suspicious” (243). Indeed, Sunaga goes as far as to claim
that he does not even know whether he loves Chiyoko, as his own reac-
tions to Chiyoko often surprise him. This happens twice in the story,
first when he is shocked by her marriage announcement that turns out
to be a lie (225–27) and second after he returns from Kamakura alone
and contemplates the relationship between Chiyoko and Takagi and
‘encounters’ his own jealousy (281–82).
If one result of over-analysis is the turning inward of the gaze that
leads one to question oneself, then the other is the lack of action exem-
plified once again by Bunzō of Ukigumo, who escapes into his second-
floor room for endless contemplation. While Sunaga is undoubtedly his
successor, he, unlike Bunzō, is well aware of the result of his overactive
intellect—“my head was made to suppress my heart” (274)—which he
takes to be a common characteristic of the educated, as he tells his
friend why he would make a poor character in a novel: “those who are
advanced in thought are always thinking and don’t have the courage to
act in a grand manner” (271). This comment leads to an interesting an-
ecdote, in which Sunaga’s friend lends him a novel in German transla-
tion titled Der Gedanke, by the Russian writer Leonid Andreyev (1871–
1919), that tells of an intellectual who strategically fakes his insanity in
order to kill his friend (who had married the woman he loves) without
being charged in the murder.23
No doubt more extreme and contrived in its protagonist’s plan and
execution, Der Gedanke nonetheless shares many similarities with Crime
—————
23. Sunaga calls the story an example of a “protagonist who possesses both
extraordinary intellect and terrifyingly and fiercely daring action” (271). The
work Der Gedanke depicts a man whose love is not welcomed by a woman, who
instead marries his friend, and who therefore decides to murder his friend in as
“complicated a manner” as possible (272). He chooses to portray himself as a
crazy person by pretending to have psychological breakdowns in front of people.
And when the rumors of his mental health had spread, he kills his friend in front
of his wife in the pretense of another breakdown so that he is not charged with
murder. The man succeeds in his task, but, of course, he is sent away to a psy-
chiatric ward. The catch is that by the end of the story, the reader is not sure if
the man is a sane man of superior intellect and action or simply a lunatic. In a
sense, the craziness of his actions—the murder as well as the various steps he
goes through in order to accomplish this task—makes it impossible to affirm as
extraordinary the intellect with which he plans his move, and the story becomes
one about a monster that can be created when reason aligns with passion.
 Mysteries of the Modern Subject 173

and Punishment in their exploration of the madness that awaits those

whose intellect loses direction, whether through socioeconomic hard-
ships or a broken heart. And by having Sunaga claim that he envies the
protagonist of Der Gedanke and by having him daydream about killing
Takagi, the text seems to suggest the powerful effects that such litera-
tures continued to exercise on the psychic life of modern Japanese sub-
jects. But to the extent that the portrayal of such subjects was funda-
mentally as men of inaction in Japan, from Ukigumo’s Bunzō to Futon’s
Tokio, Sōseki seems to reiterate the fundamentally non-radical nature
of the modern Japanese subject who embraces Western education and
literature not as models for action but as sources for fantasy, which, in
turn, foster the inward directing of the subject’s gaze. If a Russian work
(Crime and Punishment) suggested the dangerous potential of intellectuals
to turn criminal and was suppressed within Meiji literary history as a re-
sult, then Sōseki through his introduction of another Russian work (Der
Gedanke) suggests the powerless nature of Japanese intellectuals to be
like their Russian counterparts, whose frustrations with external reality
explodes violently in the form of a crime.
Indeed, Sōseki underscores this point through the figure of Matsu-
moto, who is singular in his place among Sōseki’s characters for his self-
proclamation as “kōtō yūmin” (162), for, although many of Sōseki’s charac-
ters have been described as such, this instance marks the only explicit use
of the term in his literary oeuvre. But more importantly in the context of
our present discussion, the term translated perhaps as an ‘upper-class
vagabond’ was becoming prevalent in public forums to denote a social
problem just when Sōseki was preparing and serializing Higan sugi made.
As Nagashima Yūko argues, two fears buttressed the problematization of
kōtō yūmin as a social phenomenon in the early 1910s: 1) “the increase in
unemployment, which directly expressed the dead-end conditions of the
post-Russo-Japanese War economy and would lead to the production of
the ‘educated poor’ ” and 2) “the inclination toward socialist activities by
the educated who are unemployed within the climate of the suppression
of socialists that strengthened after the Great Treason Incident [Tai-
gyaku jiken], which occurred in May of the previous year.”24 As these
—————
24. Nagashima Yūko, “ ‘Kōtō yūmin’ o megutte,” 221. In the Great Treason
Incident, various leftist intellectuals and activists were arrested by the govern-
ment under the suspicion of planning the assassination of the emperor, among
other atrocities. The trials of these suspects, most of whom labeled anarchists
and communists, were undisclosed to the public, bringing criticism from within
174 Mysteries of the Modern Subject

fears suggest, the discussion of kōtō yūmin involved the real possibilities
of the educated as a vulnerable and dangerous group who may be suscep-
tible to radical action in the form of socialist politics, whether because
of poverty, lack of social status, or boredom. Finally after twenty years
from the translation of Dostoevsky’s Crime and Punishment by Uchida
Roan, Raskolnikov—whose political dangers were actively managed on
the imaginary level through works such as Tōson’s Hakai and Katai’s
Futon—resurfaces as the embodiment of a social problem that warrants
extensive discussion both on the part of the government and the media.
Yet, despite such negative connotations surrounding the term at the
time, Matsumoto as kōtō yūmin is anything but a dangerous misfit.
Unlike Taguchi, who must suspect everyone and thereby present him-
self in line with Kushami’s definition of the detective, Matsumoto is
characterized by his undetective-like nature that enables him “to not
worry about offending others” (162).25 Such belief, as Nagashima argues,
stems from his abandonment of sincere engagement with others by con-
structing “a buffer zone between the self and the Other,” and his laissez-
faire attitude is “made possible by receiving the ‘thoughts of society’ in-
to oneself as they are” without protest, thanks in part to his wealth that
allows him to be disengaged from society.26 Matsumoto is, thus, an apo-
litical conformist rather than an anti-establishment element that the
government states is the primary tendency of kōtō yūmin. In this sense,
Matsumoto could be said to symbolize the resignation of an intellectual
in “the Age of Winter” ( fuyu no jidai ), as the 1910s would be called for
its lack of political activities in the aftermath of the Great Treason In-
cident: through the absolutist response to this incident, the government
made clear that there was no room in Meiji society for disgruntled intel-
lectuals to turn radically political and that any attempt to do so would
be nipped in the bud.
If Matsumoto’s self-proclamation as kōtō yūmin draws its symbolic sig-
nificance from the specific sociopolitical conditions of Meiji society de-

—————
the country as well as from without, and 24 people, including the well-known
journalist and writer Kōtoku Shūsui (1871–1911), were sentenced to death.
25. Described by Matsumoto as someone who “can’t relax” and “suspects”
everyone because he is “always thinking whether this person is of any use or that
person can be used without worry” (174–75), Taguchi is presented as someone who
resembles Kushami’s view of the Kanedas and of the modern individual who is
driven by self-interest and characterized by suspicion of others.
26. Nagashima Yūko, “ ‘Kōtō yūmin’ o megutte,” 222.
 Mysteries of the Modern Subject 175

scribed above, then Matsumoto in his interview with Keitarō attempts,

in turn, to frame the tribulations of Sunaga within the larger movement
of modernization through his mention of a lecture that “dissected the
civilization of modern-day Japan” (308).27 Offering reasons why “we who
are influenced by this civilization will necessarily fall prey to nervous
prostration unless our thoughts and actions become superficial,” the
scholar-speaker of this lecture states that, although people “like to know
the truth of things when they do not know,” people often regret coming
to know the truth once they know (308). Matsumoto tells Keitarō that
upon hearing this, he thought of Sunaga: “At that point, I thought about
Ichizō, and as I contemplated that, while we Japanese who must learn of
such harsh truths are very pitiful, a youth like Ichizō who is terrified as he
tries to find out his personal secret and tries again despite being terrified
is even more miserable, I wept tears of sympathy inside for him” (308). In
such a way, Matsumoto contextualizes Sunaga’s secret that he is about to
reveal by presenting him as a symbolic representative of those living in
“modern-day Japan” headed for “nervous prostration.”
But interestingly, despite such contextualization, the secret that Ma-
tsumoto reveals is one that smells of feudal times: Sunaga is an illegiti-
mate child between his father and a housemaid. The topic of adultery is
one that has surfaced and resurfaced in the course of modern Japan,
whether in literary or public discourse. As we saw in the second chapter,
the detective stories of Kuroiwa Ruikō often employed past adultery
and its exposure to a third-party as the cause of the crime and thereby
criticized the act as dangerous for society. And Ruikō would make his
criticism of adultery more direct in the 1890s as he used his scandal re-
porting in the Yorozu chōhō as a way to inculcate readers on the evils of
adultery as an immoral as well as an anti-modern act. In this context,
adultery between the head of the household and a housemaid was as
feudalistic as they come, evoking not only the violation of monogamy as
a Western/Christian value but also the stereotypical abuse of master-
servant relationship fundamental to feudal societies.
Indeed, Sōseki seems to emphasize Sunaga’s family as remnants of
a past era, for Sunaga’s household, the site of this adultery and secret,
is symbolically positioned within the feudalistic space of Edo tradition
via the manipulation of geographical structure and organization within
—————
27. In a self-referential moment, Sōseki inserts clips from his lecture “Gendai
Nihon no kaika” (The civilization of modern-day Japan), which he presented in
Wakayama on August 1911 during his hiatus from novel writing.
176 Mysteries of the Modern Subject

the story world. As Maeda Ai has argued, the locations of the houses of
the primary characters of the story—Keitarō, Taguchi, Matsumoto, and
Sunaga—form a triangle with Sunaga’s household at the center of the
triangle. Such positioning makes sense symbolically given the plot of
the story in which Sunaga and his secret become the narrative kernel that
connects Keitarō with Taguchi and Matsumoto. Moreover, while the
other three households—occupied by the emblems of modern society:
the social climber, the entrepreneur, and kōtō yūmin—are connected via
“a web of new era transportation in the form of the tram,” Sunaga’s house
is located in “the back alley aligned with houses” and has “a boarded fence
with wall spikes and rough contours” that reminds one of “the old foun-
dations of the city that still leaves the vestige of Edo.”28
In this way, Sōseki presents Sunaga, on the one hand, as an exemplar
of the modern individual’s tendency to turn detective and, on the other
hand, posits the reason for such tendency in the secret of a feudalistic
household. Yet, despite this seemingly contradictory presentation of Su-
naga, I would argue that, as Matsumoto observes, Sunaga functions as an
allegorical figure who represents the ultimate fate of the modern Japa-
nese intellectual whose seriousness toward discovering the truth sets him
apart from the likes of Taguchi, Matsumoto, and Keitarō, who avoid
“nervous prostration” through their “superficial” “thoughts and actions.”
And here, it is not simply that Sunaga’s search for truth is one of know-
ing; rather, Sōseki seems to suggest that it is our dark pasts—represented
in this novel with the vestige of Edo that is Sunaga’s household—that
fundamentally constitute us as individuals. To the extent that Sōseki’s
understanding of Japan’s modernization is an externally forced change
rather than an internal progression, the subject, despite the fact that
the likes of Taguchi, Matsumoto, and Keitarō might act as if they have
internalized such a change, is left to deal with this un-modern/Edo core
of their being in a world full of modern façades.29
And it is precisely this haunting of the present by the past that gets
played out in Higan sugi made within the detective fiction framework,
wherein the significance of random signs on the page become clear after
the revelation of the truth-as-secret. Some are more obvious, already
pointing to the secret and functioning as evidence of how Sunaga’s rec-
ollection of his personal past proliferates suspicion in him, which in turn
—————
28. Maeda, “Kashō no machi,” 203.
29. For details on Sōseki’s understanding of Japan’s modernization, see Na-
tsume Sōseki, “Gendai Nihon no kaika,” in Sōseki zenshū, vol. 11.
 Mysteries of the Modern Subject 177

primes and feeds his over-analytical mind. For example, Sunaga tells of
how Sunaga’s father on his deathbed told Sunaga, “If you are unruly like
now, mother won’t care for you” (206). And upon his death, the mother
seems to rebut the father’s worries, stating: “Don’t worry. Even if father
dies, I will take good care of you as I did before” (207). Sunaga states
that, at the time, he found these words strange, but as time passed,
strangeness turned into suspicion: “I cannot explain it even if I asked
myself why I had to take their words, which did not need to have any
special meaning, as evidence for my deep suspicion” (207). In this man-
ner, the text actively promotes the reader’s interest by constructing a
narrative dynamic where Sunaga’s casual mentioning of what he thought
was unusual or what seemed out of the ordinary become clues to discern
the reason for Sunaga’s “suspicion.” Another such example occurs a bit
later in Sunaga’s story when he tells Keitarō that he used to have a sister
who died very young before the death of their father. Casually told as an
anecdote (“I will tell you here since I just remembered it” [209]), the
story contains an additional bit of the out-of-the-ordinary, namely, that
Sunaga’s younger sister called him “Ichizō-chan” rather than ‘onii-chan,’
or elder brother (210).
Of course, these out-of-the-ordinary bits of information make per-
fect sense given the secret of Sunaga’s birth, whether his parents’ com-
ments that suggest the less-than-certain relationship between mother
and son or the sister’s use of “Ichizō-chan” that reflects his outsider po-
sition as an illegitimate child within the Sunaga household before her
death. But the revelation of Sunaga’s secret goes well beyond providing
the reader with answers to the out-of-the-ordinary behavior of his fam-
ily members toward him of which he is already conscious. It also pro-
vides a powerful frame of reference from which to interpret the actions,
emotions, and behaviors of Sunaga himself, revealing the secret’s influ-
ence at the very core of the subject, including unconscious desire. For
example, during his story in which he recounts of an episode when his
mother and Chiyoko get their hair done, Sunaga reveals his fondness for
the traditional Shimada hairstyle. While this episode is presented anec-
dotally with his admission that he “enjoys watching women put up their
hair,” Matsumoto’s story later in the novel provides a new framework
with which to consider its significance: one of the only facts that is
known about Sunaga’s real mother is that she wore her hair in Shimada
style (287, 313).
Similarly, the anecdote of Sunaga’s sister provides another example of
how a past trauma comes back to haunt the subject in the present, re-
178 Mysteries of the Modern Subject

vealing itself within this framework as the missing piece in understand-

ing the significance of a story that Chiyoko tells Keitarō of the death of
Matsumoto’s youngest daughter Yoiko. The episode tells how Yoiko’s
mother forgot to bring a key required for Yoiko’s cremation and how it
turned out that Sunaga, who was “listening with coldness to the dialogue
between the two [Yoiko’s mother and Chiyoko] from behind” regarding
the missing key, had it all along (195). Discovering this, Chiyoko calls
Sunaga an “unsympathetic person,” and the following exchange of words
ensues:
“I’m not unsympathetic. Since I don’t have a child, I don’t understand the
love between parent and child.”
“My, how can you say such a careless thing in front of Auntie? So what about
me then? When did I have a child?”
“I don’t know whether you have or not. But you are a woman so you might
have a more beautiful heart than a man” (195–96).

This scene, which can be seen as evidence of the tenuous relationship

between Sunaga and Chiyoko, takes on a different significance in light
of the revelation of his secret and childhood memories. And it is not
simply that his “unsympathetic” attitude stems from the fact that he,
unlike Chiyoko, did not have a relationship with his real blood parents
instead of the fact that he, like Chiyoko, has never had a child, as Su-
naga claims here.
Rather, Sunaga’s past raises the possibility that Yoiko’s death, occur-
ring at an age similar to the death of Sunaga’s sister, provides an occa-
sion for him to recall the death of his own sister. Considering that Su-
naga’s mother finally conceived the girl after much trouble, the sister’s
death is a traumatic moment when Sunaga could have realized that he
and his sister were different in the eyes of their ‘mother.’ Or it could be
that Sunaga had become an outsider in the household after the birth of
the sister (as suggested by her calling him by his name), but his previ-
ously held insider status was restored with his sister’s death since it once
again made him the only child bearing the Sunaga name.30 In this sense,
the sister is a usurper of Sunaga’s ‘rightful’ place within the Sunaga fam-
—————
30. I say ‘previously held insider status’ here because Sunaga’s mother asking
to have Chiyoko as Sunaga’s wife upon her birth suggests the mother’s accep-
tance of Sunaga as the heir of the household. But, of course, this was at a time
when the sister was not born and the mother believed that she could not have a
child. As such, it is easily imaginable how the mother’s attitude toward Sunaga
may have changed upon the birth of her own child.
 Mysteries of the Modern Subject 179

ily and, as such, a possible target of hatred and jealousy, and the sister’s
funeral could have been the moment when Sunaga realized the selfish
nature of adults, as his mother, left once again without a child of her
own, reaccepted him as her son. If Yoiko’s funeral and cremation bring
back this memory, then it makes sense that Sunaga would be “unsympa-
thetic” and “careless” to Matsumoto’s wife, who may have functioned as
a surrogate of Sunaga’s mother.31
And the central conflict of the novel—the relationship between Su-
naga and Chiyoko—is fittingly bound by the same dynamic of the past
controlling the present. As previously mentioned, Sunaga’s mother upon
the birth of Chiyoko made the Taguchis promise that she be made Su-
naga’s wife. In light of the revelation of Sunaga’s secret, the reasoning
behind this move on the part of his ‘mother’ is obvious, at least, to Su-
naga and Matsumoto, as Matsumoto quickly confirms (“Yes, that’s ex-
actly right. There is no other reason”) when Sunaga states: “So the rea-
son that mother says to take Chiyoko as a wife is because, from the
perspective of bloodline, she wants me to have a relative as a wife” (313).
From this perspective, the relationship between Sunaga and Chiyoko is
truly doomed. If he asks her to marry him, then it would be an affirma-
tion of his outside status. If he does not marry her, then it would make
him into an outsider. This double bind caused by the secret makes it
impossible for him to act, and I would argue further that his intellectu-
alism and penchant for analysis constitutes not so much an attempt to
discover a solution but a response to relish in and submit to this double
bind, which has foreclosed the possibilities of ‘correctly’ analyzing a de-
sirable course of action.
In these ways, the revelation of Sunaga’s secret by Matsumoto opens
up various reinterpretations of the already read portions of the text and
suggests the darkness lurking behind the most casual of anecdotes. 32
—————
31. Many scholars have pointed out that Sōseki’s daughter died during his hi-
atus from fiction writing and see Chiyoko’s story, which does not seem to have
much connection to Sunaga’s or Matsumoto’s stories, as Sōseki fulfilling his de-
sire to write about his daughter. While this may certainly be the case, my argu-
ment is that Chiyoko’s story has intimate connection to the rest of the work
and is, thus, a vital part of a whole.
32. But we should note that in this reinterpretation process, the biggest mys-
tery of Higan sugi made surfaces, a mystery that involves the previously discussed
observations made by Sunaga as a child on the out-of-the-ordinary comments
made by his family members, which, in turn, raise his suspicions and foreshadow
his illegitimate birth. Sunaga tells these observations to Keitarō, but impor-
180 Mysteries of the Modern Subject

And it is not Keitarō, the self-appointed detective of the story, but the
reader who must take on the task of the detective to make connections
between clues-as-effect and secret-as-cause, discerning, for example, the
significance of the Shimada style hair. Importantly, such connections,
when the reader makes it, are not necessarily true. It could be the case
that Sunaga likes the Shimada style for a completely different reason
than one relating to his biological mother. But the point seems to be
that such a possibility becomes foreclosed upon encountering Matsu-
moto’s story of Sunaga’s traumatic past, for the narrative dynamic of
a foreshadowed secret followed by its revelation forces the reader to
submit to the interpretative framework of the secret being the end-all,
making the reader believe that such connections shed light on the deep-
est inner workings of the subject.
Given the careful manner in which Sōseki constructs this interpreta-
tive framework—embedding, hiding, showing various clues within the
text—it is rather surprising, then, that Sōseki is so casual in rejecting
this framework as nothing spectacular. Matsumoto’s tale, which reveals
Sunaga’s secret, is followed by a short conclusion that summarizes what
Keitarō did in not-so-flattering terms and, in the final paragraph of the
novel, the third-person narrator underlines this point, stating: “But ul-
timately he [Keitarō] could not place himself inside it” (334). This com-
ment is interesting precisely because the interpretative framework con-
structed around Sunaga’s secret seems to suggest that Keitarō has really
gotten to the bottom of things. While it is true that Keitarō, as the text
states, has remained a passive ‘listener’ throughout the story, the reader

—————
tantly—as Matsumoto’s story that follows Sunaga’s within the novel reveals—
Matsumoto tells Sunaga of his illegitimate birth before he graduated from the
university. In other words, while the reader has not been made aware of Su-
naga’s secret, Sunaga himself already knew of his secret when he told Keitarō his
story, filled with questions that are explained away by the knowledge of the se-
cret. Thus, Sunaga in telling the story seems to dangle his feelings of suspicion
without providing the answer, or rather, seems to feign ignorance on the reasons
for such suspicions. Why does Sunaga provide clues that point to his secret but
not the answer, which he knows? Has Sunaga repressed this knowledge that he
obtained from Matsumoto? Or is Sunaga, who has joked to his uncle that Kei-
tarō likes playing the detective, purposefully presenting his own story as a mys-
tery for Keitarō to solve? While the text does not seem to provide evidence to
suggest whether any of these possibilities have merit, this enigma is narratologi-
cally necessary to ensure that the revelation of Sunaga’s secret produces maxi-
mum effect in the reader.
 Mysteries of the Modern Subject 181

cannot help being surprised at how much of the story Keitarō was able
to obtain through his ‘detective’ work, especially considering the per-
sonal nature of the stories describing the most private and traumatic
moments of people’s lives.33 But the third-person narrator’s dismissal of
Keitarō’s effort starts to make sense once we encounter Sōseki’s Kokoro,
in which its first-person narrator’s involvement with the life of an older
friend suggests what it really means to place oneself “inside” to get to
the bottom of things.

Narrating Guilt, Narrating Betrayal

Serialized in Tōkyō Asahi shinbun from April 20 to August 11, 1914, Na-
tsume Sōseki’s most famous work Kokoro revisits the main theme of Hi-
gan sugi made—secrets from the past and their constitutive effect on the
individual—through the exploration of “Sensei” (teacher), an educated
recluse who lives with his wife in self-enforced banishment from society.
As his testament, written to the narrator just before his suicide, clearly
indicates, Sensei shares with Higan sugi made’s Sunaga his detective-like
character that requires him to endlessly analyze the intentions of others
via their actions and behavior. For example, Sensei recalls that, when he
first moved in with “Okusan” (madam) and “Ojōsan” (young miss), he,
“like a cat, watched the movements of others in the house . . . behaving
like a pickpocket who doesn’t steal.”34 This condition becomes worse
with the introduction of his friend K to the household, as he becomes
suspicious of the motivation behind each and every action by Okusan,
Ojōsan, and K, especially as it relates to Ojōsan as the object of desire

—————
33. Importantly, the text shows no coaxing or pleading on the part of Keitarō,
especially when it comes to Matsumoto’s story, which is not framed by a dialogue
between Keitarō and Matsumoto that should have preceded the story. To the
extent that Matsumoto is divulging Sunaga’s secret, the content of which could
certainly be considered slanderous if it were to become public, a narrative framing
that might elucidate Matsumoto’s reasons for telling what he tells seems most
necessary. And in this sense, one could argue that Higan sugi made does not de-
scribe Keitarō’s greatest talent, which is to get other people to open up to him.
This aspect of the ‘detective’ will become crucial not only in Sōseki’s Kokoro but
also in the Akechi Kogorō stories of Edogawa Ranpo discussed later.
34. Natsume Sōseki, Kokoro, in Sōseki zenshū, vol. 6, 178; Natsume Sōseki,
Kokoro, trans. Edwin McClellan, 150. All subsequent references to these sources
will appear in the text in parentheses, with the Japanese original followed by the
English translation.
182 Mysteries of the Modern Subject

for both himself and K.35 In this way, Sensei whose suspicious nature is
founded on his belief that “a person’s ‘words and actions’ (external self )
and ‘heart’ (internal self ) should correspond” 36 presents himself as a
quintessential subject trapped within the epistemological paradigm set
forth by Tsubouchi Shōyō’s Shōsetsu shinzui. Despite the difficulties if
not impossibility of deciphering what lies beyond the observable, Sensei
is unable to refrain from operating as if a person’s external appearance
and behavior sincerely expressed his or her internal emotion or thought.
The similarities between Sensei and Sunaga extend beyond their
character to its cause as well. Like Sunaga, Sensei’s detective-like char-
acter stems from his past experience of a radical shift in the attitude of
family members toward him. For Sunaga, this was the attitude of his
mother, who, as we discussed in the previous section, most likely flip-
flopped in her treatment of her unrelated son. For Sensei, this is the at-
titude of his uncle and uncle’s family, who were like a nuclear family to
him after the death of his parents but became extremely cold to him
once he rejected the uncle’s proposal to take the uncle’s daughter as
his wife. Ultimately, it is revealed that the uncle had robbed Sensei of
his rightful inheritance, and the uncle’s proposal for Sensei to take the
daughter as his wife a last ploy to hide this fact. Whether lurking in the
unconscious as it was the case for Sunaga or festering in the conscious as
it is the case for Sensei, both stories show how the conniving attitudes
of adults based on self-interest make it difficult for individuals to trust
others.
And in the case of Kokoro, an adult whose actions are motivated by
self-interest and, thus, warrant suspicion, includes Sensei himself, whose
self-centered treatment of K revealed that he was no different from his
uncle. As such, Kokoro combines Sōseki’s views on the detective as ex-
pounded in Neko and Higan sugi made: while Neko explained the detective-
like characteristic of the modern individual as a reflection of his self-
interest, Higan sugi made described it as his reaction to the self-interest
of others, brought on by his education that fostered analysis and treat-

—————
35. Indeed, Sensei’s decision to invite K into the household despite Okusan’s
warning not to do so suggests his need to place himself in a situation where his
suspicions would be aroused, enabling him to continue his detective-like ways in
a household where such predisposition had seemingly become unnecessary. To
this extent, Sensei’s decision reveals the web of doubt and suspicion within
which he finds himself as a mode of existence fundamental to his identity.
36. Ishihara, Hanten suru Sōseki, 162.
 Mysteries of the Modern Subject 183

ment of others as objects of knowledge. Through Sensei’s betrayal of K,

Kokoro mediates between reflection and reaction, suggesting how acting
like a detective as a result of suspicion toward others leads the subject
himself to adopt a self-interested mentality. Sensei’s story thus functions
as a cautionary tale of the tragic consequences brought on by adopting
a detective-like way of life, from self-interest to betrayal and from guilty
introspection to distrust of others.
But if such is the message of Sensei’s story, then it is only a part of
the whole, for Kokoro begins as an account of the student-narrator that
revolves around his desire to find out why an older intellectual Sensei,
whom he met on a Kamakura beach, is the way he is. Even though the
newspaper serialization had the title “Sensei no isho” (Sensei’s testa-
ment), revealing that Sensei will be dead by the story’s end, we only
encounter this testament, involving his betrayal of K, in the last section
(albeit the longest of three sections) of the story. Thus, as Komori Yōichi
makes clear in his groundbreaking essay “ ‘Kokoro’ o seisei suru ‘hāto’ ”
(The “heart” that creates “kokoro”), it is only through examining the nar-
rative dynamic between these two texts—the student-narrator’s account
and Sensei’s testament—that we can come to understand Sōseki’s story.
For Komori, this narrative dynamic is characterized by one of con-
trast between the narrator’s treatment of Sensei and Sensei’s treatment
of K: whereas the latter is characterized by an attitude that “can only
observe the Other with ‘cold eyes’ and relate to him in an ‘analytical’
way,” the former “supports the warm and human-like relationship be-
tween Sensei and [the narrator himself ]” and, as such, the narrator does
not treat Sensei as an object of knowledge but instead searches con-
sciously for a way to treat him as a subject in his own right.37 For exam-
ple, the narrator claims with “pride” that he “did not visit Sensei with
the purpose of studying him” nor was he “curious in an impersonal and
analytical way” and this was the reason why they “were able to become
so close to each other” for “he [Sensei] was in constant dread of being
coldly analyzed” (20–21; 13–14).38

—————
37. Komori, Kōzō to shite no katari, 421. The article is re-titled “Kokoro ni okeru
hanten suru ‘shuki’ ” in the book version.
38. As supporting evidence of this treatment, Komori discusses the way in
which they met at the beach for the first time: “Sensei and ‘I’ separate from the
masses, and two of them finally exchange words when they are alone as they
take the pose of floating belly-up on the waves of the wide blue sea. It is not the
attitude of seeing and being seen, but they meet as transmitters of the body’s
184 Mysteries of the Modern Subject

Importantly, this attitude that sets his relationship to Sensei apart

from that of Sensei and K already finds support in the opening para-
graph of Kokoro:
I always called him “Sensei.” I shall therefore refer to him simply as “Sensei,”
and not by his real name. It is not because I consider it more discreet, but it is
because I find it more natural that I do so. Whenever the memory of him comes
back to me now, I find that I think of him as “Sensei” still. And with pen in
hand, I cannot bring myself to write of him in any other way (5; 1).

Employing the term of respect to address the person whose story he is

about to tell, the narrator suggests through phrases such as “natural” and
“cannot bring myself to write of him in any other way” that his narration
to follow flows from his heart without guile or artifice. And precisely
because the narrator as a narrating subject within the story world has
already encountered Sensei’s testament, the opening passage becomes
emblematic of his narrative strategy to consciously distinguish his treat-
ment of Sensei as the subject of his story and Sensei’s treatment of K
described in Sensei’s testament. Not explicitly stated in the McClellan
translation is the last sentence of this paragraph in the Japanese text,
which reads: “I cannot bring myself to use such a cold thing as an initial”
(5). As Komori notes, it is this phrase that directly contrasts with Sensei’s
introduction of K in his testament, which reads: “I shall here call my
friend ‘K’ ” (194; 164).39
But while such examples in Kokoro may present themselves as evi-
dence for the non-analytical nature of the narrator’s attitude toward
Sensei, it is also true that they are reconstructions written by the narra-
tor after the fact of Sensei’s death and, as such, can be construed as a
conscious effort on the part of the narrator to erase the traces of his an-
alytical treatment of Sensei. Indeed, it is from such a perspective that
Komori rearticulates his above argument in “ ‘Watashi’ to iu ‘tasha’-sei—
Kokoro o meguru ōto kuritikku” (Otherness called “I”—self-critique sur-
rounding Kokoro). Noting the way the narrator relentlessly follows Sen-
sei after noticing him on the Kamukura beach, not only by staring at
him but even swimming after him (also picking up his glasses as soon as
he drops it as if to say that the narrator had him under “surveillance all

—————
resonance, giving themselves up to the waves as they direct their gaze to the
blue sky. . . . The ‘I’ who met Sensei in such a manner does not observe or ana-
lyze the other. He just intuits with feeling and senses” (ibid., 425).
39. Ibid., 418.
 Mysteries of the Modern Subject 185

along”), Komori characterizes Sensei’s initial understanding of the nar-

rator as “the silent Other who continues to observe himself like a de-
tective of the Metropolitan Police that comes up in Higan sugi made.”40
The narrator’s first visit to Sensei’s house in Tokyo also reeks of the
detective from this perspective. Rather than having Sensei be present at
home, Sōseki makes sure to have Sensei not be present, prompting the
narrator to track down Sensei at K’s grave—the ultimate symbol of Sen-
sei’s secret—through the information he obtained from Sensei’s wife.
Sensei cannot contain his shock at seeing the narrator: “How in the
world. . . . ? Did you follow me? How. . . ?” (15; 9).41
In the context of my present argument, the strength of Komori’s
provocative analysis lies in its ability to explain the fundamental contra-
diction of the narrator’s story, namely, the coexistence of the narrator’s
claim of his un-detective-like treatment of Sensei and the characteristics
of his story that suggest the fundamentally detective-like nature of their
relationship. Noting Sensei’s less-than-enthusiastic reactions to the nar-
rator described above, Komori argues that “the narrator must have har-
bored anxiety of the possibility that it was his existence that was threat-
ening Sensei.”42 And if such was the case, then everything changes with
the arrival of Sensei’s testament because “by reading the theme of the
‘letter’ that the reason for [Sensei’s] anxiety and dark shadow all stems
from K’s suicide, he [the narrator] releases himself from the sense of in-
congruity felt before Sensei’s death.”43 Calling him “the capable Holmes
who hunts down the criminal called ‘Sensei’ and leads him to his confes-
sion,” Komori concludes that the narrator, “in order to obtain the an-
swer that would negatively affirm the question of whether he is disliked
[by Sensei] . . . pushed his opponent to the point of death.”44
—————
40. Komori, “ ‘Watashi’ to iu ‘tasha’-sei,” 15–16. And when the narrator finally
accomplishes to be on speaking terms with Sensei, he turns Sensei’s question of
how long he will be staying in Kamakura and asks Sensei the same question in-
stead “as if a detective in interrogation” (ibid., 17).
41. As Komori argues, this scene introduces Sensei’s wife as an informant
who tells the narrator where Sensei is, and, in so doing, suggests the conspirato-
rial relationship that develops between the narrator and wife in the course of
the narrative. For details, see ibid., 18–20.
42. Ibid., 21.
43. Ibid.
44. Ibid. This is not to say that the narrator is absolved of all guilt. As Komori
argues, the narrator cannot help but feel culpable, at least partially, for Sensei’s
suicide, for the narrator “ignored” Sensei’s telegram requesting to see him, which
186 Mysteries of the Modern Subject

But complicating this reading is the evidence of the narrator’s de-

tective-like nature that does not lay hidden beneath the surface level of
the text to be unearthed, for the narrator seems conscious of the pos-
sibility that his treatment of Sensei was detective-like and actively em-
ploys strategies to preempt such criticisms as those raised by Komori.
Whether describing Sensei as having a “strangely unapproachable qual-
ity” (18; 12) or wondering the meaning behind his comments—“What
struck me then as being odd was his latest remark: ‘. . . we should be the
happiest of couples.’ Why ‘should be’?” (30; 21)—the narrator highlights
his impression of Sensei as someone who confronts him first and fore-
most as an enigma. Importantly, we are led to believe that exacerbating
this impression is Sensei himself, who continuously showers the narrator
with suggestive statements without providing any concrete answers or
details, a prime example being his comment regarding his wife: “If I were
the sort of person she thinks I am, I would not suffer so” (28; 19). And
given Sensei’s discomfort and unwillingness in discussing his life de-
spite the narrator’s best efforts, it seems natural that the narrator’s un-
derstanding of Sensei as a self-promoted enigma becomes rearticulated
within the framework of an interrogation where Sensei appears as “some
kind of criminal, instead of the Sensei that [he] had come to respect”
when the narrator expresses his desire to learn of Sensei’s life “to the ex-
tent of digging up [his] past” (86; 68).
Echoing such a characterization of Sensei as an enabler who prompts
the narrator into inquiring about his life all the while deferring the revela-
tion of a traumatic secret lurking in his past, the narrator’s own narrative
also seems to tempt the reader by foreshadowing Sensei’s demise and the
content of the testament that will reveal all. The narrator writes:
Whatever my thoughts regarding Sensei’s reserve might have been, they were, of
course, only speculations. And there was always, at the back of my speculations,
the assumption that their marriage had been the flowering of a beautiful romance.
My assumption was not proved entirely wrong. But I was imagining only a
small part of the truth that lay behind their love story. I could not know that
there had been in Sensei’s life a frightening tragedy, inseparable from his love for
his wife. Nor did his own wife know how wretched this tragedy had made him.
To this day she does not know. Sensei died keeping his secret from her. Before
he could destroy his wife’s happiness, he destroyed himself (34; 24–25).

—————
“could have been Sensei’s final flash of flame to put his stakes on the possibility of
life” (ibid., 24).
 Mysteries of the Modern Subject 187

Through such passages, the narrator highlights the divide between the
narrated self and the narrating self and posits this divide as one between
a speculating subject who reacts to Sensei’s strange behavior and sug-
gestive comments and a knowing subject who actively connects these
behaviors and comments to Sensei’s secret past.45 In so doing, the narra-
tor reproduces his interactions with Sensei on the level of narrative in
a manner similar to that found in Higan sugi made, by adopting the nar-
rative strategy of the detective story that suspends the revelation of a
secret as the mystery-to-be-solved until the very end, all the while pro-
moting suspicion and speculation of its nature on the part of the reader.
To return once more to Komori’s argument on the narrator’s anxiety
of Sensei’s feelings towards him, such a mechanism functions to ensure
that the final revelation of the secret will bring with it maximum explana-
tory force regarding Sensei’s personality and behavior, including that to-
ward the narrator, and thereby clear the narrator of his suspicion that
Sensei saw him as a threatening Other. But convincing the reader that
Sensei was constituted through and through by his traumatic past, which
affected his behavior toward others and ultimately led to his suicide, does
not simply serve the narrator’s own purposes, because this also seems
to be the point of Sensei’s testament. Thus, we are able to understand the
narrator’s narrative strategy as being based not on self-interest but on the
desire to enhance the power of Sensei’s message contained in his testa-
ment, namely, to pass down most effectively Sensei’s teaching of how a
subject driven by self-interest and characterized by his detective-like
ways is doomed to self-destruction in the modern world.
In this manner, the narrator’s story confronts us as a fundamentally
conflicted text that pulls the reader toward the opposite ends of the in-
terpretative pole at every turn. In a sense, such a characteristic seems
logical as a natural continuation of Komori’s argument: that the narrator
is a subject of deep ambivalence who cannot figure out the truth of his
own motivations—as driven by his loyalty and respect for Sensei or by
his self-interest and curiosity—in his interactions with Sensei. While
the narrator may have been Keitarō of Higan sugi made as a narrated self,
boldly and shamelessly delving into the private life of his friend, he is
left to ponder Sensei’s suicide and thereby becomes Sunaga, whose
analysis of Chiyoko never yields answers but only multiple and contra-
dictory hypotheses. Such ambivalence, then, also speaks to the motiva-
—————
45. Ken Ito makes a similar observation regarding the effect of the narrator’s
extensive use of foreshadowing (“Writing Time in Sōseki’s Kokoro,” 3–21).
188 Mysteries of the Modern Subject

tion behind the narrator’s publication of the story as a desperate appeal

to the reader to turn detective and investigate his culpability in the
‘crime’ that he may have committed, which, in turn, provides reasons
for his contradictory text. To the extent that the narrator seeks to
resolve his sense of guilt by appealing to the reader, he must not only
state how his treatment of Sensei was not detective-like but also pres-
ent situations and exchanges that gave him the sense that Sensei may
have thought of his treatment as detective-like. Ultimately, the narrator
needs the reader to agree with him that, despite such and such situa-
tions with Sensei and such and such reactions by Sensei, these were in
the end just ill effects of Sensei’s traumatic and secret past.46
But in appealing to the reader for judgment, the narrator cannot stop
feeding his fundamental guilt regarding his relationship with Sensei at
the source of deep ambivalence, for the narrator, in publishing this story,
seems to violate the only request that Sensei had made to him in the
testament, which Sensei makes clear in the conclusion to his testament:
I want both the good and bad things in my past to serve as an example to others.
But my wife is the one exception—I do not want her to know about any of this.
My first wish is that her memory of me should be kept as unsullied as possible.
So long as my wife is alive, I want you to keep everything I have told you a se-
cret—even after I myself am dead (288; 248).

In writing a story for the world to see, the narrator seems to do pre-
cisely what Sensei asked him not to do, for the story’s publication will
no doubt mean the revelation of Sensei’s past secret to his wife. Of
course, there exists a situation in which the narrator’s writing of Sensei
is not a betrayal. This situation is that Sensei’s wife is already dead at
the time of the narrator’s writing of the story. But as many have pointed
out, the evidence in Kokoro suggests otherwise, with the primary clue
that Sensei’s wife is still alive at the time of the narrator’s writing being
the phrase within the previously cited passage, which foreshadows the
“frightening tragedy” lurking in Sensei’s past, namely, the phrase, “To

—————
46. In doing so, the narrator must be honest, for he must feel that he was
judged for the crime he suspects he may have committed and to lie would do no
good for his own conscience in dispelling his guilt over Sensei’s suicide. At the
same time, this is not to say that the narrator cannot employ techniques—such as
presentation of Sensei as an enigma as well as his own foreshadowing of Sensei’s
death and past—that function not only to convince the reader but also himself.
 Mysteries of the Modern Subject 189

this day she does not know [Sensei’s secret].”47 As such, in writing the
narrative that is Kokoro, the narrator seems to betray the dying wish of a
man whom he called Sensei and thereby perpetuate the lineage of be-
trayals that began with the betrayal of Sensei by his uncle and spread to
Sensei’s betrayal of K.
But if betrayal fuels his fundamental guilt, then the narrator makes
sure to insist on its importance within the framework of Sensei’s teach-
ings: rather than hiding evidence that would mark his narrative as an act
of betrayal, the narrator highlights it by ‘placing’ Sensei’s commandment
not to tell his story to his wife at the end of the testament, and, in so
doing, actively constructs a contrast with the opening paragraph of the
story that begins with the narrator’s addressing of the general public. In
this sense, the betrayal functions as a final ‘confirmation’ of the dif-
ference between the narrator’s treatment of Sensei and Sensei’s treat-
ment of K, a difference whose operating mechanism is already put into
place in the first paragraph of the story. And the betrayal becomes neces-
sary precisely because Sensei, while having taken steps to overcome his
mistrust of others by confessing his story to the narrator, still reveals in
his final request his fundamental inability to share his secret with the per-
son who deserves to hear it most, namely, his wife, who has wondered for
years why Sensei seems so unhappy and whether this may be her fault. No
doubt, Sensei’s suicide will accelerate her suspicions whose downward
spiral can only be stopped by his secret’s guardian, the narrator. By di-
vulging Sensei’s life story, the narrator releases the wife from turning de-
tective on her past, analyzing her interactions with Sensei to determine
her culpability in Sensei’s demise. Whereas Sensei considers his wife a
helpless object—“pure, spotless thing”—that should not be stained with a
traumatic past, the narrator treats her like a subject who deserves to
know (277; 237).48 In this sense, the narrator’s betrayal of Sensei’s dying
wish is a betrayal that is necessary for the narrator to take Sensei’s teach-
—————
47. Among the literary scholars noting this phrase as evidence that Sensei’s
wife is still alive when the narrator tells his story, Miyoshi Yukio provides a de-
tailed analysis of its implication. For details, see Miyoshi, “Watoson wa haishin-
sha ka,” 7–21.
48. Sensei states: “That I refused to tell her the truth was not due to selfish
calculation on my part. I simply did not wish to taint her whole life with the
memory of something that was ugly. I thought that it would be an unforgivable
crime to let fall even the tiniest drop of ink on a pure, spotless thing” (277; 237).
As this passage makes clear, Sensei views his wife as a helpless object that has no
ability to ‘cleanse’ itself of the ‘ink’ that is the past.
190 Mysteries of the Modern Subject

ings to heart and to overcome the shortcomings of a modern individual,

exemplified by Sensei, who sees others as objects of observation and
knowledge rather than as subjects for dialogue and interaction.
Befitting its fundamentally contradictory nature, however, the narra-
tor’s text makes certain to bury within it subtle hints as contrary evi-
dence that suggest the above interpretation as a noble façade to mask
the self-interest lurking behind the text. Throughout the course of the
narrative, Sensei repeatedly recommends that the narrator take care of
the issue of inheritance before his ailing father dies. Of course, this rec-
ommendation has much to do with Sensei’s own past, which he recounts
in his testament, regarding the betrayal of his relatives upon his father’s
death. Yet, despite Sensei’s recommendation, the narrator never settles
the matter of inheritance with his father or with his elder brother, who
would be the rightful heir to his father’s inheritance. And considering
that the narrator leaves his father’s deathbed to return to Tokyo to see
Sensei—an ultimate betrayal of familial obligations—it is easily conceiv-
able that the narrator’s allowance, which he had been receiving as a uni-
versity student, be stopped after his father’s death and that he receive
none of the inheritance.49 In this context, the narrator’s writing of his
life with Sensei reveals itself as being based on his decision to pursue
writing as a profession by which to make a living to the extent that he
has no free time or money to pursue writing as a hobby. In other words,
the narrator uses Sensei’s story as a stepping-stone for his professional
and economical success as a writer, utilizing the detective story frame-
work to appeal to the vulgar curiosity of the reader and provide an en-
tertaining and engrossing tale.
As the above discussion reiterates, the narrator’s narrative is charac-
terized first and foremost by its schizophrenia, which I have hereto in-
terpreted as caused by the narrator’s deep ambivalence and fundamental
uncertainty about his own motivations behind his treatment of Sensei as
well as his publication of his story. But at the same time, there is another
side to the narrator’s schizophrenic narrative filled with contradicting
evidence: in short, rather than being an appeal for judgment by a con-
flicted narrator, schizophrenia itself constitutes a fundamental part of
—————
49. In a way, the need for the narrator to have to write Sensei’s story is a re-
sult of his position as the second-born son. And this fact is significant to the ex-
tent that Sensei is a first-born son whose father is also the first-born son. That is,
an argument could be made that the uncle’s usurping of Sensei’s inheritance has
much to do with the uncle’s attempt to get his ‘share’ of the family inheritance.
 Mysteries of the Modern Subject 191

the narrator’s strategy in telling the story of Kokoro. In other words, his
narrative is torn between the presentation of himself as Sunaga, which
I discussed above, and the making of the reader into Sunaga, as I have
been made to become in my examination of the narrator’s story, by ac-
tively fueling the proliferation of suspicion and doubt on the part of the
reader regarding the text and its deeper motivations lurking underneath
the surface.
Indeed, the latter attempt is critical to the narrator’s project precisely
because it enables the narrator to place himself in the subject position
that Sensei feared most, that is, “to be coldly analyzed.” Seen in this light,
the narrator’s story asserts itself as an attempt to understand Sensei
better, not as an object separate from himself—a relationship that char-
acterizes the detective-like treatment of others—but through doing his
best to become the Other and to experience what the Other has experi-
enced, a feat made possible through the investigation and punishment
by the reader as detective. Ultimately, it is in his submission to the de-
tective fiction paradigm that we find the narrator’s paradoxical attempt
to get outside the powerful influence that this paradigm exerts on those
who live in the modern age.
And this attempt serves to underscore a key difference between Sensei
and the narrator, perhaps a true indication that the narrator had taken
Sensei’s teaching—not the message contained in the testament but the
message produced through the act of confessing—to heart. For there is
no question that Sensei’s project involves not a submission to the de-
tective but a preemptive rejection of it, which Sōseki seems to highlight
by having Sensei connect his decision to commit suicide to critical his-
torical events of Meiji Japan. These, of course, were the deaths of the
Meiji emperor on July 29, 1912 and of General Nogi by way of junshi (fol-
lowing one’s lord to the grave) on September 13, 1912, the first day of the
three-day funeral ceremony for the Meiji emperor, that have contrasting
significance within Sōseki’s literary project.50
On the one hand, the emperor was an emblem of sacredness and pri-
vacy in Meiji Japan, protected by the government through such mea-
sures as the crime of disrespect ( fukeizai ), which prohibited any attempt
—————
50. Sensei describes his sentiment upon hearing the news of the emperor’s
death as follows: “I felt as though the spirit of the Meiji era had begun with the
Emperor and had ended with him. I was overcome with the feeling that I and
the others, who had been brought up in that era, were now left behind to live as
anachronisms” (285; 245).
192 Mysteries of the Modern Subject

to introduce the emperor within unofficial discourse.51 Upon his falling

ill in the early months of 1912, however, the Imperial Household Agency
(Kunaishō), which was in charge of making official statements regarding
the emperor, began to make public his physical and mental condition,
and such information filled the pages of the newspapers. The publicized
information was extremely private in nature, going as far as to describe
the condition of his excrements, and, in this sense, they were “blas-
phemy of [the emperor’s] sacredness and extremely ‘disrespectful.’ ”52 To
put it in the terms of our present discussion, the desire to be a detective
and the inevitability of becoming one despite one’s best efforts in the
modern age that were problematized in Sōseki’s works find their ulti-
mate conclusion in the death of the Meiji emperor, for in his illness, the
emperor—the emblem of sacredness and privacy—came to be treated as
an object of knowledge by the Japanese people.
On the other hand, Nogi’s death was sudden and of his own choosing,
including the decision to disseminate information through his will that
functioned to explain rather than describe—as was the case of the em-
peror—his demise. Kokoro presents Nogi’s death and will as having a huge
effect on Sensei who, despite his denial of fully understanding the reasons
behind Nogi’s suicide, seems to have achieved a deep level of identifica-
tion with him. Given Sensei’s past, such identification seems natural: just
as Nogi had lived with the thought of his failure—a betrayal of the trust
that the Meiji emperor had placed in him during the Seinan War (1877)—
and waited for the “proper time to die,” Sensei too had lived with the
burden of his betrayal of K for many years.53 Although differing in length
—————
51. As the third clause of the Meiji constitution states, the emperor and the
imperial family were “sacred” and not to be “violated” in any way.
52. Watanabe Naomi, Fukei bungaku ron josetsu, 85. It is this violation of sa-
credness that is vividly, albeit implicitly, described in Kokoro: not only does the
narrator’s father, who is suffering from the same disease as the emperor, com-
pare himself to the emperor, but the narrator also describes in detail the dete-
rioration of his father, including information regarding his bowel movements
(134–35; 110–11). As Watanabe argues, such description of the deterioration of
the narrator’s father functioned as an “extension” of the “disrespect” with which
the government announced the emperor’s illness (Fukei bungaku ron josetsu, 88).
53. Lifton, Katō, and Reich, Six Lives, Six Deaths, 57–58. In this regard, it also
makes sense that many literary critics have understood Sensei’s suicide, which
seeks “to recompense for the ‘death’ of his best friend [K] with his own death,”
as “an imitation of the ‘death’ of General Nogi who died for the Meiji emperor”
(Watanabe Naomi, Fukei bungaku ron josetsu, 83).
 Mysteries of the Modern Subject 193

and nature, with Sensei’s being much more detailed and damaging to
his own public image compared to Nogi’s one-liner citing the loss of
“regimental colors in the battle of 1877” as the reason for his suicide, their
testaments explicitly connect their deaths to suffering that stems from a
past event caused by their own failures and weaknesses.54 For Nogi, this
framework of a traumatic past festering in the eternal present finally re-
lieved as a result of junshi had a decisive role in determining his legacy
within Japanese society after his death. While junshi was an anachronistic
concept that had been outlawed from the early Edo period, Nogi’s sui-
cide, which simultaneously “expiated his guilt and substantiated his
samurai character,” resonated with the discourses of bushidō (the way of
the warrior that served as one of the dominant ideologies in the Edo
period) that were resurging in the late Meiji period.55 As a result, despite
the ambivalent reactions in the press and among intellectuals, Nogi’s sui-
cide “immortalized his popular heroic myth,” and it was “Nogi—not the
emperor—who became the embodiment of the Meiji period in popular
culture” through this act.56
Especially to those, like Sōseki, who knew the details of Nogi’s career,
this turn of events must have revealed the power that the framework of
a traumatic past haunting the eternal present had in controlling the in-
terpretation of one’s life. As James Fujii describes, Nogi’s career involved
more important failures than the one named in his testament, for he
was “a man who had been dismissed from his post as governor of oc-
cupied Taiwan for administrative ineptitude,” and “a general whose out-
dated strategies and intransigence caused the senseless slaughter of nearly
58,000 of his own men at the battle of Port Arthur, won only after he was

—————
54. The first clause of Nogi’s suicide note runs as follows: “On this occasion of
the passing of Emperor Meiji, I am filled with remorse and have decided to com-
mit suicide. I am aware of the gravity of this crime. Nonetheless, since I lost the
regimental colors in the battle of 1877, I have searched in vain for an opportunity
to die. To this day I have been treated with unmerited kindness, receiving abun-
dant imperial favors. Gradually I have become old and weak; my time has disap-
peared and I can no longer serve my lord. Feeling extremely distressed by his
death, I have resolved to end my life” (cited in Lifton, Katō, and Reich, Six Lives,
Six Deaths, 31).
55. Ibid., 58.
56. The first citation is from ibid. The second is from Gluck, Japan’s Modern
Myths, 224.
194 Mysteries of the Modern Subject

replaced by another commanding officer.”57 But one could make the ar-
gument that Nogi’s short testament framed his life in such a powerful
manner that his life became defined by it—as he claimed was the case—
rather than by myriad events throughout the course of his life that be-
come buried and forgotten, in turn. By actively choosing death and by
leaving a narrative that explains this choice, Nogi provided others with a
framework by which to make sense of his life, a framework whose truth-
fulness was insured by sincerity of death.
And the same could be said for Sensei, although Sensei even goes a
step further than Nogi. Rather than simply providing a master narrative,
Sensei transplants his master narrative into the detective fiction para-
digm of cause and effect where a past traumatic event serves as the ul-
timate cause that will explain his life as an effect, ensuring the interpre-
tation of his life within this paradigm by tempting the narrator to turn
detective.58 By ultimately and willingly providing the narrator with the
secret which seems to answer all—not to mention making the narrator
feel guilty about his role in the suicide—Sensei promotes a specific in-
terpretation of his life and forecloses the proliferation of discourse sur-
rounding his life and the reasons why he is the way he is. But this is
not to say that the ‘charade’ is for others alone. As his inner struggles
and his willingness to submit himself to the detective fiction paradigm
clearly suggest, the testament is also written for himself. Just as the nar-
rator needs to hear Sensei’s secret that functions to explain all his pecu-
liarities and quirks, Sensei needs writing as external expression of his in-
teriority to dictate the interpretation of his own life that has become a
mystery to him, for a submission to such an illusory framework of cause
and effect where an event in the past provides an explanation of the
—————
57. Fujii, Complicit Fictions, 135. Despite such negative portrayals, this is not to
say that Nogi was simply an utter failure as a general and an educator who did
nothing to deserve public admiration. For example: “In contrast to other mili-
tary leaders, such as Tōgō and Kodama, Nogi demonstrated great concern for
war invalids and for the families of dead soldiers. He argued persistently for the
presentation of ‘honorable titles’ to all dead soldiers and personally contributed
to the government’s Institute for Invalid Soldiers. Nogi visited families of dead
soldiers to express sympathy and, indeed, empathy at their losses” (Lifton, Katō,
and Reich, Six Lives, Six Deaths, 53).
58. This model of cause and effect goes beyond Sensei’s mentality to explain
the more physical aspects of Sensei’s life. For example, Sensei explains, however
jokingly, the reason that he and his wife do not have a child as being “divine
punishment” (25; 17).
 Mysteries of the Modern Subject 195

present state of affairs precludes him from pursuing other possible rea-
sons for his shortcomings relating to two persons he holds most dear:
his mistreatment of his wife and his inability to be a productive subject
of the emperor.

D
In his earliest work of fiction Neko, Sōseki utilized the metaphor of
the detective to criticize the modern individual caught in a web of self-
interest, exposing the narrator’s affinity to the detective in the process.
It is the relationship between this dual connection—between the mod-
ern individual and the detective and between the narrator and the de-
tective—that is examined in detail in his later works, Higan sugi made
and Kokoro, through a pair of contrasting figures: Sunaga and Keitarō,
and Sensei and the narrator. Suspicious and analytical, Sunaga and Sen-
sei are presented as quintessential subjects within Shōyō’s epistemologi-
cal paradigm as they search for true intentions of each and every exter-
nal action of others, guided by their belief that external actions and
behaviors are manifestations of interior thoughts and emotions, despite
the fact or precisely because they have been betrayed by others as a re-
sult of misunderstanding their true intentions. As these stories make
sure to impress upon their readers, Sunaga and Sensei are constituted by
their past experiences that revealed others—and the self—as driven by
self-interest and therefore wearing a façade and being untrustworthy.
But while being a development of progressively detailed meditation
on the detective-like nature of the modern individual, these stories ex-
hibit a trajectory that also strikes us as peculiar. Ironically for Sōseki
whose criticism of the detective in early works including Neko revolved
around the attack on the subject who tries to penetrate the private lives
of others in order to know the ‘true’ other, his project ends with Higan
sugi made and Kokoro, which certainly seem more ambivalent on their
treatment of the detective. Higan sugi made revolved around the detective
fiction framework generated through Keitarō’s desire to know the truth
of Sunaga’s story and adopted by the reader, who is forced to participate
in the framework by the various ‘clues’ that the narration seems to em-
bed within the text without making explicit sense of them. And if Higan
sugi made ultimately seems to dismiss such framing through the ‘evalua-
tion’ of the third-person narrator, Kokoro seems to affirm it as necessary,
however illusory it may be, for the modern intellectual. For, unlike Su-
naga who remains the object of knowledge within the detective fiction
framework—held as such by Keitarō, the reader, and himself—Sensei
196 Mysteries of the Modern Subject

utilizes the framework for his own purpose to make sense of his life in the
modern world, full of doubt and myriad interpretations.
Also ironically for Sōseki, who began his criticism of the detective in
Neko with a consideration of the sociohistorical causes that prompts the
individual to turn detective in the modern world, his project ends with
the submission to the detective whose rhetoric places the utmost im-
portance on one’s past and, in so doing, deemphasizes the social and the
modern that provide alternative interpretations on the present state of
affairs. And here, the way in which the student-narrator of Kokoro first
takes interest in Sensei is quite suggestive. The narrator’s interest in
Sensei is piqued by Sensei’s mingling as equals with a Westerner at a
Kamakura beach, and, thus, the narrator’s pursuit of Sensei can be seen
as an effort to learn the ways of Westernization. Of course, the narrator
instead finds Sensei, whom he believed to be a leader in the quintessen-
tial national program of Westernization as being kōtō yūmin, an anti-
national phenomenon that was just beginning to receive press. But such
repression of the social could only offer momentary solace, considering
the relationship between Japan and the West that was at the core of the
modern Japanese intellectual. As the next chapter illustrates, it was the
disavowal of the social and the modern and the concomitant delusions
of the subject that would become the chosen themes of subsequent ex-
perimentations by modern Japanese writers through their engagement
with the detective and his story.
 FIVE

Rhetoric of Disavowal:
“Secrets and Liberation” and
the Specters of the West

The founding issue of the magazine Shinseinen (New youth) published in

January 1920 contains a poem by Shiratori Shōgo (1890–1973), a member
of the Populist Group (Minshū-ha) of poetry that espoused the liberal
sociopolitical ideals of the so-called Taishō Democracy. Entitled “Atara-
shiki seinen ni gekisuru uta” (A song of encouragement for the new
youths), the poem was a fitting one to commemorate the start of a
magazine that would become the emblem of urban youth culture in part
through its promotion of the detective fiction genre in the 1920s.1 Fitting
also of Shiratori’s political stance, the poem was idealistic and polemic in
its language, using such phrases as “Oh, League of Nations, democracy,
for eternal justice and for happiness of all human kind” and “The inter-
national second restoration waits now for the power of new youths.”2
Dreaming of a world united by its pursuit of justice and human happiness
made possible by the spread of democracy, Shiratori’s poem crystallizes
the representative characteristics of the discourses of Taishō Democ-
racy—idealism, humanism, internationalism, and cosmopolitanism—and

—————
1. The relationship between Shinseinen and the detective fiction genre will be
discussed in detail in the next chapter.
2. Shiratori, “Atarashiki seinen ni gekisuru uta,” 4–5.
198 Rhetoric of Disavowal

incorporates them as the necessary elements of the movement’s most

important and concrete goal: universal male suffrage.3
This goal would be accomplished in March 1925, but historical reali-
ties, at least in hindsight, made the representative ideals of Taishō De-
mocracy seem barely tenable from its early stages, leaving us to wonder
the extent to which Japanese intellectuals actually believed in the realis-
tic possibilities of the movement’s idealistic vision of the world. As
made clear by “the intensification of anti-Japanese movement and racial
discrimination” in the United States, anti-Japanese sentiment was grow-
ing among Western powers, making it difficult to envision Japan’s par-
ticipation in the world as one of its important members.4 Such senti-
ments were also growing among Japan’s neighbors that it had sought
hard to incorporate into its empire, as exemplified by the widespread
protests in Korea against Japan’s colonial rule in 1919. These protests
provided the Japanese government with the occasion to shatter the ide-
als of internationalism harbored by its intellectuals and to impress on
them and the world the undeniably imperialistic nature of Japan’s rela-
tionship with its Asian neighbors, as 7,509 protesters were killed in the
ensuing military suppression.5 And at home, the despotic tendencies of
the Japanese government should have been evident from its response to
the 1910 Great Treason Incident, in which various leftist activists ar-
rested under the suspicion of planning the assassination of the emperor,
among other atrocities, were executed without a public trial. In the
summer of 1918, moreover, the so-called Rice Riots erupted all over the
country as a result of high rice prices, and, despite their primarily non-
political nature, foreshadowed the rise of socialist and labor movements
in the early 1920s.
It was in such a sociopolitical landscape of the 1910s, a turbulent
period of transition when the dreams expressed by the discourses of Tai-
shō Democracy were seemingly on the verge of collapse in the face of

—————
3. That many scholars have referenced this poem in their discussions of the
literature of 1920s Japan suggests its symbolic significance for the understanding
of this historical period. For example, Suzuki Sadami cites this poem in his sem-
inal work on Shōwa literature, “Shōwa bungaku” no tame ni, 25–27, as does Kawa-
saki Kenko in “Shinseinen no tanjō to sono jidai,” 4.
4. Kawasaki, “Shinseinen no tanjō to sono jidai,” 6.
5. Figures cited in Eguchi, Futatsu no taisen, 64. For the details of extreme vio-
lence exercised by the Japanese military during the suppression of these protests,
see ibid., 64–66.
 Rhetoric of Disavowal 199

historical realities, that the general interest magazine Chūō kōron pub-
lished an issue titled “Himitsu to kaihō” (Secrets and liberation; July
1918). The issue’s focus was broad and extensive, ranging from essays deal-
ing with the topic of secrecy from a wide variety of perspectives to eight
fictional works organized under the heading of “new artistic detective
novels” and “plays and novels taking up the topic of secrets” by Tanizaki
Jun’ichirō, Satō Haruo, Akutagawa Ryūnosuke, Satomi Ton (1888–1983),
Nakamura Kichizō (1877–1941), Kume Masao (1891–1952), Tayama Katai,
and Masamune Hakuchō (1879–1962). As these names make clear, the
contributors to the fiction section of the issue were prominent and up-
and-coming members of the Japanese literati and suggested the serious-
ness with which the editors of the magazine sought to tackle the issue of
“secrets” and “liberation” as well as “detective novels.”
When considering the “Himitsu to kaihō” issue from the perspective
of detective fiction, however, we see that the issue actually contains very
little of what could pass as detective fiction. Of the four stories organ-
ized under the “new artistic detective novels,” none contains a detective
as protagonist. As for the essays, the primary focus is the issue of secrets,
with the word “detective” (tantei ) not appearing in the title of a single
essay. As such, the combination of the topic of “secrets” and “libera-
tion” with “detective novels” strikes us as a curious one. The task of
the detective is to seek and reveal the secrets of others (criminals), but
the result is normally not one of liberation. Rather, the combination of
secrets and liberation suggests a missing link that would connect the
two more aptly, namely, a confessional story in which the subject reveals
his or her secret in an act of confession and gains liberation from guilt
through this act. In fact, the next issue of Chūō kōron contained essays
such as Nakamura Seiko’s “Kokuhaku shōsetsu no ryūkō” (The trend of
confessional novels) and Honma Kumeo’s “Kokuhaku bungaku to jiko
hihyō” (Confessional literature and self-criticism), suggesting that the
decision to organize the four stories under the heading of “new artistic
detective novels” was a conscious choice on the part of the editors to
provide a bridge between detective stories and “confessional novels,”
which were in vogue at the time.
It is therefore fitting, but also surprising because of the extent, that
many of the stories contained in the “Himitsu to kaihō” issue exhibit
similar narrative structure to that of Natsume Sōseki’s Kokoro. Published
four years prior and exemplifying what might be called the “confessional
novel” as a work that addresses the issue of “secrets” and “liberation” as
well as engaging critically with the detective story genre as we saw in the
200 Rhetoric of Disavowal

last chapter, Kokoro was no doubt on the minds of the writers when they
wrote their stories for the “Himitsu to kaihō” issue. More specifically,
as Iida Yūko in her Karera no monogatari (Their stories) illustrates by
drawing on René Girard’s seminal work Deceit, Desire, and the Novel, the
fictional works in the “Himitsu to kaihō” issue mimic the triangular
structure of desire underlying the last section “Sensei’s Testament” of
Kokoro between male characters of close resemblance (Sensei and K) as
rivals for their object of desire (Ojōsan).6
Beginning with the reconsideration of the triangular relationship of
desire, this chapter examines three works in the “Himitsu to kaihō” issue,
namely, Akutagawa’s “Kaika no satsujin” (Murder in the age of enlight-
enment), Tanizaki’s “Futari no geijutsuka no hanashi” (The story of two
artists), and Satō’s “Shimon” (The fingerprint). Although these stories
no doubt share important characteristics with Sōseki’s Kokoro, they also
deviate from it in significant ways, precisely because they reexamine Sō-
seki’s meditation on the course of Japan’s modernization process and
the trials and tribulations of the modern intellectual. Central to this re-
examination process is the rewriting of the modern Japanese subject in
terms not only of crime but also of authority, highlighted by the detective
fiction rubric under which these stories were published and circulated.
In so doing, these works explore the modern intellectual’s predilection
for crime within the specific sociohistorical context of modern Japan and
its relationship to the West, an exploration that operated within the
framework of disavowal—of actively denying self-consciousness of the
truth—befitting 1910s Japan, fraught with contradictions between ideal
and reality.

Crime and Love in Akutagawa Ryūnosuke’s

Story of Enlightenment
In a letter to a friend dated June 19, 1918, Akutagawa says this of the
story that he was writing for the “Himitsu to kaihō” issue of Chūō kōron:
“Because I promised to write a detective story for Chūō kōron, I am
grudgingly writing an odd piece. It’s no good that I feel helpless because
I feel like I am prostituting [my] talents. And despite writing it as a de-
—————
6. For details on Girard’s discussion of the triangular relationship of desire,
see Girard, Deceit, Desire, and the Novel. For Iida’s discussion of the triangular re-
lationships found in the stories of “Himitsu to kaihō,” see Iida, Karera no mono-
gatari, 202–28.
 Rhetoric of Disavowal 201

tective story, it seems like it will not be a detective story.”7 Indicating

the magazine’s explicit request for a detective story as well as suggesting
Akutagawa’s lowly opinion of the genre’s literary value, this letter also
reveals how, despite his intention to write detective fiction, Akutagawa
was unable to do so. Indeed, the story he produced, “Kaika no satsujin,”
contains no detective, although it does contain a murder. But while
Akutagawa may have felt as if he was “prostituting” his literary talents,
his inability to produce a “detective story”—an inability that would be
shared by many ‘detective story’ writers in the 1920s and 1930s—displays
the seriousness with which he engaged in the work as a literary endeavor
of significance that had profound implications in determining the tra-
jectory of his literary project. “Kaika no satsujin” would become the
founding work of the so-called kaika-mono or stories of enlightenment,
in which Akutagawa explored the world of early Meiji to reflect upon
the period’s legacy in the Taishō period.8
From its employment of the epistolary style to a written confession of
a secret by a person who has committed suicide, “Kaika no satsujin”
shares many characteristics with Sōseki’s Kokoro.9 As Iida Yūko argues,
moreover, the primary narrative structure driving the story is a triangular
one organized around a love affair between the subject, his object of
—————
7. Akutagawa, Akutagawa Ryūnosuke zenshū, vol. 18, 221.
8. For an overview of the critical reception of Akutagawa’s kaika-mono, see
Andō, Akutagawa Ryūnosuke, 127–28. For a comparative work on Akutagawa’s
kaika-mono, see Matsumoto Tsunehiko, “Kaika no futari,” 121–42; and Asano,
“Kaika e no manazashi,” 42–48.
9. “Kaika no satsujin” takes the form of Doctor Kitabatake’s testament that
begins with his confession of love for Akiko, the wife of Viscount Honda. As the
story goes, Kitabatake becomes enamored with her as a teenager, but before he
could confess his love and ask her hand in marriage, he is sent to London to study
medicine at the age of 21. Upon returning from his three-year stint there with
thoughts of Akiko on his mind, he learns that she had married a banker named
Mitsumura Kyōhei. Kitabatake is dejected by this news, but when he learns of
Kyōhei’s deplorable character, he decides to kill Kyōhei. Using his knowledge of
medicine and, thus, poison, Kitabatake murders Kyōhei, making his death appear
like a brain hemorrhage. After Kyōhei’s death, Akiko and Honda rekindle their
relationship, which they had prior to her marriage to Kyōhei, and quickly decide
to get married. This turn of events is no surprise to Kitabatake, who had learned
of their past relationship during the planning stages of Kyōhei’s murder, but, as
their relationship progresses, Kitabatake is struck with a desire to kill Honda.
Haunted by this desire, Kitabatake ultimately decides to commit suicide, leaving
his testament for Honda and Akiko.
202 Rhetoric of Disavowal

desire, and his rival. No doubt Akutagawa was conscious of these simi-
larities, and precisely because of such awareness, the differences within
the similarities are of particular interest in order to understand “Kaika no
satsujin” as a way for Akutagawa to develop the issues raised by Kokoro.
For example, unlike in the case of Sensei, the victor who had succeeded
in ‘attaining’ the object of his desire, Doctor Kitabatake, the writer of
the testament, is the loser who has failed to wed his childhood love inter-
est Akiko who, in turn, marries his friend Viscount Honda, and his tes-
tament addressed to these newlyweds, thus, is not a confession stemming
from the guilt of a victor due to the way in which he achieved such
a result. “Kaika no satsujin” also does not simply depict two friends’ com-
petition for the same woman, for there is added to the mix a third man,
the banker Mitsumura Kyōhei (Akiko’s first husband), creating a dou-
bling of Girard’s triangular structure of desire.
And unlike Sensei’s suicide, Kitabatake’s is presented as a preventive
one, having more to do with the crime he fears he will commit than the
crime he has committed. Indeed, regarding the murder of Kyōhei—the
actual crime committed—Kitabatake shows no sense of guilt, as he be-
lieves and makes the case that he is fully justified. Recounting his im-
pressions of Kyōhei on their first meeting at a social event, Kitabatake
notes his instantaneous disgust for Kyōhei, shuddering at his deplorable
character as he “sang loudly a trendy song so obscene that it was unbear-
able to listen, as he embraced an older geisha on his right and was ac-
companied by an apprentice geisha on his left.”10 Notwithstanding the
visceral nature of his feelings towards Kyōhei, Kitabatake is quick to
deny any possibility of personal interest at stake by invoking a moral
framework for his hatred: “The motive for murder from the start of in-
ception was absolutely not a simple feeling of jealousy but rather a moral
fury to punish wrongdoings and remove injustice” (221). To support this
claim, Kitabatake describes how he enlisted the help of his journalist
friends to dig up “the footprints of his [Kyōhei’s] lewd and immoral ac-
tions,” citing in particular a rumor relayed to him by Narushima Ryū-
hoku of how Kyōhei violated “the virginity of an apprentice geisha, lead-
ing to her death” (221).11
—————
10. Akutagawa, “Kaika no satsujin,” Akutagawa Ryūnosuke zenshū, vol. 3, 221.
All subsequent references to this source will appear in the text in parentheses.
11. Narushima Ryūhoku (1837–1884) was a Meiji writer famous for his knowl-
edge of the pleasure quarters, which were the subject of his work Ryūkyō shinshi
(New chronicles of Yanagibashi; 1859–1871).
 Rhetoric of Disavowal 203

Kitabatake also makes certain to show how such a moral framework

is not a work of revisionist history by prefacing the above line of argu-
ment with a citation from his diary—a method repeatedly employed in
his testament—from the date of his first meeting with Kyōhei, in which
he vows to “rescue my sister Akiko from this lecher with my own hands”
(221). As reflected in the use of the word “sister,” the diary entry goes
on to explain how Kitabatake had abandoned Akiko as an object of his
desire upon hearing the news of her marriage to Kyōhei thanks to his
newfound belief in the Christian God, which occurred during his stay
abroad. And it is a new fact discovered after Kitabatake’s decision to
murder Kyōhei that reinforces the humanistic and moral framework for
doing so: namely, that Akiko and Honda had promised to marry each
other but “pressured by Kyōhei’s power of gold, could not help but
break the promise in the end” (222). This posits Kyōhei as someone who
bought Akiko with money (fitting considering that he is a banker) and
suggests that Akiko is a victim of her family’s economic circumstances.
It also implies that, even despite Kyōhei’s ‘disappearance,’ Kitabatake
will not be able to win Akiko’s love and, thus, cannot have a personal
stake in Kyōhei’s death, for Kitabatake’s murder of Kyōhei benefits not
himself but Akiko and Honda. This is a point which Kitabatake reiter-
ates by drawing once again from his diary entry: “Thinking that my dear
Viscount and Akiko would enter a happy life in time as a result of my
murdering that giant of a beastly heart [Kyōhei], I could not prevent a
smile from appearing on my lips” (223).
Importantly, Kitabatake, in making this point, emphasizes the purity
of the relationship between Honda and Akiko that goes beyond the
social contract of marriage. He states: “It seems that he [Honda] and
Akiko had not simply made a promise to get married but also truly had
the feelings of mutual love [sōai ]” (222). Kyōhei’s boorish character, ex-
emplified by his deplorable treatment of women as sexual objects who
can be bought, is pitted against the pure love between Honda and Akiko,
which models itself after the ideology of ren’ai (love), even before the
word gained currency in late 1880s Japan.12 Honda and Akiko are pre-
—————
12. Tomi Suzuki states: “Ren’ai, which is now so naturalized that almost no
one is aware of its historical origin, was a neologism adopted in the late 1880’s to
translate the English ‘love’ and the French ‘amour.’ In contrast to the traditional
word koi, ren’ai signified the newly imported notion of love, understood to mean
a more spiritual, deeper, and more highly valued mutual affection between man
and woman” (Narrating the Self, 74).
204 Rhetoric of Disavowal

sented as forerunners in the way of ‘modern’ love, Kyōhei as the anti-

modern, feudalistic element of Japanese society which must be exorcised,
and Kitabatake as the enlightened man of Western education and means
who will take it upon himself that this ‘modern’ love will bear fruit in
Meiji Japan through the removal of Kyōhei.
But this moral framework begins to crumble after Kyōhei’s murder
when Kitabatake begins to become aware of the “strange desire” to
murder Honda, a process that results in his gradual breakdown as a con-
scious subject cognizant of his own actions (224). When he discovers
himself reaching for the poison bottle (which he used to kill Kyōhei)
upon Honda’s complaint of a stomachache one evening, Kitabatake is
shocked and must ask himself: “For what purpose am I carrying this
medicine? Is it coincidence? I truly hope that it is a coincidence” (226).
And a month later when he has dinner with Akiko and Honda, it is no
longer a question of unawareness of his actions, as his desire has become
an object that exists separate from himself: “I did not forget for a sec-
ond about the poison at the bottom of my pocket. It was as if my heart
contained a monster that was incomprehensible even to myself” (226).
Kitabatake presents the destruction of his moral framework as an other-
ing of the self, and, in his understanding of the self as mystery, he
evokes Kokoro’s Sensei who calls himself “mysterious” ( fukashigi ) in his
testament.13
Ultimately, Kitabatake chooses suicide as a way to exorcise this “mon-
ster,” explaining the logic behind his decision as follows:
Where would I find the reason for killing Mitsumura Kyōhei if I killed Vis-
count Honda in order to save myself? And do I find the egoism that I am not
conscious of lurking inside as the reason for murdering him? If so, my character,
my conscience, my morality, and my contention would all disappear. . . . I kill
myself because I believe that I will be victorious over spiritual bankruptcy (227).

—————
13. Given this depiction of the breakdown of the subject aware of his own
actions, Akutagawa’s “Kaika no satsujin” presents itself as a successor not only
to Sōseki’s Kokoro but also to Shiga Naoya’s “Han no hanzai” (Han’s crime; Oc-
tober 1913), which tells the story of Han, the knife thrower, who kills his wife
during a knife-throwing exhibition but is himself uncertain whether the death
was accidental or premeditated. That Akutagawa was deeply interested in the
problematics of the self-conscious subject posed in “Han no hanzai” can be seen
in the fact that he would revisit the topic in more detail in “Giwaku” (Suspicion),
which appeared in Chūō kōron in July 1919.
 Rhetoric of Disavowal 205

Describing his moral dilemma as one in which “egoism” is pitted against

“character” and “morality,” this passage shows how Kitabatake’s “moral
fury” that was the basis for his murder of Kyōhei becomes problema-
tized through his desire also to kill Honda, a friend with whom he can
find no moral high ground. In short, his desire to kill Honda suggests
that Kyōhei’s murder may have been motivated by jealousy, an admis-
sion that Kitabatake would rather reject through suicide than make.
Through this turn of events, “Kaika no satsujin” presents itself as
being diametrically opposed to Sōseki’s Kokoro, despite the undeniable
similarity in the defiant and proud tone of Sensei’s and Kitabatake’s
final words that suggest the high esteem with which they view their act,
not of suicide necessarily, but of sincere confession. Sensei’s testament
is an act of coming to terms with his egoism, the self-interest that led to
his ‘betrayal’ of K by asking Okusan for Ojōsan’s hand in marriage with-
out K’s knowledge. Kitabatake’s is an act of denying his egoism, pre-
empting the possibility that egoism had anything to do with his actions
in the first place. The act of suicide forecloses the possibility of a final
proof—in the form of the murder of Honda—to the egoism underlying
his actions by stopping the transformation or reversion of the moral tri-
angle between hero (Kitabatake), villain (Kyōhei), and victim (Akiko)
into the love triangle between subject, rival, and their object of desire.
“Kaika no satsujin” shows the power of external action (suicide) to over-
come internal desire (jealousy); it presents a mechanism of active dis-
avowal of egoism and of the rejection of self-consciousness.14
“Kaika no satsujin” offers a permutation to the relationship between
morality, self-interest, and love in the age of enlightenment examined
in Kokoro, a relationship whose importance for Akutagawa can be dis-
cerned by the fact that he would quickly revisit it in his next kaika-mono,

—————
14. Of course, one could argue that Kitabatake is already implicated in his
egoism/jealousy to the extent that he had thoughts of murdering Honda, but the
point seems to be that Kitabatake’s suicide functions as an action exorcising such
thoughts. It is also possible to argue that Kitabatake’s attempt to reject internal
egoism itself is egotistical, as Oketani Hideaki does in his essay on the relation-
ship between Sōseki’s Kokoro and Akutagawa’s kaika-mono. He writes: “This sui-
cide smells of hypocrisy. To commit suicide because admitting the latent egoism
leads to one’s spiritual bankruptcy suggests a deluding of oneself in order to push
through one’s claims [tatemae] and cannot help giving off the impression that that
after all is also another type of egoism” (“Akutagawa to Sōseki,” 30).
206 Rhetoric of Disavowal

“Kaika no otto” (Husband of enlightenment; February 1919).15 Such pre-

occupation seems fitting considering that this relationship pitted char-
acter against personal desire, a conceptual opposition that echoed the
ideological transition from Meiji to Taishō, and enabled Akutagawa to
reflect on the legacy of the Meiji project from this perspective.16 By de-
scribing the Japanese subject’s unwavering adherence to the Western
ideal of love, to the extent that he would not only commit murder but
kill himself, “Kaika no satsujin” suggests at once the power with which
Western ideas grasped Meiji intellectuals, prompting the blind worship
of these ideas as universal truths, and the caricature-like nature of the
extremes to which they went in trying to adopt these ideas in the name
of bunmei kaika. In so doing, “Kaika no satsujin” inscribes within the re-
lationship between morality, self-interest, and love the indelible marks
of Japan’s encounter with the West that were not fully revealed in Sō-
seki’s fictions on the fragmentation of the Japanese intellectual in the
modern age. And in this regard, “Kaika no satsujin” offers more than
Kitabatake’s inner world of moral struggle as a site of such inscription,
for a similar sort of inscription can also be found in the turn of events
within the story world that founds Kitabatake’s dilemma in the first
place.
In “Kaika no satsujin,” Kitabatake is prevented from acting as a rival
for Akiko’s love against Kyōhei (or Honda) to create a Kokoro-like love
triangle because he is not in the country when all the parties involved
—————
15. “Kaika no otto” tells the story of Miura, a seeker of and believer in true
love, who finally finds a girl he loves and marries. But soon, he discovers that
his wife is having an affair, but to the surprise of his friend, the narrator, Miura
affirms their relationship. He states: “You remember that I espoused ‘a marriage
of love,’ don’t you? That assertion was not to satisfy my own self-interest. It was
a result of putting love above everything. . . . So I was of the belief that if there
existed a love that was more pure than the one between my wife and me, I was
prepared to readily become a sacrifice for them who were childhood friends.
Unless I did so, my assertion to put love above everything would die out in real-
ity” (Akutagawa, Akutagawa Ryūnosuke zenshū, vol. 4, 198). In this way, Miura
presents himself as a successor to Kitabatake, who puts aside his “egoism” for
the sake of love as an ideal, although unlike Kitabatake Miura himself is the ob-
stacle to the fulfillment of true love that stands in the way of his wife and her
cousin. But it is also this predicament—of being a victim of adultery—that en-
ables Miura to elevate himself morally and prove his belief in true love by ac-
tively forfeiting his participation in Kokoro’s triangular relationship of desire.
16. Harry Harootunian provides a succinct overview of this transition in “A
Sense of an Ending and the Problem of Taishō,” 3–28.
 Rhetoric of Disavowal 207

come of age. When Kitabatake returns from his stint abroad, Kyōhei
has already defeated Honda in their quest to wed Akiko: the triangle of
love and betrayal exemplified by Sensei, K, and Ojōsan has already hap-
pened without the involvement of the subject, for Kitabatake arrives at
the battle too late. Significantly, his stint abroad is not of his own ac-
cord but by the orders of his father, who wanted him to obtain the
proper training and education necessary for taking over the family busi-
ness of medicine. Already enamored with Akiko before leaving for Lon-
don, Kitabatake would have had the opportunity to court her if he were
allowed to stay in Japan. But his familial obligations take him away from
the opportunity to fulfill his personal desire, placing Kitabatake in a
situation where he can only act as an executioner of “moral fury,” that is,
as an agent of morality who stands outside the realm of personal desire
and subjective goals.
Furthermore, Kitabatake’s studies abroad represent more than his ful-
fillment of familial obligations; they are also a perfect reproduction of
the ideology of bunmei kaika, the primary goals of which were to study
and adopt Western values and knowledge: in particular, those related to
science and technology. Kitabatake sacrifices his future with Akiko not
only for the good of his family but also for the good of the nation as a
Japanese pioneer of Western medicine. Indeed, the text makes sure to
emphasize the intricate relationship between the West and Kitabatake’s
personal sacrifice made for modernizing the nation, which explodes as his
murder of the un-modern Kyōhei. Kitabatake’s studies abroad provide
him with the means—poison based on his knowledge of Western medi-
cine—as well as the ideology—his ‘misguided’ idea of humanity stemming
in part from becoming a Christian while in England—necessary to exe-
cute Kyōhei’s murder.17
Through the story of Kitabatake, “Kaika no satsujin” presents an alle-
gory of the Meiji project, but the allegory does not end with him, for the
story’s narrative frame, characteristic of Akutagawa’s stories during this
period, produces another tale of inner struggle. Granted, the narrative

—————
17. In this sense, “Kaika no satsujin” describes an extreme result of self-
sacrifice for the good of the nation, and, in so doing, reiterates the cultural shift
from Meiji to Taishō described by Harry Harootunian in the following manner:
“Meiji civilization summoned purpose and goal—self-sacrifice and nationalism
( fukoku-kyōhei and bussan [sic] kōgyō )—where as Taishō culture, as it was con-
ceived, evoked new associations related to the nuances of consumers’ life, to in-
dividualism, culturalism (bunkashugi), and cosmopolitanism” (ibid., 15).
208 Rhetoric of Disavowal

frame is not an elaborate one in the original “Himitsu to kaihō” version,

taking the form of a postscript after the end of Kitabatake’s testament
that reads: “Postscript: When this testament was written, the peerage
system had not been established. The use of the word Viscount here fol-
lows the title of Honda’s later years.”18 Akutagawa made the narrative
framework more explicit, however, when the story was reprinted in the
short-story collection Kairaishi (Puppeteer; January 1919). In the new
version, which is also the version included in Akutagawa’s collection of
complete works, the postscript becomes incorporated into the story’s
early paragraphs where the narrator-editor introduces Kitabatake’s tes-
tament to the readers. In so doing, the editor explicitly confirms the
fact that he has recently obtained Kitabatake’s testament from Viscount
Honda, highlighting the temporal gap that exists between the testament
written in the age of enlightenment and the Taishō present when the tes-
tament is made public.
The narrative frame, then, generates a specific historical context
through which the readers can interpret Kitabtake’s testament, enabling
them to relativize his disturbing story as a relic of the past. But the frame
offers more than a critical perspective, for lurking behind Kitabatake’s
story is the story of Honda, who has lived with the knowledge of the truth
behind his friend’s suicide for the last 30 years. Significantly, the text
leaves ambiguous whether Akiko ever saw the testament, and it is easily
conceivable that Honda hid the testament from her given its content.
Perhaps it is because she has died that Honda is finally releasing the
testament to ‘liberate’ him from the ‘secret’ that has bound him all these
years like Sensei. But this is not to say that the dynamic of secret and
exposure is the same in “Kaika no satsujin” and Kokoro. In the latter, the
person who committed the ‘crime’ and the bearer of the secret of that
‘crime’ are the same. In the former, they are different: crime and punish-
ment are not directly connected but arbitrarily conferred. Honda did
nothing wrong, yet he is burdened with Kitabatake’s crime through the
latter’s confession. Thus, while the length that Honda had withheld Kita-
batake’s secret from the public may suggest his likeness to Kokoro’s Sensei,
it is rather the narrator of Kokoro that Honda resembles to the extent
that both are recipients of a will that puts them in a double bind of
whether or not to go public with the story.

—————
18. Cited in notes to “Kaika no satsujin,” Akutagawa Ryūnosuke zenshū, vol. 3,
422.
 Rhetoric of Disavowal 209

On the one hand, if Honda went public with this information, it

would certainly mean a scandal that would taint his marriage to Akiko.
Also, going public would mean making his best friend Kitabatake, who
made their marriage possible, a criminal in the name of the law. On
the other hand, if Honda does not go public with this information—
which is his course of action, at least, until he gives the testament to the
editor—then Kitabatake makes him into a criminal. Unlike in the case
of Sensei as well as the narrator of Kokoro, the knowledge Honda holds
is not only a dark past that has stained his marriage to Akiko but also a
crime committed against the state to the extent that he is not providing
authorities with information he knows about a murder. And it is here
that the other significance of the frame—aside from alerting the readers
of a presence of an editor who ‘exists’ in the present—becomes evident.
Honda is a central contributor to the Meiji state, for which he was
awarded with the title of Viscount, but he has turned his eyes away from
Kitabatake’s murder of Kyōhei who, despite his ‘immoral’ existence, was
a successful banker and thus a productive member of Meiji society like
Honda.
In such a way, Kitabatake transfers the guilt of his crime onto Honda
through his testament, a cruel decision that suggests his sense of re-
sentment regarding the sacrifice he made to the nation, which, in turn,
foreclosed the possibility of the fulfillment of his personal desires. If
the Western ideal of love provided the moral justification for a violation
of Meiji law in the form of murder for Kitabatake, then Honda, too,
is forced to live the deeply conflicted life brought about by selecting
the Western ideal of love over state interests, as a conspirator in this
crime committed against a productive member of Japanese society. In
short, Kitabatake and Honda are fragmented subjects torn between a
Western ideal and a Japanese law. To the extent that “Kaika no satsu-
jin” constitutes a public exposure not only of Kitabatake’s testament
but also of Honda’s secret, the story reveals itself as an attempt to come
to terms with the fundamental fragmentation and contradiction exist-
ing at the heart of the Meiji subject and the state in the new age of
Taishō, suggesting that Kitabatake’s story is not a relic of the past but
something that needs to be negotiated in the present. As we shall see
in the ensuing sections, a similar negotiation takes place in the stories
of Tanizaki Jun’ichirō and Satō Haruo in the “Himitsu to kaihō” issue of
Chūō kōron, revealing their shared concern over the issue of what could
be called fragmentary allegiances at the heart of the modern Japanese
intellectual.
210 Rhetoric of Disavowal

The Double and the Allegories of Modern Japanese Experience

“Kaika no satsujin” tells the story of a disavowal of egoism to maintain
an ideal. As such, it pits personal interest against an ideal—precisely the
reason why the ideal is considered universal and, therefore, applicable
to every individual—creating an opposition between the two. By actively
rejecting one through the other, the subject fails to see the intimate con-
nection between the two and thereby denies self-reflection and self-
understanding. But given the new environment of the Taishō period
which was characterized by “new individualism” and involved “the im-
portant transition from ‘inner conscience’ to the defense of ‘private in-
terest,’ ” it was fitting that a story would be written that suggested how
self-interest and universal ideal do not necessarily have to go against each
other.19 This story was Tanizaki’s “Futari no geijutsuka no hanashi” (later
re-titled “Kin to gin”; hereafter referred to as “Futari no geijutsuka”20),
telling the story of the well-to-do artist Ōkawa and his decadent rival
Aono, in which the former attempts to kill the latter.21
“Futari no geijutsuka” shares with Akutagawa’s “Kaika no satsujin” the
triangular structure and the role of an ideal within it, although Ōkawa’s
logic is diametrically opposed to that of Kitabatake. The following pas-
sage in which Ōkawa explains (to himself ) his decision to kill Aono illus-
trates the similarities as well as the differences between the two stories:
Aono dies or I die, there are no other possibilities. If I die, Aono’s art will grow. If
Aono dies, my art will be saved. Although killing Aono might be immoral, isn’t
killing one’s own art more immoral? I want to be faithful to myself before being
faithful to others. If my art is saved, I will be able to live an eternity. If the will
to live an eternity is the most precious among human values, it would be okay to
bear any sacrifices to carry on that will. Only by having the passion and courage
to carry on, I can finally become a genius. If that becomes the case, then God will
—————
19. Harootunian, “A Sense of an Ending and the Problem of Taishō,” 12, 17.
20. A portion of this story had appeared two months before the “Himitsu to
kaihō” issue in the literary journal Kokuchō as “Kin to gin.” The title was later
changed from “Futari no geijutsuka no hanashi” to “Kin to gin” once again.
21. “Futari no geijutsuka no hanashi” tells of two artists: Aono and Ōkawa.
The latter funds the former because he believes in and is jealous of his talents.
For an upcoming exhibition, they both employ a woman named Eiko as a model.
Ōkawa, fearful of what Aono might produce, sneaks into Aono’s studio to ex-
amine Aono’s painting. Realizing not only how superior Aono is as an artist but
also how similar they are in their artistic ideals, Ōkawa decides to murder Aono.
Carefully planning his crime, Ōkawa ultimately attacks Aono, leaving the latter
brain damaged and mute.
 Rhetoric of Disavowal 211

not abandon me. Even if people won’t know how serious and solemn a motive my
crime was committed under, God will allow it. In the past, was there even one
person who had murdered a person with a more solemn motive as mine? Someone
who was more faithful to one’s own art? Even only by that motive, I have the right
to be a genius. . . . Yes, how can one murder a person for art if he didn’t have the
right to be a genius? A thing like this happened because I am a genius. To kill
Aono is to exercise the privilege permitted only to a genius.22

As this passage makes clear, Ōkawa’s logic revolves around the notion of
art as an ideal—not unlike the notion of love for Kitabatake—which, as
the highest ideal in life existing above the law, functions to justify mur-
der. But unlike Kitabatake, who justifies his murder as serving a greater
good by emphasizing the victim’s deplorable character, Ōkawa’s focus
rests on himself and on his own qualifications to commit murder. Call-
ing his motive for killing Aono a “serious” and “solemn” one, Ōkawa
turns his own argument upside down at the end of the passage by claim-
ing that his desire to murder Aono for the sake of art qualifies him as
a “genius” who is, in turn, qualified to commit murder. In “Futari no gei-
jutsuka,” self-interest—rather than being a despicable personal desire
to be rejected—is justified through the ideal of art as a mode of self-
expression: egoism and ideal serve to reinforce each other.
And unlike Kitabatake, whose focus is to disavow the notion of jeal-
ousy as the emotional manifestation of self-interest at all costs—even
his life—Ōkawa readily admits his jealousy for Aono’s talents, although
he understands the jealousy as fundamentally existential in nature. He
states, as a part of his decision making process to murder Aono:
My animosity toward him comes not only from simple jealousy but also from
the uneasy awareness that another person who is the exact same type of artist
as myself exists in this world. He lives in the world of imagination I live in. He
produces the things that I try to produce. When I see his paintings, I discover
the home [kyōdo] that my soul is hurrying to reach someday (425–26).23

—————
22. Tanizaki, “Kin to gin,” Tanizaki Jun’ichirō zenshū, vol. 5, 427. All subse-
quent references to this source will appear in the text in parentheses.
23. Also: “I am starting to feel as if I were Aono’s shadow. Indeed, if there
exist two artists here who are trying to express beauty that is exactly the same, it
follows that one out of the two doesn’t need to exist. To the extent that a thing
called art is something that expresses the existence of the self, two persons must
try to eliminate each other. The moment I recognized this, I began to take a
jaundiced view of the self” (424).
212 Rhetoric of Disavowal

The problem with Ōkawa is that he believes he and Aono are funda-
mentally the same in their artistic sensibilities. To the extent that he be-
lieves art to be an expression of the self, this is not something that should
happen. How can the Other be the Same? Embedded within this notion
of originality, moreover, is the sense of belatedness—of being a repetition
of another—that Ōkawa feels, intimated by the phrase “When I see his
paintings, I discover the home that my soul is hurrying to reach some-
day.” Fittingly, then, he continues on to conclude the above line of ar-
gument: “In the end, the threat that I feel is the same threat felt by
William Wilson who suffered from his own doppelgänger” (426). Ōkawa
sees Aono as his doppelgänger, citing the famous short story by Edgar
Allan Poe, which was translated by Tanizaki’s younger brother Seiji in
1913 and had a major impact within Taishō literary circles.24 Like Poe’s
famous double, Ōkawa and Aono exist on the opposite sides of the mo-
rality spectrum, but, unlike in Poe’s story in which the bad half kills the
good, “Futari no geijutsuka” tells the story of how the good half tries to
kill the bad.25
From the various works of this period, it is clear that the subject of the
doppelgänger was of much interest to Japanese writers, including Satō
Haruo, whose “Shimon” will be the subject of the next section. This
fact is fitting, considering that, as Ichiyanagi Hirotaka writes, the doppel-
gänger is “an excellent representation of a soul that has been ripped apart
by age and society that continues to run the road to modernization at an
intense speed.”26 Indeed, the mid-1910s were precisely the height of rapid
modernization in the form of industrialization and urbanization stem-
ming from Japan’s new role as an exporter of war goods during World
War I. But while the rise in stories about doubles no doubt has much
to do with the ubiquitous processes of modernization, Tanizaki’s “Futari
no geijutsuka” as well as Akutagawa’s short story “Futatsu no tegami”
(Two letters; September 1917) reveals the culturally specific nature and in-

—————
24. For details on the reception of Poe in Japan, see Sadoya, Nihon kindai bun-
gaku no seiritsu, 727–824.
25. Tanizaki returns to this motif of the struggle between good and bad in his
“A to B no hanashi” (A story of A and B; August 1921), in which the ‘good’ writer
decides to take on the pains of the ‘bad’ writer by publishing his own works as
those of the ‘bad’ writer.
26. Ichiyanagi, “Samayoeru dopperugengā,” 122.
 Rhetoric of Disavowal 213

flection of the Japanese writers’ experimentation with the topic of the

doppelgänger.27
Similar to “Kaika no satsujin” in its employment of the epistolary style,
“Futatsu no tegami,” which was published about a year before “Kaika no
satsujin” and is one of the earliest examples of a story describing the
subject’s confrontation with his double, presents two letters written to
the police chief by a man named Sasaki. In the first letter, Sasaki, after
recounting his experiences of seeing his and his wife’s doppelgänger on
various occasions, pleads to the police chief to deal with his neighbors,
who accuse his wife of being an adulterer. In the second letter, he admon-
ishes the police chief for not taking any action despite his first letter and
reports that his wife has gone missing, possibly kidnapped. Framing these
letters is the narrator-editor (who somehow obtained the letters like the
narrator of “Kaika no satsujin”) who cuts the second letter short, con-
cluding his presentation of Sasaki’s story in the following manner: “From
that point, philosophical-like things that do not make much sense are
written at length. That is unnecessary so I have decided to omit them
here.”28
Through this postscript (another instance of Akutagawa’s use of the
framing technique), then, the narrator-editor makes clear that he judges
“the text presented by Sasaki to possess coherence only within himself
and has no power of persuasion to the outside world” and rejects Sa-
saki’s letters as the ramblings of a madman.29 For the narrator-editor,
there is no reality to Sasaki’s experiences with the doppelgänger, except
as evidence that Sasaki is a man who cannot handle the harsh realities of
his wife’s adultery. Sasaki’s encounters with his and his wife’s doubles
result from witnessing the instances of adultery where he projects his
desire to be his wife’s lover onto the adulterer, thereby recognizing the
adulterer as himself. The doppelgängers, thus, provide Sasaki with the
mechanism to disavow the visual and traumatic reality of adultery and,
by extension, the triangular relationship between subject, his object of
desire, and rival as victor that Akutagawa would later revisit in “Kaika
no satsujin.”

—————
27. In his work on doubles in modern Japanese literature, which will be dis-
cussed a bit later on in this chapter, Watanabe Masahiko labels the Taishō pe-
riod “the age of doubles” (Kindai bungaku no bunshinzō, 70).
28. Akutagawa, “Futatsu no tegami,” Akutagawa Ryūnosuke zenshū, vol. 2, 247.
29. Ichiyanagi, “Samayoeru dopperugengā,” 120–21.
214 Rhetoric of Disavowal

As powerful as the postscript is in framing the readers’ interpretation

of Sasaki’s letters, it is also worth noting that the letters themselves pro-
vide evidence of his madness. A professor of English and ethics, Sasaki
begins his letter by discussing the existence of doppelgängers in this
world, citing many Western examples he has garnered from various
sources.30 After these examples, Sasaki tells the story of his first encoun-
ter with his double, which takes place when he goes to the orchestra
with his wife. During intermission, he leaves her to go to the bathroom,
and, upon returning, sees standing next to her his double, who quickly
disappears upon her seeing him in turn. Sasaki concludes the episode in
the following manner: “From that night on, I began to be stricken with
one type of anxiety. That is because, as the examples previously pro-
vided show, the appearance of the doppelgänger often foreshadows the
death of the person concerned.”31
Indicating his fear of dying from the moment of his first encounter
with the double, this passage intimates Sasaki’s madness through his
mention of the Western examples of the doppelgänger that provide the
basis of his psychological reaction. For, the passage reveals that Sasaki
has knowledge of the phenomenon, perhaps information he may have en-
countered through his occupation as a professor of English and ethics,
prior to his first encounter with his double. Knowledge precedes ex-
perience, revealing the interpretation of the latter by the former as a
hallucination produced by the second-hand knowledge of the doppel-
gänger in the first place. And in this reversal of knowledge and experi-
ence, of knowledge producing experience, we can discern the sense of
belatedness—the shadow of the Western influence—haunting the Japa-
nese modern experience. Western knowledge literally splits the subject
(Sasaki) into fragments, ‘enabling’ him to see his double to disavow the
triangular relationship in which he is the victim.
In this way, “Futatsu no tegami” explores the relationships between
the sense of belatedness and the mechanism of disavowal and between
Japan and the West that are implicated in the phenomenon of the dou-
ble. As we saw in the previous section, Akutagawa would revisit these
relationships, while not dealing explicitly with the doppelgänger, in his
“Kaika no satsujin” through the figure of Kitabatake, whose crime has
—————
30. Akutagawa obtained the examples from the “Döppelganger” [sic] chapter
of Catherine Crowe’s The Night Side of Nature: Or, Ghosts and Ghost Seers. Cited in
Ibid., 122.
31. Akutagawa, “Futatsu no tegami,” Akutagawa Ryūnosuke zenshū, vol. 2, 237.
 Rhetoric of Disavowal 215

much to do with losing his chance to court his love Akiko because of his
studies in England. And Tanizaki’s “Futari no geijutsuka,” too, explores
these relationships beyond what we have already discussed, although at
first glance, what remains seems more superficial than Akutagawa’s, lim-
ited to playful insertions of Western signifiers in the form of material
objects and literary references into the tale of Ōkawa’s crime. For ex-
ample, Ōkawa decides to wear a “black wool suit” that he had purchased
when he was “returning from the United States” to serve as a tuxedo
when dining on the ship as a way to ensure that he not be identified by
his clothes on the night of the crime (443). In considering the feasibility
of murdering Aoki, moreover, Ōkawa specifically cites Sherlock Holmes
and Auguste Dupin and thereby reveals himself as a reader of Western
detective fiction. Yet, despite such insertions, these signifiers do not
really become involved in the crux of the story. The question of Ōkawa’s
disguise in the form of American formalwear never enters the investiga-
tion of the assault on Aono. Nor does Ōkawa utilize the specific details
of the detective’s method that he may have learned from reading the
classical detective stories by Conan Doyle and Poe.
But as trivial as they might seem, these Western signifiers have a ma-
jor function within the dynamics of disavowal and belatedness in Tani-
zaki’s work. For, by clearly invoking the West as a part of Ōkawa’s life,
these signifiers superficially hide and thereby actively flag how it is pre-
cisely the recognition of Western influence that Ōkawa is working so
hard to disavow. As we have seen, the primary source of Ōkawa’s mur-
derous desire stems from the sense of belatedness that he keenly feels
towards Aono, and Ōkawa, unlike Kitabatake, does not seem to be in
denial of his own motivations, readily admitting and accepting (and per-
haps relishing in) the personal interest that is at stake in his decision to
kill his rival. At the same time, however, Ōkawa is operating within a
mechanism of disavowal to the extent that he is blind to the paradoxical
nature of his understanding of art as an ideal, which provides him with
the rhetoric of justification to murder Aono. That is, while Ōkawa em-
phasizes the strangeness that someone like Aono who shares his artistic
vision exists in this world, it is wholly understandable if not obvious that
such a person could easily exist in Taishō society considering the over-
whelming influence of Western values and concepts within the devel-
opment of art in post-Restoration Japan as a whole. But this is not to
deny the possibility of artistic originality in modern Japan, which would
be another debate all together. Rather, in addition to the critical discur-
sive trends of 1910s Japan, which will be discussed shortly, the text of
216 Rhetoric of Disavowal

“Futari no geijutsuka” prompts the understanding of Ōkawa as someone

characterized by his blindness to and disavowal of Western influence
through a narrative strategy that presents Ōkawa’s existential struggles
as a parody of sorts.
That Tanizaki was consciously casting such blindness in ironic light
can be discerned by the story’s resemblance to Crime and Punishment that
reveals the influence of Western literature in the production of this
story, which, in turn, takes up the topic of the desperate search for ar-
tistic originality in Taishō Japan. Indeed, it is not only Tanizaki’s story
but also Akutagawa’s “Kaika no satsujin” that display the Russian work’s
influence in the major theme of the story: the dangers of a rift that is
created when a foreign ideal that is understood as absolute and universal
in later-developing countries like Russia and Japan faces off against real
social conditions. The thought processes of the protagonists of these
stories, in believing that there exists morality beyond the law of the
land, strongly evoke Raskolnikov’s notion of the Übermensch, or the
exceptional man.32 But in Tanizaki’s story, the connection goes beyond
this larger theme, especially after Ōkawa decides to kill Aono when the
connection becomes conspicuously direct.
As mentioned above, Ōkawa, in considering the feasibility of murder-
ing Aono, cites the famous protagonists of Western detective stories,
Sherlock Holmes and Auguste Dupin. More specifically, Ōkawa cites
the detectives to ponder the reasons why crimes are detected, to which
he ultimately concludes that the primary reason lies in the carelessness
of the criminal. For Ōkawa, the question that detective fiction replies
in the affirmative—“in the strict sense, does each and every single move
of a human being necessarily leave some kind of trace in this world?”
(429)—is answered in the negative. No doubt, the line of questioning
through which Ōkawa comes to his conclusion that individual traces can
be eliminated is highly disappointing, involving, for example, asking
himself whether his action can be known by a detective if he simply
stood up, walked to the mirror, looked at himself in the mirror, and
then sat down again. But at the same time, it is undeniable that this line
of thinking is identical to that of Raskolnikov when he plans the murder
of the pawn lady in Chapter 6 of the Russian masterpiece: “At first—
long before indeed—he [Raskolnikov] had been much occupied with

—————
32. Nakajima Reiko also makes this point in “ ‘Zenka mono,’ ‘Kin to gin,’ ‘A
to B no hanashi’ ni tsuite,” 81.
 Rhetoric of Disavowal 217

one question; why almost all crimes are so badly concealed and so easily
detected, and why almost all criminals leave such obvious traces?”33
At the moment when evidence of Western influence is strongest—
that is, when Ōkawa’s logic most resembles that of Raskolnikov—
Tanizaki introduces unrelated signifiers of Western origin—Sherlock
Holmes and Auguste Dupin—only to reject their influence by letting
Ōkawa conclude that, unlike in Western detective stories, every act is
not detectable. The text pretends as if Ōkawa is operating within the
framework of the classic detective stories when his logic, in fact, is
firmly entrenched in that of Crime and Punishment, and, in so doing, the
text misdirects and suppresses the influence of Crime and Punishment on
the production of this story. Yet, such misdirection and suppression can
only be superficial to the extent that the reader will discern the ‘hidden’
Western influence, especially considering that the mid-1910s enjoyed a
boom in the translation of Dostoevsky’s works, in general, and his Crime
and Punishment, in particular.
Starting with Etō Tōden’s translation of Crime and Punishment under
the title Fuan in 1909, the Russian work underwent numerous transla-
tions during this period, including the Russian scholar Nakamura Ha-
kuyō’s version in 1914.34 Hakuyō’s version would be reprinted in Septem-
ber 1918, just two months after the publication of “Himitsu to kaihō,” as
a part of Dosutoefusukii zenshū (The complete works of Dostoevsky) from
Shinchōsha. Given such a literary environment, Tanizaki’s juxtaposition of
the protagonists of Western detective stories with Crime and Punishment
and the suppression of the latter from the surface level of the text not
only speak to his playful use of intertextuality but also cast Ōkawa’s
criminal logic in an ironic light. In other words, through the textual sup-
pression of the influence that Crime and Punishment had on the production
of this story, Tanizaki, consciously and actively, parodies Ōkawa’s con-
fidence in the possibility of the notion of artistic originality in Taishō
Japan—where Western cultural influences abound whether in the field of
literature or art, including the story in which Ōkawa is the protagonist—
as characterized by a certain disavowal and blindness.
—————
33. Dostoevsky, Crime and Punishment, 65.
34. Other translations of Crime and Punishment included versions by the monk
Kyōgoku Itsuzō as well as by the writer Ikuta Chōkō and the poet Ikuta Shun-
getsu (co-translation) in 1915. Crime and Punishment was also made into a screen-
play by Tsubouchi Shikō, the nephew of Tsubouchi Shōyō, in the same year. For
details, see Sakakibara, “Dosutoefusukii hon’yaku sakuhin nenpyō.”
218 Rhetoric of Disavowal

And, of course, such a text would have produced a parodic effect pre-
cisely because Ōkawa’s way of thinking—albeit a less radical and criminal
one—revolving around his belief in artistic originality was nothing origi-
nal. As various literary and social discourses of the period reveal, the
discursive environment of the 1910s was characterized by exaltation of
Western notions of originality and individuality, which resulted from the
rejection of various -isms that had organized the Japanese intellectual
sphere. On this point, Iida Yūko writes: “At the base of [the] hatred of
‘-isms’ lies the assertion of individuality as the unification of diverse ele-
ments not able to be represented by one ‘-ism.’ ‘Originality’ at the level
of the individual that is different from the level of ‘-isms’ becomes wor-
shiped.”35 The intimate coupling between criticism of “-isms” and asser-
tion of individuality/originality makes perfect sense, for to adhere to an
“-ism” suggests the subject being influenced by an external source and is
diametrically opposed to the notion of originality.36
But the rejection of “-isms” also requires the existence of and adher-
ence to universal values to the extent that individual action requires cri-
teria by which it is to be judged and made meaningful. Thus, while various
“-isms” are criticized as constraining individual expression, universal val-
ues or rather tag words such as “art,” “beauty,” “self,” and “world”—what
Hasumi Shigehiko has called “ ‘Taishō-esque’ nature of abstraction”—
become ubiquitous, as exemplified in the rhetoric of the Shirakaba group
that was active during the 1910s.37 As Tomi Suzuki writes of Mushanokōji
Saneatsu (1885–1976), the leader of the Shirakaba group, and of the group
in general:
For Mushanokōji and the Shirakaba group, there were no Japanese: there ex-
isted only Humanity [ningen], or Mankind [ jinrui ], together with such universals
as Love, Art, Nature, Justice, Beauty, and Life. . . . This absolute acceptance of
Western discourse, the uncritical universalism and internationalism, and the no-
tion of cultivating the individual self reflected the general intellectual atmo-
sphere of the 1910s—a time when the sense of national crisis had dissipated in

—————
35. Iida, Karera no monogatari, 219.
36. Iida writes: “What the unification of binary oppositions and the rejection
of -isms signify is, at once, a rejection of already-existing frameworks that pro-
duce meaning and, above all, a strong resistance to the restrictions of the subject
through such frameworks that are set outside the subject” (ibid., 222).
37. Hasumi, “ ‘Taishō-teki’ gensetsu to hihyō,” 132.
 Rhetoric of Disavowal 219

the aftermath of the Russo-Japanese War but when political activity was tightly
controlled by the government.38

As Suzuki makes clear, the rhetoric of the Shirakaba group was fraught
with contradictions, for lying behind the rhetoric of universal values
were events such as the Great Treason Incident and the annexation of
Korea in 1910 that made clear the absolutist and imperialistic vector of
modern Japan. In this context, the overtly liberal and humanistic rheto-
ric of the Shirakaba group, which would be echoed by Shiratori Shōgo’s
poem in the inaugural issue of Shinseinen, reveals itself as overcompensa-
tion for and an active disavowal of the harsh political and international
realities of this period.
“Futari no geijutsuka” tells a story in which obsessive adherence to the
universal value of originality and art leads one to an excessive reaction—
murder—but, at the same time, it makes sure to mark itself with signs
of Western influence that problematizes the notion of originality in the
first place. In so doing, it presents itself as a parody of the discursive en-
vironment of 1910s Japan as well as an allegory of artistic originality in a
later-developing nation like Japan that had been heavily influenced by
Western artistic values.39 It suggests that in order to speak about the self
and originality in Japan is to suppress and disavow the Western influence
and what it has done to the possibility of originality in modern Japan.
That is, the question of artistic originality only arises when Ōkawa suc-
cessfully disavows the Western influence that he and Aono share. Or to
put it in another way, Ōkawa’s obsession with Aono, by focusing on the
similarities of their art as an existential question, enables him to be blind
to the larger picture that would reveal a social problematic lurking behind
their similarities.

—————
38. Tomi Suzuki, Narrating the Self, 53. Suzuki also writes of the group: “Pur-
suing the self through art was a common goal of the Shirakaba (White Birch)
group. . . . Influenced by such humanitarian philosophers and writers as Tolstoy
and Maeterlinck, the Shirakaba group espoused an idealistic humanism rooted
in the belief that the pursuit of the self was the goal of the highest value. . . .
‘self,’ ‘individuality,’ and ‘personality’ were key terms for the group” (ibid., 94).
39. Such influence, rather than being an issue of whether or not an artwork is
derivative of Western art (a difficult theoretical problem on its own), clearly re-
veals itself in the consciousness of modern Japanese intellectuals, as exemplified
by works such as Natsume Sōseki’s “Gendai Nihon no kaika,” which presents
the developments of modern Japan as externally forced rather than internally
developed.
220 Rhetoric of Disavowal

But if Tanizaki’s work operates primarily as a parody and an allegory,

then what are we to make of Ōkawa’s success as an artist after incapaci-
tating Aono? And how do we interpret the story’s ending, where not
Ōkawa but the mute Aono is ecstatic in his coma-induced fantasy world?
It seems that blindness and disavowal are all we have, especially when we
consider Aono’s, rather than Ōkawa’s, story, for Aono, who is presented
as someone to whom issue of artistic originality is not relevant, also oper-
ates fundamentally within the rhetoric of disavowal, namely, masochism.
For, as Gilles Deleuze has discussed, the masochist “does not believe
in negating or destroying the world nor in idealizing it: what he does is
to disavow and thus to suspend it, in order to secure an ideal which is it-
self suspended in fantasy.”40 Within this understanding of masochism,
Aono’s art proves itself to be a means to an end—a tangible manifestation
of his fantasies in the real world he seeks to disavow—and his state of
incapacitation a godsend that enables him to maintain the state of dis-
avowal and, thus, his fantasy indefinitely without such an external crutch.
Stories about disavowal, Akutagawa’s “Kaika no satsujin” and Tani-
zaki’s “Futari no geijutsuka” are diametrically opposed to the framework
of the detective story to expose the truth of the case.41 If detective fic-
tion emerges when the public internalizes the panoptic authority of the
state, as scholars have noted, then these stories dubbed as “new artistic
detective novels” by placing Western ideals over the law of the land,
—————
40. Deleuze, Coldness and Cruelty, 32–33. According to Deleuze, reality for the
masochist is a world of the law, established by the father as a bearer of the phallus,
and the realm of fantasy is the world of the mother who, through the subject’s dis-
avowal and suspension of her lack, represents the possibility of an ideal that the
father outlaws by perpetuating the fear of castration. Thus, the fundamental op-
erational framework of masochism is the “twofold disavowal, a positive, idealizing
disavowal of the mother (who is identified with the law) and an invalidating dis-
avowal of the father (who is expelled from the symbolic order)” (ibid., 68).
41. Indeed, not only do both stories deny the presence of the detective, easily
committing a perfect crime, but they consciously mock the authority of the
state. Kitabatake’s perfect crime is made possible by his knowledge of Western
medicine and suggests that his success stems from him being more knowledge-
able (Western) than the police who incorrectly diagnose the cause of Kyōhei’s
death. Ōkawa’s perfect crime is made possible by his knowledge of Western
detective stories and suggests that his success, too, stems from him being more
knowledgeable (Western) than the police, a point that is emphasized by the fact
that Ōkawa is stopped by a police officer on the way back from attacking Aono,
but he quickly evades further questioning by showing the police officer a fake
identification card.
 Rhetoric of Disavowal 221

make no room for a hero of such a genre to emerge. The detectives

of the Western tradition—exemplified by Sherlock Holmes and Auguste
Dupin—take the authority of the state for granted, and the question of
morality rarely if ever emerges. But when an individual internalizes as
authority something other than the laws of the state to which the indi-
vidual is subjected, we instead get Raskolnikov, Kitabatake, and Ōkawa,
who turn into criminals rather than detectives as a result of such in-
ternalization. As the ending of “Futari no geijutsuka” suggests, Tanizaki
would continue to seek a world that disavowed such fragmented alle-
giances through his exploration of masochism and fetishism, revealing
how embracing and indulging in disavowal can be a pleasurable, if not
legitimate, form of existence. But as we will see in the next section, Satō
Haruo sought to present another possibility in his “Shimon,” which
shows how such a world, constituted in part by its rejection of the detec-
tive of the Western tradition, can give rise to another type of detective
whose reason for being was found in the kernel of the modern Japanese
experience as described in the stories of disavowal by Akutagawa and
Tanizaki.

The Birth of a Japanese Detective

Among the stories in the “Himitsu to kaihō” issue of Chūō kōron, “Shi-
mon” is no doubt closest to what we might call a detective story. 42
There exists in R. N. a character who occupies the position of the de-
—————
42. “Shimon” tells the story of R. N., a childhood friend of the narrator named
Satō. During his studies abroad, R. N. becomes an opium addict, continuing his
addiction in Nagasaki after returning to Japan, but he suddenly returns to Tokyo
and asks the narrator to let him live with him and his wife in order to beat his
addiction. One day, the narrator, his wife, and R. N. go to Asakusa to watch a
foreign film called Nyozoku Rozario. Encountering a close-up of a fingerprint in
the movie, R. N. abruptly leaves the theater and thereafter becomes obsessed
with the topic of fingerprints. Ultimately, R. N. reveals to the narrator that he
may have killed a person at an opium den in Nagasaki. He tells the narrator,
moreover, that near the body he found a watch, on the back of which was a fin-
gerprint identical to the one that they saw in the film. After conducting an inves-
tigation at the alleged scene of the crime in Nagasaki with the narrator, R. N.
concludes that he did not commit the murder, but rather the murder was com-
mitted by the actor in the film named William Wilson. The narrator is incredu-
lous at R. N.’s conclusions, but even after R. N.’s death, the narrator still cannot
dispel R. N.’s theories because the fingerprint in the film seems identical to the
one on the back of the watch.
222 Rhetoric of Disavowal

tective, and, recounted by the first-person narrator Satō whose shock

and awe of R. N.’s actions at every turn evoke the stupefied narrator of
Poe’s Dupin Trilogy as well as Watson of Sherlock Holmes tales, the
story exhibits specific narrative and structural resemblances to the clas-
sical detective story format established by these works. The story also
includes an investigation of the supposed crime scene in Nagasaki where
R. N. shocks the narrator with the accuracy of his ‘deductions.’ Of
course, there is one catch—R. N.’s investigation focuses on exonerating
his own guilt for a murder that he may have committed while in an opi-
um daze: R. N., thus, is at once a detective, a criminal, and a witness.
Recalling how he came to discover a dead body lying next to him at
the Nagasaki opium den, R. N. tells the narrator of his suspicions that
he may have murdered the man during his opium dream because in it
he saw “an armored knight” kill a man who was “floating on water.”43
But R. N.’s fear that he is a murderer takes an unexpected turn when he
encounters the face of the actor William Wilson in the movie Gun Moll
Rosario (Nyozoku Rozario).44 R. N. tells the narrator:
I saw instinctively that that man’s face, illuminated by the light that shone from
behind him in the picture in front of me, was identical to the face of the knight
that basked in the moonlight in that dream of mine. And I recalled in an instant
that it was a face that I had frequently seen in an opium den in Shanghai. But I
immediately thought at that moment that this instinct of mine was stupid. I re-
jected myself thinking that I projected my dream into the film as soon as I saw a
human face that was as large as in my dream at that time (111).

As this passage reveals, R. N., upon encountering the close-up face of

William Wilson on the big screen, makes a connection between the
actor and the knight in his opium dream. To support this connection,
R. N. also ‘realizes’ that he has seen the face many times in a Shanghai
opium den, thereby making it more plausible for the actor to have been
in the Nagasaki opium den as well. But at the same time, R. N. is self-
reflective, questioning these connections as a work of projection and of
reconstructing the story of his trauma through a convenient foil that
was prompted by the likeness of the larger-than-life nature of William
Wilson’s close-up and the hallucinatory images in his opium dreams.
—————
43. Satō, “Shimon,” Teihon Satō Haruo zenshū, vol. 3, 107. All subsequent refer-
ences to this source will appear in the text in parentheses.
44. Gun Moll Rosario is the English title that is given to Nyozoku Rozario by
Elaine Gerbert in her discussion of “Shimon” in “Space and Aesthetic Imagina-
tion in Some Taishō Writings.”
 Rhetoric of Disavowal 223

His skepticism gets pushed aside, however, when the close-up of the
fingerprint, which is left by Johnson (the character played by the actor
William Wilson) on a table, appears on the big screen. Already at this
point, as he later reveals to the narrator, R. N. had discovered a gold
watch at the murder site with a fingerprint on its back, and, analyzing
the fingerprint meticulously, reached the conclusion that it was not his.
Thus, upon encountering the fingerprint on the screen, R. N. realizes in
a flash that it is identical to the fingerprint on the back of the watch.
By obsessively reading various Western literature on fingerprints there-
after to answer the question “In the world, are there two or more fingers
that have the identical—or rather, similar—patterned fingerprints?” in
the negative, R. N. is able to claim that the actor William Wilson must
be the person whose fingerprint is on the back of the watch found at the
scene of the crime (112). R. N. tries to confirm his theory by writing to
William Wilson through the American film company, stating that the
Japanese police are looking for him as a suspect in a murder case, but he
receives no reply, learning instead that William Wilson has disappeared
just around the time when he would have received R. N.’s letter. Upon
this, R. N. concludes: “I escaped to Tokyo thinking that I may have com-
mitted a murder in Nagasaki. . . . But don’t worry. I was by no means a
murderer. The murderer is that man! It is indeed he—William Wilson.
That motion picture’s Johnson—no, William Wilson” (105).
In such a fashion, R. N.’s hypothesis moves seamlessly from his own
exoneration to the identification of the culprit. But as Kawamoto Saburō
states, “Shimon” seems to be “a story of mystery-increasing by a ‘sickly
master detective’ ” that leaves the reader not with “the feeling of intellec-
tual refreshment” but with “the pleasure of slight perplexity on whether
it was real or dream.”45 On the one hand, all physical and circumstantial
evidence seem to suggest that the actor William Wilson murdered the
man in the Nagasaki opium den. On the other hand, R. N.’s analysis and
the resulting story is so fantastic and extraordinary that the narrator can
never get himself to fully accept R. N.’s conclusions, even after a body is
discovered exactly where R. N. had stated and even after R. N.’s death
(details of which are not presented to the reader). In fact, the story ends
with the narrator having become entrapped in a perpetual state of un-
certainty, inching closer to accepting the identity of the fingerprints but
never able to alleviate the need to search for their difference: “Even now,

—————
45. Kawamoto, Taishō gen’ei, 251.
224 Rhetoric of Disavowal

as I write this, I cannot discover how the fingerprint in that film and the
fingerprint inside the lid of the watch are different. Ever more, I cannot
doubt my own eyes. Because that would be a bigger blasphemy than not
believing in God” (117–18). And such an ending characterized by its un-
certainty cannot help trickling down to affect the interpretation of the
reader, especially because the certainty and confidence of analysis that
R. N. displays are relativized by the narrator’s portrayal of R. N. as an
opium addict and a madman.
Ultimately, though, it is the identity of the culprit that radically prob-
lematizes R. N.’s hypothesis. As discussed in the previous section, Wil-
liam Wilson is the title and the protagonist’s name of Edgar Allan Poe’s
story about the doppelgänger. And importantly, Satō, the narrator, who is
an educated writer that actively prompts his conflation with Satō Haruo
of the real world through various textual strategies, does not make the
connection between the name William Wilson and Poe’s work, which
was, as previously mentioned, an influential story within Taishō literary
circles.46 In other words, Satō Haruo, the real author and not the narra-
tor, embeds in the story a conscious blindness to a literary connection
that would reveal the truth of this story’s madness as well as its fiction-
ality, in a similar manner to Tanizaki’s “Futari no geijutsuka” also seem-
ingly blind of its likeness to Crime and Punishment. In “Shimon,” then, the
doppelgänger exists on the level of literary reference for the well-read
readers familiar with Poe’s story (or anyone who read Tanizaki’s “Futari
no geijutsuka,” which mentions William Wilson, in the same issue of
Chūō kōron) to decode, leaving us with the question: why is it William
Wilson and what is the significance of this literary reference?
“Shimon” is a story about the fascination and obsession with finger-
prints. Hidden behind this obsession, however, lies the story of the dou-
ble. On the one hand, we have the fingerprint, a modern technological
‘discovery’ that enables the identification and differentiation of individu-
als and, as such, makes possible for the detective to reclaim the lost indi-
vidual traces in the big city through “capturing the criminal in an act of

—————
46. For example, the narrator refers to the work “Tsuki kage,” which Satō Ha-
ruo published in reality as an account of R. N.’s opium dream. Also, in explaining
why he refrains from describing R. N.’s fascinating views on film, the narrator
writes in a parenthetical aside: “I regret that because of the page restrictions and
the deadline of this manuscript, I cannot even take a necessary detour” (95).
 Rhetoric of Disavowal 225

unconscious revelation.”47 Indeed, it is precisely this “act of unconscious

revelation” through the leaving of a fingerprint, the most exemplary of
such acts, that “Shimon” describes, for we are led to believe that, in
Gun Moll Rosario, it is Johnson’s inadvertent placing of the fingerprint on
the table that brings the gang down.48 On the other hand, the finger-
print(s) is ‘determined’ to belong to William Wilson whose name evokes
the doppelgänger, also a modern phenomenon but a psychological and
literary one, which rejects the very notion of individuality that the finger-
print, as a scientific tool for identification and a proof that each indi-
vidual is unique, functions to reclaim. Although the fingerprints on the
gold watch and the one left by the driver Johnson on the table in Gun
Moll Rosario may match, the name William Wilson suggests, as Wata-
nabe Masahiko concludes in his Kindai bungaku no bunshinzō (The dou-
bling image of modern literature), that the “murderer” is not the same
person as the actor who plays Johnson but rather his double.49 Or as
Ubukata Tomoko hypothesizes, “the murderer William Wilson is a per-
son who takes on the territory of R. N.’s ‘unconscious’ ” and, thus, “R. N.
as ‘detective’ and William Wilson as ‘criminal’ are an entity that shares
the ‘soul’ of one human being despite having two different bodies.”50
In these ways, the name William Wilson prompts the reader (and
critics) to contemplate the identity of the criminal as well as the alle-
gorical significance of the name William Wilson. And naturally, consid-
ering that William Wilson appears as a movie actor, these discussions
revolve around the question of film as an emergent medium that had

—————
47. Gunning, “Tracing the Individual Body,” 24. The full passage follows:
The detective story structures itself around two essential moments: one plays on the pos-
sibility of exploiting the loss of the immediate signs of identity and place in society, while
the second tries to restore and establish identity and social status beyond a shadow of a
doubt. The criminal can use disguise and alias to elude recognition. However, the detec-
tive can identify the criminal precisely by focusing on marks that the criminal might not
be aware of or would find difficult or impossible to conceal. The drama of this new form
of evidence lies less in stripping the criminal of his disguise . . . than in capturing the crim-
inal in an act of unconscious revelation” (ibid., 23–24).
48. The narrator describes this critical scene as follows: “Rosario’s band of
thieves never took the gloves off from their hands. But the gloves of the driver
Johnson had worn out at some moment. Johnson, whose fingers had lost some
sense of touch because of his job, did not notice this at all. And he had left his
fingerprint carelessly at the crime scene” (96).
49. Watanabe Masahiko, Kindai bungaku no bunshinzō, 78.
50. Ubukata, “ ‘Tantei shōsetsu’ izen,” 175.
226 Rhetoric of Disavowal

significant impact on the experiences of modern life. Drawing on the

works of Sigmund Freud and Mary Anne Doane, Ubukata argues: “Ac-
cording to Freud, the unconscious corresponds to the domain where
‘the preservation and symbolization of memory traces’ take place. And
Mary Anne Doane points out that this function of ‘the preservation and
symbolization of memory traces’ is precisely the unique characteristic of
cinema.”51 It is this link between the opium dream and cinema as sites
of the expressions of the unconscious, as fantasy, that enables Ubukata
to hypothesize William Wilson as R. N.’s double, which, in turn, leads
to the discussion of the fragmented subject in modern society: “The
mystery solving of ‘Shimon,’ which tries to make sense of the world of
the ‘unconscious’ through the fingerprint, exposes the vulnerability of
the concept of individual’s ‘identity’ created by modern authority.”52
In contrast to Ubukata’s argument in which the concept of the dou-
ble is a product of the connection between opium dream and cinema,
Watanabe sees a direct link between cinema and the double. Noting the
proliferation of stories of the doppelgänger in the Taishō period, Wata-
nabe singles out the German expressionistic film Der Student von Prag
(The student of Prague; 1913), which was released in Japan in April 1916,
as the most influential work to familiarize the Japanese literati on the
subject. Telling the story of Baudin, a poor university student who sells
his reflection in the mirror to the devil, the central appeal of Der Student
von Prag was the simultaneous presentation of Baudin and his double
played by the same actor on the screen.53 Made possible by technologi-
cal developments within the film medium, namely, superimposition,
such presentation produces the sensation that the impossible—the exis-
tence of the double showing that an identical person is occupying two
different spaces—is possible. Unlike in the case of the novel where such
impossibility must be accepted on the symbolic level by the intellect,
the film challenges the audience to judge the possibility of this intellec-
tual impossibility for themselves at the level of immediate perception.54

—————
51. Ibid., 179.
52. Ibid., 180.
53. Baudin sells his reflection to obtain money to court a countess, but to his
dismay, he is thwarted at every turn by his own reflection, ultimately leading the
horrified Baudin to shoot the reflection, at which point Baudin himself dies.
54. Such comparatist perspective was actively fostered in the film audience
from the first days of narrative cinema in Japan. The French film series Zigomar
about a cat-and-mouse game between a robber and the police that became ex-
 Rhetoric of Disavowal 227

The result is that, while the double may be considered impossible by the
intellect, the subject nonetheless sees it and, thus, cannot deny its ex-
istence. The subject is prompted to give in to the allure of the visual,
where the power of the visual forces an override and a disavowal of in-
tellectual knowledge.
Importantly, the significance of Der Student von Prag went beyond
introducing the theme of the double to the Japanese audience, as the
film functions on a meta-level, its content echoing and emphasizing the
media-specific effects of cinema on its audience. According to Wata-
nabe, the human images of early films struck their uninitiated viewers
as very real and created the sensation that the image is a double of the
actor, especially because the image of the same actor appeared inside
various stories in multiple movie theaters at any given time. Watanabe
concludes: “The audience knows that the person on the screen is a copy
of a real human being who lives somewhere in this world. But, as far as
feelings go, [the audience] must feel that the same person lives different
lives inside multiple stories.”55 Sitting in a dark room with their eyes fix-
ated on the screen, the audience falls under the impression that they are
peeping and eavesdropping on the lives of actual human beings existing
somewhere in the world, and, thus, when they encounter the same actors
playing different roles, they become struck with the sensation of the
double, that the same person is leading multiple lives.56
The film medium in its early stages of development infected the au-
dience with an eerie sense of the double, imbuing the stories it told with
an illusionary quality, one that “Shimon” accentuates by R. N.’s likening
of movies to his opium experience and the connection he makes be-
tween the murdering knight in his drug-induced daze to William Wil-
—————
tremely popular in Japan in the early 1910s utilized the disguise as the primary
method by which the robber escaped the detection of the police (and the police
infiltrated the gang). Thus, the audience was allowed to detect the disguises of
characters on the screen before their identities were unveiled. For plot summa-
ries and discussions of Zigomar films, see Nagamine, Kaitō Jigoma to katsudō sha-
shin no jidai.
55. Watanabe Masahiko, Kindai bungaku no bunshinzō, 72.
56. In her discussion of “Shimon,” Elaine Gerbert states on the effect of the
cinematic experience: “In the inactive state induced by the darkness and the sta-
tionary positioning of the body and the head, the normal sense of self in space is
suspended, and in the hypnotic state produced by the illumined image upon the
screen, critical analytic activity is temporarily suspended” (“Space and Aesthetic
Imagination in Some Taishō Writings,” 78).
228 Rhetoric of Disavowal

son in the film Gun Moll Rosario. No doubt, such engagement with the
new medium of film is one of the major characteristics of “Shimon” that
presented itself as being ahead of its time as a literary experiment. But
“Shimon” is not only a literary experiment about cinema but also a liter-
ary experiment on the literariness of a literary text. As such, to focus the
interpretation of “Shimon” solely on the intimate relationship between
the emergent film medium and the theme of the double would be to
deny the complexity of this story, which is consciously weaved by pro-
viding the readers with excess clues of a literary nature (with the name
William Wilson being the primary clue) to guide and to confuse at the
same time.
Nowhere is this clearer than when R. N. shows the narrator a news-
paper clipping of an article reporting of William Wilson’s disappearance.
For R. N., this news is a result of his letter to William Wilson telling him
that the Japanese police are searching for him as a murder suspect and,
therefore, proves William Wilson’s guilt. But if we interpret William
Wilson as the double of the criminal in the Nagasaki opium den, as Wa-
tanabe does, then his disappearance takes on a new twist: discovering
that his double has committed—and may still be committing—crimes
around the world, William Wilson, the actor who plays the criminal on
the big screen, turns detective to chase after his evil half. But the details
of the news reports of William Wilson’s disappearance complicate such a
reading as well. The news speculates that William Wilson, despite his
English-sounding name, is actually of German decent and has disap-
peared due to this fact in light of a recent situation, namely, World War I
(104). This news—no doubt superfluous to the story according to the
interpretation above—hints at the possibility that the actor who plays
Johnson in Gun Moll Rosario has adopted William Wilson as an alias that
points to the truth of his identity as a double. And such possibility finds
support in the other bit of William Wilson’s bio included in the news,
namely, that he started out his career as an actor in the film XYZ, thus
evoking in the readers the name of Anna Katharine Green’s detective
story, which Tsubouchi Shōyō translated as Nisegane tsukai. If we recall
the first chapter of this book, the issue of false identity—the detective
pretending to be a criminal—played a major role in the story. But XYZ
as the title of a film has no significance within the story world in terms of
William Wilson’s real identity, and the significance of this literary refer-
ence is once again left for the readers to speculate.
In such ways, we quickly fall into the trap laid out by Satō (the author
and not the narrator), finding ourselves in a labyrinth of literary refer-
 Rhetoric of Disavowal 229

ences and myriad interpretations. As the name William Wilson natu-

rally pulls the readers’ interpretation toward the supernatural and the
symbolic, other details surrounding the actor William Wilson simulta-
neously suggest the possibility of a more literal interpretation. And a
similar antagonistic pull underlies R. N.’s presentation of his analysis of
the case as well to confuse the readers further regarding their assess-
ment of the story. For example, in claiming the gold watch as the key
piece of evidence, R. N. does not forget to mention that he used to own
a similar watch but had misplaced it or given it away, and, thus, raising
suspicion in the minds of the readers that the gold watch may be his.57
But R. N. quickly redirects the discussion to the question of the finger-
print on the watch, stating that it was not his own upon comparison.
And indeed, this line of argument by R. N. serves to highlight the obvi-
ous and basic fact that, befitting of a story titled “Shimon,” the whole
of R. N.’s case hinges on the positive match between the fingerprint
on the gold watch and that of the driver Johnson in Gun Moll Rosario,
and thereby, returning to the starting point from which we began our
discussion.
But this time, rather than considering the fingerprints within the in-
terpretative framework buttressed by the name of the suspect as a liter-
ary reference, I would like to focus somewhere else, namely, that, as a
piece of evidence in a detective story, the fingerprint on the gold watch
is at best a non-conclusive one regardless of its ‘owner,’ and the evoca-
tion of the double through the name William Wilson echoes the irrele-
vance of the fingerprint on the gold watch within R. N.’s analysis in the
first place. As R. N. tells the narrator, he discovered the gold watch, not
next to or on the victim, but inside a wall in near (not immediate) prox-
imity to the victim. But, of course, discovering an object near the corpse
does not automatically equal key evidence. It is one thing to discover
a foreign object in the victim’s house, for example; it is another thing

—————
57. R. N. states: “I doubted that the criminal whom I discovered through my
subconscious and sixth sense was myself and that the watch, which is material
evidence, was mine. In truth, I too had a golden watch. That was lost on some
occasion (I have forgotten why. From long ago, I quickly forget trivial and un-
interesting things like that. Ever since I started doing opium, it became especially
bad. It was either that I gave it to someone, dropped it, sold it, or got it stolen).
In order to compare line by line the fingerprint on the back of the watch and my
own, I spent most of my good days. That which was on the back of the watch was,
indeed, different from mine” (111).
230 Rhetoric of Disavowal

altogether to discover an object where many people gather. And here,

R. N.’s comment that he has seen William Wilson several times in the
Shanghai opium den functions to undermine his analysis. Not only does
this claim raise the possibility that William Wilson had been present in
the Nagasaki opium den at some point and had misplaced his watch
there, but it also raises the possibility that R. N. could have projected
onto the face of the knight in his opium dream a face of a person he had
already seen or even interacted, perhaps giving him a gold watch in ex-
change for something.
The fingerprint on the gold watch is the central evidence of “Shi-
mon,” but the watch’s link to the murder is thin at best, as it is neither
the murder weapon nor was it found in the immediate vicinity of the
victim. Yet, despite these issues, there is no doubt in R. N.’s mind that
the gold watch is that of the criminal from the moment of its discovery
and especially after he encounters the second fingerprint on the movie
screen. And the same can be said for the narrator, whose singular focus
on the two fingerprints at the story’s end clearly indicates that he, too,
does not question this connection between the watch and the criminal.
In this sense, the obsession with the fingerprints enables R. N. (and the
narrator) to disavow all other information that may point to the possi-
bility of having committed a murder, or rather, to not come to terms
with the realization that he will never rid himself of the uncertainty sur-
rounding the dead man at the Nagasaki opium den.
As that which was found in proximity to the site of trauma but not
necessarily having a fundamental connection with the trauma itself and
functioning as an object of obsession that disavows the truth of the
trauma, the fingerprint on the gold watch is a fetish object, and R. N.
and the narrator are operating within the framework of fetishistic dis-
avowal.58 And this making of the fingerprint(s) into a fetish is promoted
—————
58. Sigmund Freud defines the fetish object as “a substitute for the woman’s
(mother’s) penis that the little boy once believed in and—for reasons familiar to
us—does not want to give up” (“Fetishism,” 152–53). A fetishist attempts at an
unconscious level to maintain his original belief that all humans have a penis. In
other words, it is an unconscious disavowal of sexual difference and of the in-
commensurability between his belief and his visual perception. The need for
such disavowal exists because the female body presents itself to a fetishist as a
sign of castration and as a reminder that he may also be castrated. Therefore,
fetishism is a way in which the female body is made visually pleasurable at an
unconscious level through seeing her in conjunction with an object which covers
her lack.
 Rhetoric of Disavowal 231

by a media-specific characteristic of film that makes the comparison of

the two fingerprints possible, namely, the close-up that provides R. N.
and the narrator with seemingly infinite details—little squiggly lines that
are skin deep yet determine the individual’s identity—engrossing them
fully to the extent that the narrator by the end of the story has become
spellbound.59 But critical here is the fact that “Shimon” does not allow
its readers to partake in this world of the fetish: just as it was the case
for the conflation of William Wilson with the knight in R. N.’s opium
dream, “Shimon” as a literary work forces its readers to share in the nar-
rator’s withholding of judgment precisely because they cannot compare
the fingerprints themselves, as it would be the case if this story were a
film. In this sense, “Shimon” does not enable the readers to turn detec-
tive in the same way that R. N. prompted the narrator to do so by the
story’s end and, thus, offers linguistic substitution for and resistance
against the irresistible allure of the visual in much the same way as the
act of eavesdropping did within the sociocultural conditions of 1880s
Meiji, as we saw in Chapter 1 of this study.
This is not to say, however, that the story simply ends with uncertainty
and mystery, as the aforementioned passage by Kawamoto argues. Rather,
“Shimon” is a story about a deferral of such judgment and a rejection of
the detective through such process of deferral. Indeed, the key to the
mystery of “Shimon,” I would argue, is the most conspicuous of the seem-
ingly extraneous information within the dominant reading of the story,
namely, the details surrounding R. N.’s gold medal. Revisiting the scene

—————
59. On this topic, Tanizaki writes: “The human face—even an ugly face—is
such that if you stare at it intently, it seems to conceal a mysterious, solemn, and
eternal beauty. When I look at a ‘close-up’ of a face in a moving picture, this
feeling is especially strong. Every individual part of the face or body of a person
who ordinarily would escape notice possesses an indescribable energy, and I can
feel its compelling force all the more keenly. Perhaps this is not only because
film is a magnification of the real object but also because it lacks the sound and
color of the real object. Perhaps the lack of color or sound in moving pictures is
an asset rather than a limitation. Just as painting has no sound and poems have no
shape, the moving pictures, too, because of their limitations, manifest the purifi-
cation—Crystallization—of nature that is necessary to art. I believe this aspect of
the moving pictures will enable them to develop into a more advanced form of
art than the theater” (“Katsudō shashin no genzai to shōrai,” Tanizaki Jun’ichrō
zenshū, vol. 20, 16–17. I have used Joanne Bernardi’s translation of this passage
found in Bernardi, “Tanizaki Jun’ichirō’s ‘The Present and Future of the Moving
Pictures,’ ” 301).
232 Rhetoric of Disavowal

of the crime with the narrator, R. N. uses his gold medal attached to
a string as a way to show that blocked away underneath the floors exists
a basement in the house, which he claims was once an opium den. R. N. is
successful in his task, but, in so doing, the medal falls into the basement,
leading him to comment: “it’s dangerous to drop something like that. It
will leave a trace” (102). Yet, despite such concern over the gold medal, he
quickly drops the subject and heads to the train station to leave Nagasaki.
R. N.’s fear is eventually realized, when three years after this incident, a
corpse is discovered exactly where R. N. said it would be and, along with
it, his gold medal. Engraved and awarded by a literature department at
a foreign university, the gold medal will no doubt be tracked to R. N.,
although R. N. has already died by this point. Important here is the like-
ness of the expected actions of the Japanese police and that of R. N. His
investigation is founded upon the gold watch he discovered near the
victim and the fingerprint it contains. The state’s investigation, too, will
undoubtedly be founded upon the gold medal discovered near the corpse
and the fingerprint—R. N.’s—it is likely to contain.
“Shimon” shows how the detective emerges within the framework of
disavowal that characterized the ‘detective’ stories contained in the “Hi-
mitsu to kaihō” issue of Chūō kōron. But at the same time, the narrator
and the story he tells quickly relativize such emergence by suggesting
that the state will have the last say regarding the ultimate outcome of
the case. In fact, the narrator seems to do more than suggest, as he
actively defers the final decision of the case to the state by the pub-
lication of “Shimon,” which tells the story of R. N.—the likely primary
suspect—who can no longer present his analysis that identifies William
Wilson as the murderer. In so doing, the narrator releases himself from
the agony of perpetual indecision, for it will then be up to the state
and not the narrator to make the determination on who the murderer
is, whether or not R. N.’s story was true, and whether or not the two
fingerprints match. Through its decision—whether correct or not—the
state, by exercising its absolute and arbitrary authority, will ensure
R. N.’s identity and individuality and ‘reclaim,’ that is, ‘tell’ the experi-
ences of R. N., a fragmented subject who has lost grasp of his external
reality. And perhaps, R. N.’s choice to use the gold medal—the greatest
honor conferred to him in the West and functioning as a symbol of his
enlightenment—for such a risky task was an unconscious cry for help to
the state to resolve the uncertainty that he could not wipe away regard-
ing his guilt, an uncertainty he hides well but becomes reflected in the
narrator by the story’s end.
 Rhetoric of Disavowal 233

D
Akutagawa’s “Kaika no satsujin” and Tanizaki’s “Futari no geijutsuka”
explored the power that Western ideals had on Japanese intellectuals
and the violence that could erupt when the ideals were understood to be
universal and applicable to real life. Thus, they were heirs to the Japanese
struggles—introduced in Chapter 3 of this book—with the problematics
left by Crime and Punishment of the intellectual who found himself outside
the confines of a path to productive citizenry, whether by choice or by
force. And to the extent that the Japanese student/intellectual was char-
acterized by his contact with Western culture and values, it was fitting
that these stories posited him as a subject of fragmented allegiance where
Western ideals were pitted directly against the Japanese law, in which the
former was understood to be in the position of truth and the latter as
preventing the fulfillment of the former. Perhaps this notion of the frag-
mentary subject explains the difficulty of the emergence of the detective
in modern Japan, as suggested by Akutagawa’s letter to his friend that ex-
presses his inability to write a detective story despite an explicit request
and as intimated by the conspicuous absence of the heroic detective
within stories organized under the heading of “new artistic detective
novels” of Chuō kōron’s special issue “Himitsu to kaihō.” If the emergence
of the detective as hero required a successful internalization of authority
on the level of the general public, the Japanese public was left to wonder
which authority they were to internalize.
Fittingly, the question of such fragmentation became paramount in
the early Taishō period, precisely because this was the moment when the
values, successes, and ills of Japan’s modernization process during the
Meiji period, understood as a Westernization process, began to be re-
assessed with the arrival of a new period. No doubt, such reassessment
made itself even more keenly felt as it fed into the historical realities both
within Japan and abroad during the 1910s, which made it difficult for the
Japanese intellectual to hold onto the notions of progress—humanism,
cosmopolitanism, and so on espoused by the supporters of Taishō De-
mocracy—as reflecting the actual state of things. And if the stories by
Akutagawa and Tanizaki sought to portray the disavowal necessary for
the Japanese subject under the spell of Western influence that led him
not to productive citizenry but to murder, then Satō’s “Shimon” reveals
itself as a perverse permutation of these stories. In “Shimon,” it is not
Western ideals but opium, the ultimate weapon used by England to colo-
nize China, that represents Western influence, thereby suggesting at
once its addictiveness and dangers for modern Japanese subjectivity. Be-
234 Rhetoric of Disavowal

fitting such allegorical implications, R. N. becomes addicted to opium in

England and continues his habits in Shanghai and Nagasaki, two cities
that are characterized by their being integral parts of Asia’s encounter
with the West.60
And if Sōseki, whose Kokoro exercised foundational influence on the
production of the stories by Akutagawa, Tanizaki, and Satō, hinted at
the need for certainty that the detective fiction framework, which con-
nects the past and the present, provides on the imaginary level regard-
less of whether or not such certainty is illusory, then “Shimon” reiterates
this need through R. N.’s—as well as the narrator’s—desperate attempts
to prove his innocence in the case of the dead man in the Nagasaki opi-
um den. And if Sōseki’s work seemed to use the past as a storage place
for traumatic secrets that define the individual and thereby disavow the
influence of the sociohistorical on the production of the subject, then
Satō reintroduces the sociohistorical into the detective fiction frame-
work by developing “Shimon” within the specific context of moderniza-
tion at whose root lies Japan’s encounter with the West. But, of course,
insofar as R. N.’s and the narrator’s ‘solving’ of the crime entails a fetish-
istic focus on the identity of the two fingerprints that may not have any-
thing to do with the case, “Shimon” suggests the difficulties facing the
Japanese subject of extricating himself from the web of social relations
that produces him as a mystery. It is this task befitting of the Japanese
detective—to make sense of a dream-like existence of the deeply frag-
mented subject—that would be explored in the detective stories of Edo-
gawa Ranpo.

—————
60. But even here, the text must complicate our interpretation of the symbolic
significance of its signifiers. After investigating the scene of the crime in Nagasaki,
the narrator suggests that they spend a night in Nagasaki. To this, R. N. answers
cryptically in the negative: “farther from Nagasaki the better. Actually, there is
a truly bad memory for me in Nagasaki” (103). The use of the word “actually” ( jitsu
wa) suggests that this bad memory is something new to the narrator, and, thus,
unrelated to the murder in the opium den. Given that Nagasaki is R. N.’s home-
town, such comment suggests the possibility of a dark family past, but the text
does not elaborate so that we can form an alternate interpretation. Rather, the
text only intimates the possibility that our interpretation is wrong.
 SIX

Detecting the Unconscious:

Edogawa Ranpo and the Emergence
of the Japanese Detective

In his essay “Nihon no kindai-teki tantei shōsetsu: toku ni Edogawa

Ranpo shi ni tsuite” (Modern detective stories of Japan: especially regard-
ing Edogawa Ranpo) appearing in the April issue of Shinseinen in 1925, the
foremost social critic of the 1920s Hirabayashi Hatsunosuke (1892–1931)
made the following remark on the relationship between detective fiction
and science:
There is no doubt that certain social conditions must exist in order for detective
fiction to develop. Until a certain social environment develops, detective fiction
will not be born. Broadly speaking, that social condition or environment is the
development of scientific civilization, of intellect, of analytic spirit, and of me-
thodical spirit. And narrowly speaking, it is for crimes and their investigations to
become scientific, for arrests and trials to be carried out according to reliable
physical evidence, and for refined written laws to uphold the order of the nation.1

For Hirabayashi, whose optimistic view of modern society rested on the

development of a new life founded upon scientific innovations, it was

—————
1. Hirabayashi, “Nihon no kindai-teki tantei shōsetsu,” 9. Ranpo reminisced in
1938 that Hirabayashi was “the critic who, more than any other, had guided, cau-
tioned, and encouraged me or brought me happiness and fear in my early years”
(cited in Ikeda, Taishū shōsetsu no sekai to han-sekai, 143).
236 Detecting the Unconscious

only natural that his analysis of detective fiction should focus on its sci-
entific character.2 The causal connection between “scientific civilization”
and detective fiction enabled him at once to explain the late development
of detective fiction in Japan as a consequence of the country’s scientific
immaturity and to welcome the emergence of original detective fiction in
early 1920s Japan—which, as the title of the essay leaves no doubt, rested
on Edogawa Ranpo—as a sign of its development into a modern civiliza-
tion comparable to that of the West.
Revolving around the twin axes of science and realism, Hirabayashi’s
argument reflects the atmosphere of scientific craze brought on in part
by Albert Einstein’s visit to Japan in 1923 and sheds light on the hope
with which the literary critics of the 1920s welcomed detective fiction,
in general, and Ranpo’s stories, in particular. 3 But such reception of
Ranpo was short-lived, as Hirayabashi makes clear in his essay “Tantei
shōsetsu dan no shokeikō” (Various trends in detective fiction circles),
which appeared in the early spring supplementary issue of Shinseinen in
1926. Categorizing Japanese detective fiction into the “healthy” (kenzen-
ha) and the “unhealthy” ( fukenzen-ha), the essay criticized the latter cate-
gory, characterized by its focus on the perverse and the sensational, as
—————
2. For more on Hirabayashi’s view on the relationship between modernism
and science, see Hamill, “Nihon-teki modanizumu no shisō.”
3. Of course, such an understanding of detective fiction was not the only one
existing in the mid-1920s, as Satō Haruo’s essay “Tantei shōsetsu shōron” (Brief
thoughts on detective fiction), which appeared in the supplementary summer
issue of Shinseinen in 1924, indicates. Despite its similarity to Hirabayashi’s in its
emphasis on scientific and analytical elements of detective fiction, Satō’s de-
parts from Hirabayshi’s in its discussion of the secondary nature of science and
reason within the production and consumption of detective fiction. Satō writes:
“In short, what is called a detective fiction is after all one branch of a fruitful
tree called romanticism, a fruit of the bizarre and the curious . . . it would not be a
mistake to say that it is a curious admiration of evil common to all people, which
takes root upon the strange psychology to want to see what is frightening, but at
the same time, it founds itself by relating to the healthy spirit that loves clear
thinking.” As this passage reveals, Satō believes in the existence of two categories
of detective stories, which are characterized by “the reasoning and decisions
founded on the mind of a practical person” and by “the pathological sensitivity of
a neurotic intuition” (“Tantei shōsetsu shōron,” in Teihon Satō Haruo zenshū, vol.
19, 275). Yet, at the same time, he subsumes these contrasting categories under
the rubric of romanticism, and, in so doing, presents the two types of detective
stories as flip sides of a coin where one is not better or more desirable than the
other.
 Detecting the Unconscious 237

deviating from the scientific and analytic spirit upon which truly mod-
ern detective fiction must found itself.4 Hirabayashi writes:
I for one possess rather unhealthy and morbid interests, and I believe that while
there may be some difference in degree, these [interests] seem to be a common
phenomenon among all human beings. At the same time, I believe that there ex-
ists an antithesis against such interests within all human beings. But I think that
the detective story writers of Japan lean too much toward the unhealthy inter-
ests, that they chase too eagerly the world of artificiality, grotesque, and the un-
natural. Such a tendency is a characteristic of an age of degradation and should
be kept away from any art form. . . . I hope for the even greater development of
healthy detective fiction.5

While admitting that he too enjoys the object of his criticism—stories

with “unhealthy and morbid interests”—Hirabayashi makes certain to
separate enjoyment from prescription of what art should be and do for
people, especially because Japanese writers have a tendency to lean too
far “toward the unhealthy interests.” Importantly, Hirabayashi, who had
called Ranpo “the only true detective fiction writer in Japan” in his
1925 essay, categorizes Ranpo as a representative author of “unhealthy”
detective stories, citing in particular his “Yaneura no sanposha” (The
wanderer in the attic; August 1925), published about five months before
Hirabayashi’s essay. In the course of the year separating Hirabayashi’s
two essays, something had changed. According to Hirabayashi, Ranpo
had abandoned his pursuit of modern—that is, scientific and analytical—
detective fiction for ‘detective’ stories that emphasized the perverse and
the sensational, stories that would soon earn Ranpo the reputaion of be-
ing the forerunner of the ero guro nansensu (erotic, grotesque, nonsense)
phenomenon in the late 1920s and 1930s.6
As history shows, it was not only Hirabayashi who would come to hold
this view on the development of Ranpo’s fiction, as many critics, both
contemporaneous and recent, have identified a shift in Ranpo’s works
from “healthy” or “scientific” to “unhealthy” or “perverse” detective fic-

—————
4. As Kawasaki Kenko points out, Hirabayashi’s categorization of detective
fiction into “healthy” and “unhealthy” foreshadowed the debate on serious or
authentic (honkaku) and irregular (henkaku) detective fiction that would take
place between Ranpo and Kōga Saburō (1893–1945) in the mid-1930s (Kawasaki,
“Taishū bunka seiritsuki ni okeru ‘tantei shōsetsu’ janru no hen’yō,” 82).
5. Hirabayashi, “Tantei shōsetsu dan no shokeikō,” 347.
6. For extensive discussion on this phenomenon, see Silverberg, Erotic Gro-
tesque Nonsense.
238 Detecting the Unconscious

tion during the same period.7 Although important for our understanding
of Ranpo’s oeuvre, a focus on this shift has also promoted the tendency
to subsume Ranpo’s transformation as a writer into dualisms such as
honkaku (serious) and henkaku (irregular)—categorizations that would be-
come popular in the 1930s—and consequently veer away from analyzing
Ranpo’s works as a series of texts with continuing preoccupations and
concerns. Indeed, Ranpo’s early detective stories, whether Ranpo himself
was conscious of it or not, exhibit a specific development of or struggle
with what might be called the ‘epistemological project,’ one that ques-
tions and negotiates the methodology of how a person (the detective) can
come to hold an objective, that is, certain, knowledge about another (the
criminal). This chapter examines the early detective stories of Ranpo—
in particular, “Ni-sen dōka” (Two-sen copper coin; April 1923), “Ichimai
no kippu” (One ticket; July 1923), “D-zaka no satsujin jiken” (Murder case
on D-hill; January 1925), “Shinri shiken” (The psychological test; February
1925), and “Yaneura no sanposha”—all of which appeared in Shinseinen
during the formative years of the second detective fiction boom in Japan.
In so doing, I will consider the significance of these stories within the
radical cultural transformation taking place in the aftermath of the Great
Kantō Earthquake and of the specific concerns underlying Ranpo’s epis-
temological project, which sought to deal with the growingly tenuous re-
lationship between the Japanese subject and his external environment.

Detective Fiction as Parody

Upon reading the manuscript of Edogawa Ranpo’s “Ni-sen dōka,” Mori-
shita Uson (1890–1965), the editor-in-chief of Shinseinen, wrote a note
stating that he experienced “the same joy as Belinksy who upon reading
Dostoevsky’s first novel pounded the door of his residence in the dead
of the night.”8 Uson sent this note along with the manuscript to the doc-
tor and detective fiction enthusiast Kozakai Fuboku (1890–1929), who
—————
7. For example, Ryū Tōun, in his 1931 essay “Edogawa Ranpo ron” (An essay on
Edogawa Ranpo), separates Ranpo’s fiction into three stages: the first stage,
spanning his first story “Ni-sen dōka” and “Muyūbyōsha no shi” (The death of a
sleepwalker; July 1925), comprised Ranpo’s “healthy and serious detective fiction”;
the second stage, from “Yaneura no sanposha” to Injū (Shadowy beast; August to
October 1928) could be classified his “irregular” detective fiction; and the third
stage, from Nanimono (Who; December 1929), as his “full-length detective novels”
(“Edogawa Ranpo ron,” 40–41).
8. Cited in Nakajima Kawatarō, Nihon suiri shōsetsu shi, vol. 1, 269.
 Detecting the Unconscious 239

quickly replied with the same words of excitement and requested to write
a recommendation of Ranpo’s work upon its publication.9 The result was
his introduction to “Ni-sen dōka” that appeared in the same issue as the
story (May 1923), in which he praises the story and, in particular, the
secret code presented by Ranpo. Fuboku writes:
Although he may have got the hint for the copper coin trick from foreign detec-
tive novels, his ability to connect Braille and the six-character code is nothing
short of remarkable. On this point, even Poe in his grave must be in awe. In the
past, there have not been many secret codes in Japanese that are ingenious, and
it can be said that this secret code is the finest example of all secret codes that
have appeared up to now.10

As Fuboku’s praise would have us believe, the newness of “Ni-sen dōka”

rests on the presentation and deciphering of a secret message written in
the kanji (character) system, rather than in the alphabet system, exhibit-
ing Ranpo’s successful effort to adopt and utilize past works of Western
detective fiction in a Japanese context. Indeed, direct references appear
in “Ni-sen dōka”: “If this were French or English, I would have no prob-
lem just by searching for the letter ‘e’ like Poe’s ‘The Gold-Bug’ ” and
“I am no Sherlock Holmes, but I also know at least 160 ways to write a
secret message,” alluding to Holmes’s comment on his knowledge of

—————
9. Beginning in 1922, when he was forced to retire from his position in the
Department of Medicine at Tokyo Imperial University due to illness, Fuboku
published various articles about medicine as well as detective fiction, including
the essay “Kagaku-teki kenkyū to tantei shōsetsu” (Scientific research and de-
tective fiction), published in the supplementary February issue of Shinseinen in
1922, which advocated that detective fiction must “found itself first and foremost
on contemporary science.” Fuboku also published scientific tracts such as “Doku
oyobi dokusatsu no kenkyū” (Study of poison and murder by poison; October
1922–January 1923), “Satsujin ron” (Theory on murder; March–November 1923),
and “Hanzai bungaku kenkyū” (Study of crime literature; June 1925–June 1926)
in Shinseinen and set the scientific tone of the magazine during this period.
10. Kozakai, “ ‘Ni-sen dōka’ o yomu,” 8. In the advance billing to the April
1923 original detective fiction issue of Shinseinen, Uson had also expressed a simi-
lar sentiment to that of Fuboku: “ ‘Detective fiction that does not fall short of
foreign works must arise in Japan’—we have always said. And finally, such a bril-
liant work has appeared. A work that truly does not fall short of the great for-
eign works, or rather an utterly original work whose strengths, in some sense,
are even more exceptional than the works of foreign writers has been born. This
is the work of Edogawa Ranpo that will be introduced in this issue” (Cited in
Nakajima Kawatarō, Nihon suiri shōsetsu shi, vol. 1, 273).
240 Detecting the Unconscious

secret codes in “The Adventure of the Dancing Men” (1903).11 Such ref-
erences leave no doubt that Ranpo modeled this story after the secret
message stories of Poe and Conan Doyle and sought to compete with
their legacy. And it was precisely such an attempt on the part of Ranpo—
one-upping Western writers in a literary genre that is emblematic of their
culture of science and technology—that led Fuboku to embrace “Ni-sen
dōka” as a sign that “there exists in Japan a detective fiction writer who
has reached the fort held by the famous foreign writers.”12
But this is not to say that Fuboku had nothing but praise for Ranpo’s
story, for he chooses to end a string of high praises in his introduction
to “Ni-sen dōka” with the following criticism: “however, it seems a bit
‘coincidental’ that the secret message spells out ‘gojōdan’ (joke, farce)
when every eighth word is read.”13 That is, for Fuboku, who believed
that in detective fiction “the resolution and the development of the
crime must always be natural” and “the coincidental, the supernatural,
and the artificial are not permitted,” this part of Ranpo’s work failed to
satisfy the criteria of ‘good’ detective fiction and represented a ‘slip’ in
his creative process.14 As it will become clear, however, Fuboku misses
the point completely here. There is nothing “coincidental” about this
‘slip.’ In fact, this ‘slip’ was not a slip at all but constituted a part of
Ranpo’s larger narrative strategy in “Ni-sen dōka” that was not a simple
bettering of the framework of Western analytical detective fiction in-
troduced by Poe’s Dupin trilogy and instituted by Conan Doyle’s Sher-
lock Holmes tales, as Fuboku’s review as well as Ranpo’s own text may
suggest, but a radical problematization of its foundational tenets.
Employing the first-person narration in a memoir format, “Ni-sen
dōka” mimics the narrative form and structure found in the detective
fiction of Poe and Conan Doyle.15 Like Watson, who is always confused
—————
11. Edogawa, “Ni-sen dōka,” in Edogawa Ranpo zenshū, vol. 1, 119. All subsequent
reference to this source will appear in the text in parentheses.
12. Kozakai, “ ‘Ni-sen dōka’ o yomu,” 7.
13. Ibid., 8.
14. Ibid.
15. “Ni-sen dōka” begins with the narrator’s recounting of a crime that he has
read in the newspaper. A man, masquerading as a newspaper reporter, has stolen
money from a factory for electrical machinery, but through the persistent legwork
of one police detective, the criminal is finally apprehended. However, the crimi-
nal, while confessing to the crime, refuses to disclose the whereabouts of the sto-
len money, and to this day the money has remained undiscovered. After telling
this story, the narrator describes the strange behavior of his roommate Matsu-
 Detecting the Unconscious 241

about Holmes’s actions, the narrator appears confused at the strange be-
havior of his roommate Matsumura at the start of the story—“for some
reason, Matsumura became deeply lost in thought” (13); “But Matsu-
mura’s behavior in this case was so strange that even I was forced into
silence” (14). As the story develops, however, the narrator begins to act
suspicious; that is, he appears to know more than he is telling us—“As for
this strange behavior of Matsumura, I had a deep interest, the reason for
which I have not disclosed to you readers” (15). After Matsumura gives his
explanation of how he had come to discover the location of the hidden
loot of the so-called gentleman thief, the narrator confirms this suspicion
by revealing himself as the one who had orchestrated everything based
on the newspaper story on which Matsumura’s deductions were based.
Disguised as Watson in the course of the narrative, the narrator emerges
in the end as Conan Doyle, as a detective fiction writer who manipulates
Matsumura, an unknowing actor in a farce authored by the narrator, into
playing Sherlock Holmes.16
“Ni-sen dōka,” thus, is about how the narrator plays on Matsumura’s
love of detective fiction to lead him through an adventure that he has
read many times over, and, in so doing, the narrator, rather than bring-
ing the fictional world of detective fiction to the ‘real’ world (as a story
of the application of the scientific method found in Western detective
fiction), reconstructs the ‘real’ world as the world of fiction (as a story of
how the narrator consciously arranged the ‘reality’ in order to make it
applicable to the scientific method found in Western detective fiction).

—————
mura who eventually asserts that he found the money that the thief in the news-
paper had hidden, delineating in detail how he discovered and decoded a secret
message written by the thief. Ultimately, however, the narrator confesses to
Matsumura that this is all a farce set up by the narrator himself, that it was he who
wrote the secret message and he who had left the fake money at a place desig-
nated by the secret message for Matsumura to discover.
16. The basic plot structure of “Ni-sen dōka” bears striking resemblance to
Tanizaki Jun’ichirō’s “Hakuchū kigo” (The ghost in broad daylight; 1918). In Tani-
zaki’s work, the narrator’s friend discovers a code, which he decodes as desig-
nating the time and place of a murder. The narrator and his friend arrive at the
designated place and witness a murder from a peephole. Becoming enraptured by
the female murderer, the friend begins his search for her around Tokyo. While his
search is successful, the friend soon realizes that he will be the next victim of this
murderess. But before he is murdered, he realizes that another friend of the narra-
tor had paid this woman to dupe the friend into discovering the code and witness
the murder.
242 Detecting the Unconscious

Matsumura was able to ‘solve’ the mystery of the hidden loot only be-
cause the narrator intended for him to do so. The narrator’s farce re-
quires that Matsumura decipher the secret message, just like a detective
story requires the detective to solve the crime. If this were not the case,
there would be no story. In order to ensure that there will be a ‘story,’
the narrator must plant various clues to create an artificial world: it is
he who places the two-sen copper coin on Matsumura’s desk for him to
discover and he who tells a false story about the relationship between
the tobacconist’s daughter and a prison caterer to intimate a possible
connection of the copper coin with the gentleman thief.
Given the artificial nature of the secret message and Matsumura’s
treasure hunting to which its discovery led, it is clear that Fuboku’s crit-
icism of “Ni-sen dōka”—“it seems a bit ‘coincidental’ that the secret
message spells out ‘gojōdan’ when every eighth word is read”—is wholly
unwarranted. The fact that the message spells out “gojōdan” is coinci-
dental only if the message was written by the thief with the intention of
communicating to his accomplice on the whereabouts of the hidden
loot. But this is not the case. It was the narrator who wrote the message,
and, as the author of the message, the narrator is free to decide not only
what the message says but also how many ways the message can be read.
The fact that the message can be read as “gojōdan” is not “coincidental”
but necessary, precisely because the narrator intended the secret mes-
sage to be read in two ways so that he can inscribe within it the function
of the message within his farce (the whereabouts of the hidden money)
as well as its function outside the farce (to reveal that the whole thing
was a farce; that the message was just a prop in the farce).
In playing the role of the detective fiction writer to turn Matsumura
into a puppet who dances to his tune, moreover, the narrator makes a
further claim, as his comments after listening to Matsumura’s analysis of
the case illustrate:
Your imagination is truly splendid. You have accomplished a great task. I am
sure that my respect for your mind will increase many folds. Indeed, as you say,
I cannot compete with your intelligence. But do you believe reality to be that
romantic? . . . In other words, do you think that gentleman thief had that sort of
wit? I admit that your suppositions are truly impeccable if they were in a novel.
But the world is more realistic than a novel (23).

In contrasting the real world with the fictional world, the narrator sets
up a dichotomy between the two and locates the place of ‘detecting’ in
the latter. It is not simply that Matsumura’s analysis of the case does
not hold true because the clues on which it was based were invented by
 Detecting the Unconscious 243

the narrator. Rather, Matsumura’s analytical process, modeled after

Sherlock Holmes or Legrand in Poe’s “Gold-bug,” is itself faulty because
such models are a product of an author who orchestrates their cases as
stories with an imaginative mind and detailed care. The ‘real’ world, in
contrast, is devoid of such authors and thus does not yield the materials
for detective fiction.
If “Ni-sen dōka,” in its conflation of the narrator and the author, sug-
gested the artificial and fantastical nature of the world where the act of
‘detecting’ yields actual results, then Ranpo’s next story “Ichimai no
kippu” goes a step further in its criticism of the world of Western ana-
lytical fiction by focusing on one of its fundamental tenets: the truth-
value that physical evidence yields through the analysis of the detective.17
Centering around the student Sōda’s refutation of the theories put forth
by Detective Kuroda regarding the truth behind the death of a renowned
professor’s wife, “Ichimai no kippu” can be considered a fairly ‘tradi-
tional’ detective story. The analyses of physical evidence play a crucial
role in the investigation of the crime, and the difference between the
theories of Sōda and Kuroda, as Sōda readily admits, is not one of quality
but quantity: “There was no error in his [Kuroda’s] reasoning method.
His observations were simply lacking in their materials.”18 That is, while
Sōda’s refutation of Kuroda’s theory implicating the professor in his
wife’s murder involves the analysis of various physical clues that Kuroda
had overlooked, their analyses exist within the same epistemological
paradigm, namely, what might be called the positivistic paradigm insti-
tuted by the Sherlock Holmes tales, in which the truth is reached based
on the analysis of physical evidence, including witness accounts.
Just as the surprising ending of “Ni-sen dōka” required a reinter-
pretation of the text, however, the ending of “Ichimai no kippu” necessi-
—————
17. In “Ichimai no kippu,” a wife of a renowned professor has been killed by a
train, and because a suicide note was found on her body, the police determines
her death to be a case of suicide. Kuroda, a famous police detective, however,
gathers various evidence that ultimately implicates her husband in the murder of
his wife. As a result, the professor is arrested, and Kuroda gains a reputation as
the Japanese Sherlock Holmes. Sōda, a young man who happened to be present
at the scene of the crime, however, believes in the professor’s innocence, and
through various clues that the police and Detective Kuroda had overlooked but
he had discovered, Sōda overturns Kuroda’s conclusions and establishes the in-
nocence of the professor.
18. Edogawa, “Ichimai no kippu,” in Edogawa Ranpo zenshū, vol. 1, 35. All sub-
sequent references to this source will appear in the text in parentheses.
244 Detecting the Unconscious

tates a re-reading of the text in terms of its ending as Sōda’s response to

his friend’s commendation of his ability as a detective after the exonera-
tion of the professor makes clear:
“Would you correct that word detective with daydreamer? In fact, I have no idea
how far my daydreaming will go. For example, if the suspect was not the professor
who I greatly admire, I may even have daydreamed that Professor Tomita was the
criminal who killed his wife. And I may have refuted all the powerful evidence I
had put forth myself. Do you understand what I mean? If you think deeply, all the
evidence I listed as if they were true is ambiguous and can be used to imagine
other situations beside this one. The PL Company’s ticket is like the only reliable
piece of evidence, but that’s not true either. For example, what if I did not find it
underneath that rock in question but picked it up next to the rock.” Sōda stared
at the face of the other who could not quite understand and snickered amusedly
(40).

Through Sōda’s comments revealing his prejudiced motivation for solv-

ing the crime that may have led to his tampering of evidence, “Ichimai no
kippu” questions the one-to-one relationship between cause and effect
whose reinstatement from a state of numerous suspicions and multiple
interpretations constitutes the critical function of the detective within
the Western analytical detective story paradigm.19 For Sōda, the inter-
pretation of physical evidence is just one of many possibilities and is
founded on his admiration for the suspect, and physical evidence—the
scientific source of ‘truth’ in Western analytical detective fiction—is a
rhetorical tool by which he convinces others of the ‘truthfulness’ of his
claim. This is why he is a daydreamer and not a detective: his interpreta-
tion is based on a wish and functions to rationally support this wish rather
than to rationally explain the evidence. The exoneration of the professor,
then, proves not that his interpretations were correct but rather that they
were more plausible than the ones that Kuroda offered; that is, Sōda suc-
ceeds in letting others partake in his fantasy.
Importantly, Sōda intimates that such a state of things is not simply a
result of his personal prejudice but a universal fact—that all interpreta-
tions of physical evidence are motivated, confused, and/or arbitrary, be-
ing no different epistemologically from a fantasy—by likening Kuroda

—————
19. For example, Franco Moretti writes: “The clue is, therefore, that particular
element of the story in which the link between signifier and signified is altered.
It is a signifier that always has several signifieds and thus produces numerous sus-
picions. . . . The detective . . . will have to reinstate the univocal links between sig-
nifiers and signifieds” (“Clues,” 146).
 Detecting the Unconscious 245

to a novelist (“Mr. Kuroda may be a novelist but he is not a detective”

[33]) and thereby to himself who is a “daydreamer.” For Sōda, they remain
“daydreamers” and “novelists” precisely because they are involved in cre-
ating stories and not truths (just as it was the case in “Ni-sen dōka”),
never able to escape the fictional world of detective stories and the posi-
tivistic paradigm that these stories espouse. (Sōda comments on Kuroda:
“he’s one of those guys who have read a detective story or two in his days”
[30].) As Sōda shows through his utilization of the train ticket for the
purpose of convincing the authorities and the world of the professor’s in-
nocence, physical evidence can be tampered with and used as a rhetorical
tool, and, as such, it always allows for multiple interpretations. In this
sense, Sōda, in calling Kuroda a “novelist,” is not claiming that Kuroda’s
theories are false beyond a shadow of a doubt. Rather, his claim is that it
is impossible to talk about true and false within the positivistic epistemo-
logical paradigm based on the interpretation of physical evidence because
this paradigm, at least for ‘detectives’ like Sōda and Kuroda, has the fic-
tional world of detective stories as its source.
As the above analysis shows, central to Ranpo’s early stories was the
employment of what can be called a framing technique through which a
story is constructed within the story by a surprise ending that demands
radical reinterpretation of the preceding text. Through this process, they
turn the aim of Western analytical detective fiction on its head by expos-
ing and questioning its ideological and epistemological underpinnings. As
the following passage from his essay “Gakuya banashi” (Inside story; 1929)
makes clear, such a deconstructive project was prompted by Ranpo’s
search for the new within the historical condition as a belated experi-
menter of detective fiction:
Tricks of detective stories have been exhausted almost completely by foreign
writers. Even if one thinks that a trick is new, it is often the case that it had al-
ready been used by someone else. So I came up with one way to avoid this;
namely, to use a famous trick that are known to many people as a foil by turning
them upside down. Therefore, the more commonplace the trick the better. The
readers would read in comfort thinking that they know the trick from some-
where else. But then I turn the trick upside down. Precisely because the trick is
a famous one, the effect is great. In other words, what I painstakingly thought
of was a trick that existed on the reverse side of these tricks.20

—————
20. Edogawa, “Gakuya banashi,” 38. For Ranpo’s relationship to the tradition
of Western detective stories, see Silver, Purloined Letters, 132–35.
246 Detecting the Unconscious

As he acknowledges in this and other autobiographical essays and self-

criticisms, Ranpo often used famous tricks from past detective stories—
that is, Western detective stories—to produce new tricks that cleverly
reversed their intentions. Such employment of past detective fiction was
motivated by the awareness on the part of Ranpo regarding the ‘long’
tradition of Western detective stories and the expectations of Japanese
readers that had been produced through their encounters with transla-
tions of Western works in such magazines as Shinseinen. And if we can
return to our discussion from the previous chapter, then Ranpo presents
us with an alternate way to deal with the belatedness of the Japanese sub-
ject within the relationship between Japan and the West, a subject posi-
tion that became the impetus to turn to crime for the Western educated
protagonists of Akutagawa’s “Kaika no satsujin” and Tanizaki’s “Futari
no geijutsuka.” In other words, Ranpo, rather than confronting extant
detective stories as stumbling blocks in his creative endeavor, utilized
them to his advantage—exemplifying how historical circumstances affect
literary form—and, in so doing, he maximized the surprise effect of his
endings, as seen in “Ni-sen dōka” and “Ichimai no kippu,” precisely be-
cause they overturned the reader’s expectations, which the story had
carefully constructed and guided in the course of the narrative.
To the extent that the ‘detective’ never reveals the ‘truth’ by employ-
ing his method, however, “Ni-sen dōka” and “Ichimai no kippu” are not
detective stories at all in the strict sense of the word: Matsumura never
discovers the thief’s hidden loot, and Sōda never determines whether
the professor’s wife committed suicide or was murdered. Rather, these
stories are about readers of detective fiction and function as metafiction
to expose the artificiality of the world of Western analytical detective
fiction. These stories describe how the seemingly rational and logical
discourse of the detective story can be utilized to manipulate people
for comical effect (“Ni-sen dōka”) or to convince people of one’s biased
opinion (“Ichimai no kippu”). But in problematizing detective fiction as
rhetoric of deception, does Ranpo kill it off in these stories? Is Ranpo’s
aim to expose the non-referentiality of all detective fiction and to destroy
its myth altogether? According to “Ichimai no kippu,” such is not the
case. In separating the novelist and daydreamer from the detective, Sōda
reserves the word ‘detective’ to signify someone who exposes the ‘truth,’
someone who eliminates the possibility that his conclusion may be fic-
tion, and to the extent that this is impossible within the positivistic para-
digm, the detective signifies someone who operates within a different
epistemological paradigm.
 Detecting the Unconscious 247

The Psychological Method of Akechi Kogorō

and the Burden of Proof
Ranpo’s first Akechi Kogorō story—“D-zaka no satsujin jiken,” which
appeared about a year and a half after “Ichimai no kippu” and the Great
Kantō Earthquake—introduces such a detective and begins to recon-
struct what he had destroyed in “Ni-sen dōka” and “Ichimai no kippu.”21
Like these two stories, “D-zaka no satsujin jiken” tells a story within a
story: the events leading up to the first-person narrator’s accusation of
his friend Akechi as the murderer of Akechi’s childhood acquaintance
who had married a used bookstore owner in Tokyo, an accusation based
on the positivistic paradigm, and Akechi’s rebuttal to the accusation,
which problematizes this paradigm and completes its rejection that be-
gan with “Ni-sen dōka.” What differentiates this work from the other
two, however, is that Akechi does not merely deny the validity of the
detective’s method based on the positivistic paradigm, but he also for-
mulates a new method of detection that operates outside this paradigm.
The narrator’s accusation of Akechi is based primarily on two wit-
nesses who claim that they saw a man between the sliding doors of the
used bookstore around the time of the crime. Because the sliding door
leads to the room where Akechi and the narrator, who had been convers-
ing at a café across the street from the bookstore, discovered the victim’s
body, the police believe that these witnesses, who entered the bookstore
together, have seen the murderer. But they are not much help as wit-
nesses. The only information they can provide about the murderer, be-
side the fact that it was a man, is what he was wearing, and even on this
simple point, their accounts conflict: one witness claims that the man
was wearing a black robe and the other claims that the man was wearing
a white one. From these conflicting accounts, the narrator, unlike the
police who are completely at a loss, reasons that the conflicting accounts
are a result of the witnesses’ relative position in respect to the gap be-
—————
21. “D-zaka no satsujin jiken” tells the story of a murder of a used bookstore
owner’s wife, a childhood friend of Akechi’s, whose body Akechi and the narrator
discover. The police are called in, and both Akechi and the narrator are ques-
tioned as witnesses. The narrator, an ardent reader of detective fiction, begins
to investigate the case on his own and becomes suspicious of Akechi based on
several observations. Ultimately, the narrator goes to Akechi’s apartment and
confronts him about the case, but Akechi disproves the narrator’s analysis and
proffers a theory of his own, which turns out to be the correct one, as the owner
of the noodle shop next door to the used bookstore turns himself in to the police.
248 Detecting the Unconscious

tween the sliding doors and comes to the conclusion that the murderer
was wearing a striped robe, similar to what Akechi was wearing on the day
of the crime. With Akechi surfacing as a suspect, the narrator attributes
Akechi’s urging to go into the room where they were to discover the body
as a ploy to cover up the fingerprints that he had left behind when he
committed the murder and interprets his failure to mention to the police
that he was a childhood friend of the victim as a sign that he wanted this
relationship to remain hidden from the authorities.
When the narrator confronts Akechi with these charges, however,
Akechi begins to laugh and states:
Your ideas are very interesting. I am happy that I have discovered a friend like
you. What is regrettable, however, is that your reasoning is too superficial and
too materialistic. For example, did you consider internally and psychologically
my relationship with that woman [the victim] or what kind of childhood friends
we were? Whether I had a romantic relationship with that woman in the past or
whether I resent her now? Were you not able to hypothesize on these points?22

Here is the first suggestion of Akechi’s detective method, which involves

a turn away from physical evidence to the psychological. But before he
expands on the nature of psychological evidence, Akechi criticizes the
eyewitness accounts that form the basis of the narrator’s suspicion not
by questioning the two eyewitness accounts of this case in particular but
by refuting the validity of witness accounts in general. For this purpose,
Akechi draws on an experiment conducted by the German psychologist
Hugo Münsterberg (1863–1916) and published in his Psychology and Crime
(1908). In the experiment, a short scuffle between two men and the re-
sulting ‘murder’ of one man were enacted in front of a group of scientists,
after which the description of the murderer’s hat is collected from the
scientists. The result showed numerous conflicting accounts with only
10 percent of the witnesses able to accurately describe the murderer’s
hat. After describing this experiment to the narrator, Akechi concludes:
“Observations and memories of human beings are something truly un-
reliable” (111).
In refuting the reliability of eyewitness accounts—central to West-
ern analytical detective stories, in general, and works of Conan Doyle,
in particular, where most of Holmes’s theories are formed through ac-
counts divulged by his clients at their first meeting—Akechi makes a

—————
22. Edogawa, “D-zaka no satsujin jiken,” in Edogawa Ranpo zenshū, vol. 1, 109–
10. All subsequent references to this source will appear in the text in parentheses.
 Detecting the Unconscious 249

further claim.23 Mimicking the words of Sōda in “Ichimai no kippu,”

Akechi rejects the validity of physical evidence as a whole and suggests a
new method of detection. He states: “Physical evidence can mean any-
thing depending on the interpretation. The best detective method is to
penetrate psychologically the deepest part of a person’s soul” (112). After
this articulation of his method of detection, which is highly evocative of
Tsubouchi Shōyō’s definition of the task of the novelist in Shōsetsu shin-
zui, Akechi describes his investigation of the case. Drawing on his ob-
servation that the wives of the used bookstore owner and the noodle
shop owner both had fresh wounds on their bodies, Akechi questions
the used bookstore owner and discovers that his wife was a masochist.
From this discovery, Akechi harbors a suspicion for the noodle shop
owner and questions him. It is at this point that Akechi offers more in-
formation on his method, which involves a form of questioning that
subtly incorporates a word-association test into dialogue.
But in this story, Akechi only offers a vague definition of his method,
as he quickly moves to the description of its application, which is just as
vague: “I talked to the noodle shop owner about a variety of topics.
Very mundane everyday gossip at that. And I examined his psychologi-
cal responses. This is a very delicate problem of the psyche, and, as such,
it’s very complicated, so I will give you the details some other time, but
the result was that I had reached a firm conviction. That is, I had found
the culprit” (113). And true to Akechi’s words—“I will give you the de-

—————
23. A typical Sherlock Holmes story begins with the arrival of a client to
Baker Street, followed by the client’s own account of his or her situation. In this
recounting by the client, Holmes only judges the honesty of the client, and his
or her reliability as a witness is never questioned. For example, in “The Adven-
ture of the Engineer’s Thumb” (1891), Holmes and others, after hearing the story
of a hydraulic engineer whose thumb has been cut off, travel to the scene of the
crime. The only clue to locate the mysterious house where the crime took place
is the engineer’s word that the house was about twelve miles from Eyford Sta-
tion and that the horse drawn to the carriage looked “fresh” and “glossy.” After
others give their opinions on which way they should go, Holmes states that they
are all wrong, claiming that the house in question will be found in the immediate
vicinity of the station. Here is Holmes’s logic: “Six out and six back. Nothing
simpler. You say yourself that the horse was fresh and glossy when you got in.
How could it be that if it had gone twelve miles over heavy roads?” (Doyle, “The
Adventure of the Engineer’s Thumb,” in Sherlock Holmes, vol. 1, 386). Of course,
they soon realize that Holmes’s theory was correct, but more importantly for
the present discussion, so was the engineer’s description of the horse.
250 Detecting the Unconscious

tails some other time”—Ranpo articulates in detail the psychological

method of detection in his next Akechi Kogorō story, “Shinri shiken,”
which appeared a month after “D-zaka no satsujin jiken.”24
Focusing not only on the detective but on the criminal Fukiya to
follow the events leading up to his arrest, “Shinri shiken” differs from
Ranpo’s earlier detective stories in narrative structure with its employ-
ment of what he calls the inverted detective story (tōjo tantei shōsetsu)
format, in which the story is told chronologically from the point of view
of the criminal.25 The readers witness the student Fukiya kill the landlady
of his friend Saitō’s apartment for money and, thus, their focus shifts
from the ‘whodunit’ aspect of detective fiction to its epistemological
aspect. To highlight this shift in focus, Ranpo utilizes a mediating figure
between the detective and the criminal in Prosecutor Kasamori, who
harbors suspicions against Fukiya but is at a loss on how to prove his
guilt, leading him to summon the help of Akechi.

—————
24. “Shinri shiken” tells the story of a landlady’s murder and the ensuing in-
vestigation of her killer. The discovery of her body is quickly followed by the
arrest of her tenant Saitō, who found the body and reported the murder to the
police, because a large sum of money was found in his possession. In police cus-
tody, Saitō confesses to stealing the landlady’s money but denies that he is her
murderer. About a month after the murder, Kasamori, the prosecutor in the case,
learns that Saitō’s friend, Fukiya, has turned in a large sum of money to the police
on the day of the murder. With this new knowledge, Kasamori begins to suspect
Fukiya because Fukiya, according to Saitō’s testimony, also knew the location of
the money. To test his suspicions, Kasamori subjects Fukiya and Saitō to word-
association and pulse tests. The results of the tests point to Saitō as the culprit,
but Kasamori cannot get rid of his suspicion of Fukiya. It is at this point that
Akechi becomes involved in the story, as a friend of Kasamori. Akechi analyzes
Fukiya’s result of the word-association test and concludes that Fukiya had pre-
pared for the test in advance, and Akechi and Kasamori decide to question Fukiya
one more time. It is at this meeting that Akechi succeeds in making Fukiya con-
fess his murder of the landlady.
25. Inverted detective story format was often employed by the detective story
writer R. Austin Freeman, who was popular in Japan from the Meiji period.
Indeed, it was a lecture in 1922 by the detective fiction fan and literary critic
Baba Kochō (1869–1940) on Freeman’s inverted detective stories that prompted
Ranpo, who attended the lecture, to think seriously about writing and publishing
detective stories. For Ranpo’s analysis of the inverted detective story format, see
Edogawa, “Tōjo tantei shōsetsu” and “Tōjo tantei shōsetsu saisetsu” in Gen’eijō,
58–65, 66–85, respectively.
 Detecting the Unconscious 251

Analyzing the results of word-association test that Kasamori admin-

istered to both Fukiya and Saitō, Akechi speculates that Fukiya had
prepared for the test in advance, but by shifting his focus from the re-
sponse time to key words to the responses themselves, Akechi discovers
the key to proving Fukiya’s guilt. Akechi observes that Fukiya, in the
word-association test, has responded to the word “e” (painting) with the
word “byōbu” (folding screen). This response strikes Akechi as peculiar
and suggests to him that Fukiya has formed a psychological association
between the words “painting” and “folding screen” for some specific rea-
son. Akechi surmises that the source of this association is the folding
screen in the landlady’s room, which was damaged when she struggled
against her murderer. If Fukiya knows about this particular folding
screen, Akechi reasons, he must be lying about the fact that he has only
visited the victim’s room once a few days before the murder because the
folding screen was placed in her room only a day prior to the murder.
Based on these observations and conjectures, which the readers do not
know at this point in the narrative, Akechi formulates a fake story and
tells it to Fukiya, who has been called to Kasamori’s house under the false
pretense that Saitō has been convicted of the landlady’s murder. The false
story concerns whether or not the folding screen was damaged during the
murder, and Akechi asks Fukiya to make a statement on its condition
when he visited her a few days before the murder. Of course, it is a trap,
for if Fukiya’s statement that he had visited the landlady’s room only once
is true, then he would have had no opportunity to have known the exis-
tence of the folding screen.26 But Fukiya, feeling at ease from the news of
Saitō’s conviction, falls into Akechi’s hands by stating that there was no
damage on the folding screen when he saw it during his visit to the land-
lady’s room. It is at this moment that Akechi reveals his observations and
conjectures against Fukiya, including his observation on the psychologi-
cal association Fukiya has formed between the words “painting” and
“folding screen,” to expose the falsehood of Fukiya’s testimony. Stunned
by Akechi’s observations, Fukiya signs a statement of confession.

—————
26. Befitting the story’s similarities to Crime and Punishment, this trap laid out
by Akechi is highly evocative of the one that Porfiry laids for Raskolnikov in
their first conversation, as we saw in Chapter 3 of this book. The difference be-
tween the two stories is that Ranpo’s requires an extra step, the discovery of the
specific associations that Fukiya had formed with the word byōbu, which reveals
his possible involvement in the crime and informs the suitable subject matter of
the trap.
252 Detecting the Unconscious

In “D-zaka no satsujin jiken” and “Shinri shiken,” Ranpo proposes

a detective’s method founded upon a new epistemological paradigm, in
which the psychological intricacies of the suspect, rather than the physi-
cal and circumstantial evidence of the case, take precedence in the de-
termination of the ‘truth’ of the crime. But as the development from sus-
picion to confirmation of guilt in these stories intimates, there existed
from its inception a fundamental problem in Ranpo’s epistemological
project that investigates the ways in which the ‘truth’ surrounding an
individual—the ‘truth’ of the crime—can be known by a third party to the
criminal relationship between the criminal and the victim. For example,
after Akechi identifies the noodle-shop owner as the culprit in “D-zaka
no satsujin jiken,” and despite his complete confidence in the accuracy of
his analysis, Akechi is quick to point out the crucial shortcomings of his
psychological method. He tells the narrator: “But there is not a shred of
physical evidence. So, I cannot appeal to the police. Even if I did appeal,
they probably will not take me up on it” (113). In other words, with the
refutation of physical evidence as unreliable and prone to multiple inter-
pretation and psychological evidence as lawfully impermissible, Akechi’s
psychological method ultimately requires the confession of the culprit for
his or her conviction in a court of law.27
At the same time, what is equally important here is that Akechi’s
method, at least in “D-zaka no satsujin jiken,” does not require the con-
fession of the culprit in order to determine the ‘truth,’ that is, to reach
a firm belief on the identity of the criminal, and Akechi’s method is not
a rhetorical tool, as was the case for Sōda’s analysis in “Ichimai no kippu,”
but an epistemological one: for Akechi, “to penetrate psychologically the
deepest part of a person’s soul” is to see the ‘truth.’ In “Shinri shiken,”
however, Ranpo, in providing a detailed description of Akechi’s psycho-
logical method in action, is forced to articulate the tenuous relationship
between suspicion, knowledge, and conviction that naturally arises from
his turn toward the psychological. After examining the word-association
test results and observing the peculiar association that Fukiya displays
between “painting” and “folding screen,” Akechi tells Kasamori: “From
the result of the word-association test, I think that Fukiya is the culprit.

—————
27. Although many of the Sherlock Holmes stories also conclude with the
confession of the criminal, these confessions are not necessary for the estab-
lishment of the criminal’s guilt, functioning only to demonstrate the correctness
of Holmes’s theory to Watson, the police, and the reader.
 Detecting the Unconscious 253

But I still cannot say for certain that he is.”28 As this passage reveals, the
observation of a psychological association is not enough to clear Akechi
of all doubt that Fukiya is indeed the culprit, forcing Akechi to fabricate
the story of the folding screen. But at least in “Shinri shiken,” Ranpo
seems to salvage Akechi’s psychological method to “penetrate . . . the
deepest part of a person’s soul,” since an argument can be made that
Akechi reaches his conclusion regarding Fukiya’s guilt prior to his con-
fession when Fukiya makes a false statement to confirm the source of
psychological association that he has formed between the words “paint-
ing” and “folding screen.” As “Yaneura no sanposha,” which appeared six
months after “Shinri shiken” reveals, however, this separation between
epistemological knowledge of the suspect’s guilt and his confession is
problematic at best, and it is precisely the failure to maintain this separa-
tion between belief and conviction and between knowledge and confes-
sion that marks the collapse of Ranpo’s epistemological project.29
Similar in its narrative structure to “Shinri shiken,” “Yaneura no san-
posha” employs an inverted detective story format to tell Gōda Saburō’s
murder of his neighbor Endō, but their difference in focus is already
clear from the first sentences of respective works. “Shinri shiken” begins:
“The details of the reasons why Fukiya Seiichirō had thought of com-
mitting the horrible crime which will be told below are unknown. Even
if they were known, they do not matter too much to this story.”30 And
here is “Yaneura no sanposha”: “It was probably one type of mental ill-
ness. This world was not fun at all to Gōda Saburō although he tried

—————
28. Edogawa, “Shinri shiken,” in Edogawa Ranpo zenshū, vol. 1, 131.
29. “Yaneura no sanposha” tells the story of the death of Endō, a dental stu-
dent, and the ensuing investigation. Because Endō died from an overdose of mor-
phine and a bottle of morphine was discovered in his room, the police quickly
conclude that his death was a suicide. However, Akechi, who happens to have a
friend in the deceased’s building, visits this friend and starts investigating. The
friend, Saburō, introduces Akechi to Endō’s neighbors, and from the testimony
that Endō’s alarm clock sounded on the morning after his suicide, Akechi begins
to harbor a suspicion that Endō was murdered. A few days after his first visit,
Akechi surprises Saburō by exiting out of Saburō’s closet, which leads to the attic
where Saburō had been enjoying his daily ‘walks’ peeping into the lives of his
neighbors. Before Saburō can regain his composure, Akechi interrogates him and
ultimately induces his confession of Endō’s murder.
30. Edogawa, “Shinri shiken,” in Edogawa Ranpo zenshū, vol. 1, 117.
254 Detecting the Unconscious

various hobbies and jobs.”31 Preparing for the story’s exploration of the
method of detection through which Fukiya is discovered as the culprit,
the opening of “Shinri shiken” de-emphasizes Fukiya’s motives, and thus
his character; “Yaneura no sanposha” starts by doing the opposite, draw-
ing the attention of the readers to Saburō’s peculiar nature.
The rest of the story reflects such a beginning, as “Yaneura no san-
posha” devotes most of its pages to Saburō’s perverse activities, including
the ‘walks’ that Saburō takes in the attic space of his building and the lives
of its denizens that he observes during these ‘walks,’ and the peculiar
format of an inverted detective story becomes a commonplace narrative
structure of literature, in which a story is told chronologically through
third-person narration.32 Given such a shift in focus, then, it makes sense
that many contemporary and future critics view this story as the turning
point in Ranpo’s detective fiction, which, as we saw in the introduction
to this chapter, Hirabayashi describes as a shift from “healthy” to “un-
healthy.” This is not to say, however, that Ranpo abandons his explora-
tion of how a detective can reach positive knowledge about the guilt of
the criminal in this story. Rather, “Yaneura no sanposha” marks the turn-
ing point in Ranpo’s detective fiction because this story marks the logical
conclusion of the epistemological project that he began in “Ni-sen dōka.”
Whereas the importance of “Shinri shiken” within the framework of
Ranpo’s epistemological project rested on its detailed articulation of
Akechi’s method of detection, “Yaneura no sanposha” makes its contri-
bution to Ranpo’s project by exposing the target site of Akechi’s
method and its powers. In “Yaneura no sanposha,” Akechi becomes
suspicious of Saburō as Endō’s murderer from an observation of a psy-
chological association that is similar to the one which Fukiya makes.
Upon his first visit to Saburō’s building during which he asks Saburō to
assist him with the investigation, Akechi observes that Saburō has quit
smoking cigarettes:

—————
31. Edogawa, “Yanuera no sanposha,” in Edogawa Ranpo zenshū, vol. 1, 249. All
subsequent references to this source will appear in the text in parentheses.
32. This is not to say that “Yaneura no sanposha” marks the first work in which
Ranpo investigates the criminal mind. In his works such as “Sōseiji” (Twins; Oc-
tober 1924) and “Akai heya” (The red room; April 1925), Ranpo had already de-
picted the workings of a criminal mind. However, “Yaneura no sanposha,” as
a work in which his epistemological project fails, signals the end of a period in
which a separation between detective fiction and his stories of imagination can
be maintained.
 Detecting the Unconscious 255

“You haven’t smoked at all for quite a while, but did you quit?”
“Oh, how strange. I had totally forgotten about it. Even though you are
smoking, I had no desire to have one myself.”
“Since when?”
“Not for two or three days, I think. Yes, I bought the pack I have here now
on Sunday so I haven’t smoked a single cigarette in three days. I don’t know
what’s happened.”
“Then you haven’t smoked since the day that Endō died” (270–71).

It is from this fact, which even Saburō himself cannot explain, that
Akechi begins to form his theory about Endō’s death. Akechi, who
knows that the poison bottle used to kill Endō had spilled on a pack of
cigarettes next to his bedding, reasons that Saburō has quit smoking be-
cause he has formed a psychological association between cigarettes and
poison/death and that this is only possible if he were Endō’s killer and
witnessed the poison spill on the cigarettes. Unlike in “Shinri shiken,”
Akechi’s conjecture requires an extra step to hypothesize the psycho-
logical association, which was verbalized in the word-association test in
Fukiya’s case, from the change in Saburō’s physical behavior.
But instead of devising a trick to confirm the source of the psycho-
logical association as in “Shinri shiken,” Akechi fabricates a completely
unrelated story to induce a confession from Saburō. Emerging from Sa-
burō’s closet, which leads to the attic space, Akechi surprises Saburō
and states:
I was just mimicking you. . . . Anyway, this is your button isn’t it? . . . I checked
the other lodgers, but there is no one who is missing this button. Yeah, it’s that
shirt. Look, the second button is missing. . . . This shirt button is a very peculiar
type so it must be yours. In any event, where do you think I found this button?
I found it in the attic space and above Endō’s room at that. . . . Weren’t you the
one who murdered Endō? (272; Ranpo’s emphasis).

Of course, the button is not Saburō’s, but a piece of physical evidence

fabricated by Akechi, who had observed a missing button on Saburō’s
shirt during his prior visit, to induce Saburō’s confession. But Saburō,
who quickly glances at his shirt only to find a button missing, believes in
Akechi’s lie and confesses to Endō’s murder.
As this course of development reveals, there is no connection be-
tween Akechi’s observation of a psychological association and the way in
which he confirms his suspicion. The connection between the observed
psychological association of the suspect and the fabricated story, which
functioned to maintain the thin separation between Akechi’s knowledge
of the criminal’s identity and the criminal’s confession, has been severed.
256 Detecting the Unconscious

In “Yaneura no sanposha,” it is Saburō’s confession that confirms Ake-

chi’s suspicion of Saburō and of the source of observed psychological
association. Akechi makes this point clear after Saburō’s confession:
“The more I investigated, the more the situation pointed in your direc-
tion. But unfortunately, there was no conclusive proof. And so I thought
up this performance” (274). In the end, Akechi’s observation of the psy-
chological association, which represented his detective’s method “to
penetrate psychologically the deepest part of a person’s soul,” becomes
relegated to one of many kinds of circumstantial evidence that produces
his suspicion for a specific suspect: in “Yaneura no sanposha,” truth be-
comes confession.
It is in this sense that “Yaneura no sanposha” marks the collapse of
Ranpo’s epistemological project. No longer is the detective’s focus on the
process of detection, the process of arriving at a positive knowledge of
the Other, but on the way in which the detective can induce the con-
fession of the criminal. At the same time, however, Ranpo sheds light on
“the deepest part of a person’s soul” that constitutes the subject—the un-
conscious—through his description of the psychological association that
Saburō has formed. In “Shinri shiken,” Ranpo, through Fukiya’s psycho-
logical association between the words “painting” and “folding screen,” de-
scribes explicitly the gap that exists between a subject’s natural or spon-
taneous response and his or her intended or conscious response and, in
so doing, implicitly exposes the inability on the part of the consciousness
to control completely the subject’s actions and behavior. But the psycho-
logical association in this story involves the unconscious only partially: it
is unconscious because Fukiya is not aware that he has made such an as-
sociation, but it is not unconscious because, as he realizes upon being
pointed out by Akechi, he did see the landlady damage the folding screen,
the source of the psychological association. Thus, it remains unclear
whether the exposure of this psychological association through the word-
association test should be interpreted only as a mental slip or as a revela-
tion of the unconscious.
In “Yaneura no sanposha,” however, Ranpo leaves no doubt as to
the nature of the psychological association that Saburō has formed be-
tween cigarettes and poison. Unlike Fukiya, Saburō, even upon being
asked specifically, does not recognize the reason that he does not want
a cigarette. Whereas “Shinri shiken” describes how a psychological asso-
ciation is formed unconsciously from the experiences of a conscious sub-
ject, “Yaneura no sanposha” reveals the possibility of how an unconscious
association can form from experiences wholly unknown to consciousness.
 Detecting the Unconscious 257

The last lines of “Yaneura no sanposha” tell of the importance that

Ranpo had placed on the role of the unconscious in this story: “Although
he [Saburō] thought that he did not see where the poison bottle landed
when he had dropped it through the peephole, he did in fact see the
poison pour onto the cigarettes. And this fact, pushed beneath his con-
sciousness had the psychological effect of making him dislike cigarettes”
(274). These are not Saburō’s words but necessarily the narrator’s pre-
cisely because Saburō as thinking/conscious subject cannot tell the story
of Saburō as corporeal/unconscious subject.

Discourses of Modern Experience from Sōseki to Ranpo

Ranpo’s epistemological project, as a re-examination of the way in
which an individual can be known regardless of his or her attempts to
remain unknown, is a two-fold process: it begins with the rejection of
a method of detection based on positivistic science and ends with the
articulation of a method of detection based on human psychology. And
in positing the unconscious as the ultimate target of detection, it was,
as Ranpo readily acknowledges, heavily influenced by Sigmund Freud’s
psychoanalytical theory, which was quickly gaining currency within in-
tellectual circles in Taishō Japan. 33 A natural extension of other dis-
courses on psychology and abnormal sexuality by the likes of German
psychologist Richard von Kraft-Ebbing (1840–1902), whose effect on
Tanizaki’s fictional works is well documented, the reception and influ-
ence of Freudian psychoanalysis in Japan also differed in significant
ways from those of previous discourses. 34 First, Freud’s theories on
dreams and the unconscious provided a broad understanding of the
human psyche, the applicability of which was not restricted to the ‘ab-
normal.’ Second, befitting a theory that revolves around the under-
standing of a truth hiding deep behind the surface—that is, a favorite
paradigmatic opposition that had guided the development of the mod-
—————
33. For Ranpo’s comments on how he became interested in Freudian psycho-
analysis, see Edogawa, “Gakuya banashi,” 40.
34. For example, see Inoue, “Tanizaki Jun’ichirō no seikimatsu.” Concomitant
with the spread of such discourses within intellectual circles of the Taishō period
(Kraft-Ebbing’s Psychopathia Sexualis was translated into Japanese in 1914) were
new periodicals specifically dealing with the issues of abnormal psychology and
sexuality. The most prominent of these examples was the journal Hentai shinri
(Abnormal psychology), which was founded by Nakamura Kokyō (1881–1952) in
October 1917.
258 Detecting the Unconscious

ern Japanese novel from Shōyō onwards—Freud’s theories were popular-

ized in Taishō Japan predominantly as literary theories.
As Sone Hiroyoshi notes in his overview of the reception of Freud in
the 1920s, the essay “Kumon no shōchō” (Agony of the symbol), written
by the scholar of English literature Kuriyagawa Hakuson (1880–1923)
and published in the January issue of the journal Kaizō (Conversion) in
1922, was the most influential in spreading the ideas of Freud to the
Japanese reading public.35 Reflecting Kuriyagawa’s background in Eng-
lish literature, this essay, rather than being an introduction to Freud’s
theories as a scientific examination of human psychology, was an appli-
cation of Freud’s theories to develop his own theory on literature, which
was characterized by its “romanticism” and “optimism.”36 Stating that
“the root of the literary arts is the agony and anguish that arise when the
life force is oppressed” and that “the psychological injury, which arises
from the conflict and collision between the power that attempts at any
cost to satisfy desire and the suppressive force that operates against this,
lurks in the back of the unconscious,” Kuriyagawa posits the arts in gen-
eral and literature in particular as the “only form of living [besides in our
dreams] that liberates us from the internal and external oppression that
we are always facing in our lives.”37 As these excerpts make clear, Kuri-
yagawa utilized Freud’s notion of repression and the unconscious to le-
gitimize fiction writing as an endeavor that liberated the individual from
oppressive forces, both external and internal, and, as such, echoed “the
intellectual environment of Taishō Japan that employed words such as
‘the self’ and ‘life’ as catchphrases” and were exemplified by the writings
of the Shirakaba group that were discussed in the previous chapter.38
Given this historical context, does Ranpo’s turn to the psychological
reveal itself as a shift from one mode of Western scientific discourse/
ideology to another? No doubt, Freudian psychoanalysis enabled Ranpo
to base his detective stories upon an epistemological system that was
not utilized very much in the Western detective fiction tradition. In
this sense, Ranpo’s choice was similar to his employment of the framing

—————
35. Sone, “Furoito no shōkai to eikyō,” 82. According to Sone, Kuriyagawa’s
essay collection that included this essay, which was published posthumously in
February 1925 after Kuriyagawa died in the Great Kantō Earthquake, became a
bestseller, going through fifty printings in two months (ibid., 84)
36. Ibid.
37. Cited in ibid., 83.
38. Ibid., 84.
 Detecting the Unconscious 259

technique that developed out of Ranpo’s desire to be creative in a later-

developing country (in terms of its experimentation with the detective
fiction genre) like Japan. At the same time, Freudian psychoanalysis pro-
vided Ranpo with a discourse to criticize Japan’s modernization process
to the extent that it revealed the powerful and hazardous effects of the
modernization process on the psychic lives of individuals. In this regard,
Ranpo’s turn toward the psychological puts him in line with and presents
itself as a development of the critical discourses of the 1910s that recon-
sidered Japan’s modernization process and its materialistic emphasis, dis-
courses in which the most prominent voice was that of Natsume Sōseki.39
In his essay “Gendai Nihon no kaika” (The civilization of modern-
day Japan; 1911), Sōseki criticizes the externally forced modernization of
Japan as unnatural and articulates the psychological effect it has on the
consciousness of the Japanese population, offering the following meta-
phor to convey his point: “it is the same as having numerous dishes on
the table, but even before you can clearly see them to decipher what
sort of delicacies they are, they are withdrawn only to be replaced by
new dishes.”40 Described here is a sense of rapid change taking place
outside the individual and his or her inability to deal with such changes:
the eyes and consciousness are too slow to register and digest the exter-
nal stimuli that confront the individual at every turn, and the individual
is left with “feelings of emptiness,” “dissatisfaction,” and “anxiety.” To
the extent that Sōseki describes these stimuli as “dishes” that are be-
lieved to be “delicacies,” however, they exist as possibilities for ‘authen-
tic’ experience, and the general feeling of discontentment that afflicts
the Japanese stems ultimately from the sense that these experiences are
inevitably lost in the flow of history.
In one of his earliest fictional works “Rondon tō” (Tower of London;
1905), Sōseki offers an archetypal example of such a condition when he
—————
39. As Minami Hiroshi writes: “Because Meiji’s fukoku kyōhei (a wealthy nation
and a strong army) policy, in order to catch up with and overtake the foreign
countries, placed the reform of material conditions first, it [government] focused
its energies under the slogan of bunmei kaika on imitation and adaptation of the
material side of Western life, and it left the all-important modernization of the
spiritual side lagging behind to be inherited by the Taishō period. As the Meiji
period neared its end, this tardiness of modern culture, concealed under a super-
ficially fashionable civilization, began to be criticized vehemently by those such
as Natsume Sōseki and Nagai Kafū who had a good understanding of modern
thought” (Taishō bunka, 12).
40. Natsume Sōseki, “Gendai Nihon no kaika,” in Sōseki zenshū, vol. 11, 339.
260 Detecting the Unconscious

tells a story of an excursion to the Tower of London by a Japanese nar-

rator who has recently arrived in London. A displaced individual who
finds himself in an unknown land (“Unlike other Japanese visitors, I
had no letters of introduction to anyone who might show me around”),
the narrator is apprehensive and fearful of twentieth-century London,
an ever-changing metropolis unlike anything he has experienced.41 The
outside world offers no solace for him: the conveniences of a techno-
logically advanced nation, such as the railway train, the tram, the electric
train, and even a hansom cab, confront him only as suspicious forces that
might do him harm. And this feeling continues even to his lodgings: “Out
on the street I felt I would be carried away by the surging crowd, and
in my lodgings I suspected that a railway train might come crashing into
my room; night and day I was left without peace of mind.”42 Thoroughly
overwhelmed by his new surroundings, the narrator ultimately likens
himself to “a hare from Gotenba [the countryside near the foot of Mount
Fuji] who finds himself suddenly in Nihonbashi [the center of Tokyo].”43
Bearing a striking resemblance to an observation that Walter Ben-
jamin would make several decades later when he described urban life in
mid-1800s Paris as “a series of shocks and collisions,” Sōseki’s description
of modern experience in “Gendai Nihon no kaika” and “Rondon tō” sug-
gests his keen awareness of the problems arising from Japan’s encounter
with and adaptation of Western modernity. In both works, Sōseki de-
scribes a Japanese subject who is overwhelmed by his external environ-
ment. In “Rondon tō,” this sense results from a geographical displace-
ment from the margins of the modernizing world ( Japan) to its center
(London), and, indeed, I would argue that this physical displacement,
which Sōseki experienced in real life when he lived in England in the early
1900s, made him particularly sensitive to the psychological problems of
the modern subject. In “Gendai Nihon no kaika,” Sōseki suggests how a
rapidly changing environment, especially one that is foreign and deviating
from a natural course of development, affects the subject in a similar

—————
41. Natsume Sōseki, “Rondon tō,” in Sōseki zenshū, vol. 2, 5.
42. Ibid.
43. Ibid. Sōseki revisits this theme of a displaced individual in his 1908 San-
shirō. Just arriving in Tokyo from the country, Sanshirō experiences the city as
follows: “There were many things that Sanshirō was shocked about in Tokyo.
First, he was shocked that the electric trains made clamoring sounds. And then
he was shocked that so many people got on and off the train while it made these
clamoring sounds” (Sōseki zenshū, vol. 4, 23).
 Detecting the Unconscious 261

manner. And if Sōseki already observed evidence of such conditions in

the social realities of Japan in 1911, then the developments of the 1910s
no doubt aggravated these conditions to make his hypothesis more pro-
vocative and powerful by the time of Ranpo’s emergence.
With the outbreak of World War I in 1914, Japan, whose involvement
in the war was minor, saw a period of rapid industrialization to meet the
material demands of the warring nations. Consequently, the economy
boomed in larger cities, and people flooded into these cities from the
country in the hopes of obtaining work and better wages. For example,
Tokyo, whose population’s rate of increase never exceeded 1 percent in
the first five years of Taishō, saw a 14.5 percent increase in population
(around 421,900 people) in its sixth year (1917), a figure that is astound-
ing considering that Japan’s population only increased by about 384,000
people (0.7 percent rate of increase) during the same year.44 The result,
as Harry Harutoonian notes, was that “by 1920 and the succeeding years,
the sharply silhouetted contrast was widely observed in the uneven rela-
tionship between the large metropolitan sites like Tokyo/Yokohama and
Osaka/Kobe, which literally had been transformed overnight, and a coun-
tryside that supplied the cities with a labor force and capital but, accord-
ing to Yanagita Kunio, received nothing in return.”45
In addition to the major transformation of large cities that made ad-
justments to the rapidly shifting environment difficult for urban dwellers,
more than half of them had not been ‘urban dwellers’ for long in the
first place. This can be surmised from the rate of population increase
in Tokyo during the Taishō period overall as well as the Taishō 9 (1920)
survey, which indicated that only 42.5 percent of the Tokyo population
was born in Tokyo.46 Removed from their communities and confronting
others as strangers, these ‘urbanites’ then faced the double task of adapt-
ing to a wholly different environment and lifestyle, given the enormous
disparity between the country and the city, and of adjusting to the ever-
changing urban life. And this situation only grew worse with the Great

—————
44. Population numbers are from Tōkyō hyakunen shi henshū iinkai, Tōkyō
hyakunen shi, 61. Matsuyama Iwao also cites these figures in the chapter entitled
“Tantei no me” in Matsuyama, Ranpo to Tōkyō, 14–30. In this chapter, Matsu-
yama discusses Ranpo’s “D-zaka no satsujin jiken” as a story that reflects the
weakening personal relationships of urban individuals that resulted from the
process of mass urbanization in the mid- and late 1910s.
45. Harootunian, Overcome by Modernity, 3–4.
46. This figure is from Matsuyama, Ranpo to Tōkyō, 21.
262 Detecting the Unconscious

Kantō Earthquake and the complete overhaul of the city landscape

that followed, which literally transformed the external environment of
Tokyo’s denizens overnight.
It was against this backdrop of rapid urbanization and radical trans-
formation of the city that Shinseinen and the early detective stories of
Ranpo emerged and developed as successors to Sōseki’s project of dealing
with the psychological problematic of modern subjectivity founded upon
the tenuous relationship between individuals and their external environ-
ment. As the cover drawings during its first year of publication—all idyllic
images of rural Japan—are enough to suggest, Shinseinen was originally
geared toward the young students and workers of rural Japan. Reflect-
ing this target readership, the magazine’s content included “cultural and
moral tales by journalists, soldiers, educators, and entrepreneurs” and
“enlightenment of scientific technology,” which sought to educate its
young readers on the ways and values of successful men in society and to
keep its isolated readers caught up on the new developments around the
world.47 In fact, one of the main attractions of the magazine was the news
and advice regarding life in a foreign country that introduced people who
had succeeded in immigrating abroad and offered realistic and practical
advice to readers’ correspondences for doing the same. No doubt serving
as “recommendation[s] to go abroad and prosper, which was an inflection
of the Meiji period risshin shusse ideology,” but also suggesting how diffi-
cult it had become to find success within the boundaries of the nation,
the early Shinseinen fueled the dreams of rural youths to leave their homes
to make something of themselves out in the city and beyond.48
—————
47. Kawasaki, “Shinseinen no tanjō to sono jidai,” 4. In addition, the magazine
was characterized by its nationalistic and militaristic concerns. For example, the
first issue began the serialization of Higuchi Reiyō’s Nichibei sensō miraiki (Futur-
istic tale of the war between Japan and the United States), a fantastic tale about
a near-future war between Japan and the United States that had the ominous
subtitle of “The Second World War.” For an overview of the history and char-
acteristics of Shinseinen, see Yamashita, “Shinseinen” o meguru sakkatachi, 7–25, and
Kimoto, Zasshi de yomu sengoshi, 61–64.
48. Kawasaki, “Shinseinen no tanjō to sono jidai,” 4. Echoing the decision of
Hakai’s Ushimatsu to move to Texas (discussed in Chapter 3), Shinseinen’s ‘sin-
cere’ recommendation to emigrate abroad and the popularity of articles on this
topic suggested at once the undying hold that the ideology of rising in the world
had on the magazine’s readers and the difficulties of its achievement within the
confines of national boundaries, which was exacerbated by the dire conditions
of rural Japan in the late 1910s and early 1920s. Significantly, the call to emigrate
 Detecting the Unconscious 263

But the magazine’s style began to change around the time of Ranpo’s
emergence and with the Great Kantō Earthquake, as signs of rural Japan
gradually gave way to the images of the city and more and more pages
became dedicated to detective fiction.49 As Kawasaki Kenko writes: “the
physical transformation brought on by the Great Kantō Earthquake be-
came, as a result, the turning point to orient the interests of Shinseinen
toward the various phenomena of the newly emerging urban civiliza-
tion.”50 In short, Shinseinen began to focus on subjects relating to the
rapidly developing urban culture, and the detective story, as a story of ex-
ploration into urban life and its darkness, took center stage within this
general shift in the magazine’s subject matter. This is not to say, however,
that such a shift entailed a complete change in the magazine’s target au-
dience. In promoting the dreams of rising in the world to youths of rural
Japan, who lived under dire economic conditions, and in calling for their
participation in the world beyond their peripheral existence, Shinseinen
reinforced the movement from country to city that was prevalent in the
late 1910s and the early 1920s. In this sense, the successfully interpellated
readers of the magazine in its early years would have found themselves
in the city, if not in some foreign country, confronted, as suggested by
Sōseki’s description of the modern experience that is distinctly urban,
with conditions that would render their external world to be fleeting,
ethereal, and dream-like.
Fittingly enough, many if not all prominent characters of Ranpo’s
early detective stories are young men who have come to Tokyo from the

—————
to a foreign country was imbued with the rhetoric of colonialism, exemplified
by the article “Nihon minzoku no ijū nōryoku” (The immigrating abilities of the
Japanese folk), which appeared in the September issue in 1922. This essay re-
writes the ancient folktale of Japan found in Kojiki as a history of immigration
and colonization, describing the ancient emperor Jinmu as an ideal leader of a
colony and the ancient hero Yamato Takeru no Mikoto as a pioneer, to claim
that the immigrating ability of the Japanese people is the best in the world.
49. In January 1922, Hakubunkan established Shin-shumi (New hobby) as a
magazine that was solely devoted to detective fiction. While this event no doubt
indicates the growing demand for detective fiction, it also suggests the unwill-
ingness on the part of Shinseinen to give up its role as a general magazine geared
toward rural youths and to devote its pages to detective fiction. But this attitude
changed in 1923, the year of Ranpo’s emergence and the Great Kantō Earth-
quake. In November, Shin-shumi was discontinued, and Shinseinen began devot-
ing more pages to stories and criticism relating to the detective fiction genre.
50. Kawasaki, “Shinseinen no tanjō to sono jidai,” 6.
264 Detecting the Unconscious

country and, thus, reflect the shift in the readership of Shinseinen from
rural to urban youths.51 They are “hares from Gotenba” who found them-
selves suddenly in Nihonbashi to be confronted with “numerous dishes”
that were constantly being “replaced by new dishes.” But importantly, it
would be a stretch to say that Ranpo’s protagonists embody the primary
subjects of this urbanization process, namely, the poor that left their
farming communities to join the urban labor class. For example, while
“Ni-sen dōka” describes the characters’ musings and plotting based on
the detective fiction worldview as cheap entertainment for the poor
urban dwellers fighting to make ends meet, they are clearly educated
and present themselves as the student-types, the quintessential subjects
of modernization and urbanization in modern Japanese literature.
And here, Akechi and Saburō present themselves as two sides of the
same coin. Akechi Kogorō, whose provincial origins are emphasized in
his introductory tale “D-zaka no satsujin jiken” through him knowing
the victim from his hometown, is educated and well off, having time and
money to pursue his interest in detective stories and detective work.
Like Akechi in his early days, Saburō is financially independent, and it
is his economic condition (“Able to receive some allowance from his
parents, he did not have to worry particularly about his life even when
he left his job” [249]) that makes possible his peculiar lifestyle switching
from job to job, hobby to hobby, and one lodging to another in his
search for pleasures in life.52 Thus, Akechi and Saburō can be classified
as kōtō yūmin akin to Matsumoto of Sōseki’s Higan sugi made discussed
in Chapter 4. Or to the extent that Saburō, unlike the apolitical con-
—————
51. In his discussion of “D-zaka no satsujin jiken,” Matsuyama Iwao states:
“whether it is Akechi, the ‘I’ or other youths that appear in Ranpo’s short sto-
ries, they can be thought of as being superimposed to the image of Ranpo him-
self, who came to Tokyo alone from Aichi at the age of eighteen” (Ranpo to
Tōkyō, 19).
52. It is important to note that Saburō (literally, “third man”), as the third son
in the family, does not have familial responsibilities to succeed the family name.
Moreover, Saburō’s relentless search for excitement itself can be considered as
being made possible by a modern condition which provides its denizens with
time to ‘waste,’ according to Sōseki’s “Gendai Nihon no kaika.” As Sōseki states,
responsibilities and hobbies are two primary activities of human life, where the
time required for the former shortens in modern times thanks to the power of
technology (as well as financial independence), leaving the individuals with am-
ple time to spend on pursuing the latter. For details, see Natsume Sōseki, “Gen-
dai Nihon no kaika,” in Sōseki zenshū, vol. 11, 328.
 Detecting the Unconscious 265

formist Matsumoto, ends up committing a crime, Saburō is more repre-

sentative of the vilified kōtō yūmin of government and public discourse.
But at the same time, while Akechi shows no indication of being
maladjusted to society, which, in turn, may signal his being overwhelmed
by his external environment in a manner akin to the narrator in “Rondon
tō,” the same cannot be said for Saburō, whose condition is emphasized
as an illness in the opening lines of the story cited above. And while the
text tries to suggest his condition as an extraordinary anomaly by describ-
ing the extent to which he goes to remedy it, it is also true that Saburō
reeks of modernity. As Sari Kawana has discussed by drawing on Georg
Simmel, “the conditions of urban living desensitize the inhabitants,” lead-
ing to the creation of “bored urbanites” like Saburō.53 Indeed, his condi-
tion can be said to be symptomatic—albeit an extreme version—of what
Simmel calls a “blasé Metropolitan attitude,” which is “the consequence
of those rapidly shifting stimulations of the nerves” to a point where they
“can no longer produce any reaction at all.”54 In this sense, the “blasé”
or jaded urbanite can be understood as the flipside of the overwhelmed
individual as described by Sōseki: Saburō is a jaded individual who seeks
out “numerous dishes” but constantly replaces them with “new dishes” on
his own accord because he finds none to be “delicacies.”
The point of “Yaneura no sanposha,” of course, is to show the lengths
to which Saburō goes to break out of his jaded shell, a move that becomes
a real possibility when he meets Akechi, who introduces him to the fasci-
nating world of crime through various courtroom accounts and detective
stories. Saburō’s engagement with this world gradually escalates, as he
graduates from imagining being a criminal to begin his escapades around
town where he pretends to be one. Of his activities, cross-dressing is his
favorite, which is fitting for Saburō who yearns to but is unable to com-
mit actual crimes for the fear of being caught: “Despite all consideration,
even Saburō did not want to become a criminal by law. He did not yet
have the courage to indulge in pleasure by going as far as ignoring the
grief and contempt of his parents, siblings, relatives, and acquaintances”
(251). If committing a crime is the transgression of the law as the explicit
articulation of rules drafted by the government, cross-dressing is the
transgression of sociocultural norms that expect the matching of sex and
gender. And when we juxtapose this choice of activity with his qualms
with his fellow lodgers, we see that his desire to break with social norms
—————
53. Kawana, Murder Most Modern, 41.
54. Georg Simmel, “The Metropolis and Mental Life,” cited in ibid.
266 Detecting the Unconscious

is intimately connected with breaking the habits and routines of every-

day life. Saburō comments: “What boring creatures human beings are.
Wherever it is, they do nothing but present over and over to each other
similar thoughts with similar expressions using similar words” (252).
It is precisely this view of human beings that is shattered when Saburō
begins the walks in the attic space of his lodging, for what he finds there
is an access to the private lives of fellow lodgers, “the inner, rather than
outer, colors, the true sentiments of human beings without artifice that
come out when they are alone.”55 Importantly, the expression of “true
sentiments” is facilitated by the Western construction of the building
Tōei-kan, where a clear distinction between private and public space is
maintained through “rigid partitions of the walls” and doors with “metal
latches” (255). But the Western construction also brings into existence
the attic space for Saburō to wander, peeping and eavesdropping through
small holes and cracks in the ceiling. The modern/Western construction
of Tōei-kan provides its denizens with a seemingly clear demarcation
between private and public spheres, thereby making it more ‘enticing’ for
Saburō to transgress the barrier between the two spheres precisely be-
cause the denizens can feel free to do as they please without being seen
or heard by others. Here again, then, Saburō derives pleasure from trans-
gressing a boundary, but, unlike in the case of cross-dressing, which in-
corporated the risk of being found out as part of the thrill, the walks in
the attic do the opposite. The thrill comes from being completely invisi-
ble and from occupying the position of a pure observer who can discern
the most private affairs and behaviors of others. As a wearer of an “in-
visible cloak,” he comes to occupy in reality the imaginary perspective of
Tsubouchi Shōyō’s novelist, gaining, so he believes, the ability to “clearly
discern the true intentions” of his neighbors (257).56
But the way in which Akechi figures out Saburō’s involvement in
Endō’s murder suggests that Saburō’s belief that he has discerned “the
true intentions” of his neighbors was a false one. By connecting Saburō’s
involvement in Endō’s poisoning to Saburō’s sudden dislike for cigarettes,
Akechi shows that it is not the things people can hide when in public and
—————
55. Matsuyama, Ranpo to Tōkyō, 59.
56. As Shōyō writes in the following passage (discussed in Chapter 1): “To
freely dissect people’s hearts, which would be impossible in reality, to enter the
bedroom of a dignitary’s wife . . . and write her behavior and actions, or to depict
the situations inside [a house] without considering whether the gates or sliding
doors are closed—these are the freedoms of a novelist” (Shōsetsu shinzui, 149–50).
 Detecting the Unconscious 267

reveal when in private that constitute the causes of one’s behavior, action,
and desire. Rather, the connection between effects as observable and
palpable experiences of the subject and their true causes is not necessarily
known—or necessarily unknown—to the subject himself, for it is only
when experience fails to register in the consciousness and slips into the
unconscious that the subject experiences a transformation of everyday
habits, as was the case with Saburō’s smoking. And once again, a Japanese
text of modern experience exhibits a striking resemblance to the writings
of Walter Benjamin. If Sōseki’s overwhelmed subject exists on the flip-
side of Simmel’s blasé urbanite whose tired nerves are a result of con-
stantly responding to external stimuli, then the overwhelmed subject is
Benjamin’s traumatized subject who fails to fend off external stimuli at
the level of consciousness as information, leaving them to fundamentally
affect the constitutive core of their unconscious.57
And fending off external stimuli must have been made difficult in the
latter half of the 1910s and the early 1920s, especially for the likes of
Ranpo’s characters, who had moved to Tokyo from the country, as it not
only “transformed overnight” thanks to rapid industrialization and re-
sulting urbanization in the post–World War I economic boom but also
experienced the catastrophic trauma of the Great Kantō Earthquake that
—————
57. For details, see Benjamin, “Some Motifs in Baudelaire,” especially 109–20.
Franco Moretti points out that Freud’s text, on which Benjamin’s understanding
of the shocks of urban experience is based, takes “its cues from traumas under-
gone in wartime” and questions “whether the category of the traumatic and ex-
ceptional event is really the most appropriate for the analysis of the experiences
of urban life” (“Homo palpitans,” 116). For Moretti, the consciousness of a mod-
ern urbanite is much more flexible, enabling him or her to seize external stimuli
as opportunities rather than as shocks, because urban life repeats itself and, thus,
prepares the consciousness against stimuli. Although convincing, Moretti’s ar-
gument has as its subject an urbanite who has developed with his or her environ-
ment, and, as a result, is able to make small adjustments as the environment
changes. But there clearly exists another group of modern urbanites for which
such adjustments are more difficult. Moretti suggests as much when he writes:
“To be suspended between unswerving habit and sudden catastrophe is much
more typical of traditional rural societies, villages, and the provinces” (ibid., 117).
Those from “traditional rural societies, villages, and the provinces” finding them-
selves, for one reason or another, in the middle of a metropolis—it is these new-
comers to the urban scene, produced en masse during the massive urbanization
of 1910s Japan, that Benjamin’s theory of urban experience aptly describes. And
here, we cannot also forget the Great Kantō Earthquake that is in every sense the
exemplar of what constitutes a “sudden catastrophe.”
268 Detecting the Unconscious

leveled much of the city, leading to a complete overhaul of the urban

landscape. Thus, while “Yaneura no sanposha” can be understood as a
story of how the traumatic event of murder offers an occasion for a habit-
breaking experience for Saburō, such an experience is not necessarily
predicated on an extraordinary event. For, whether characterized by our
blasé or traumatized exteriors, we are all constituted by precisely what
lies beyond the penetrating gaze of the Other and the self alike, resist-
ing observation and self-reflection. Just like our public personae, our pri-
vate selves made up of desires and fears are nothing but façades masking
the true habit-breaking causes—the traumas of modern experience—that
remain hidden in the unconscious waiting to be unearthed.

The Power of Confession and the End of a Collusion

Intricately tied to and stemming from the experiences of the metropolis,
Ranpo’s rejection of the positivistic paradigm is a rejection of the physi-
cal and material world whose order and law form the basis of positivistic
science precisely because no order or law can be observed in the modern
world. The modern metropolis, characterized by rapid change and face-
less masses, frustrates the efforts of its inhabitants to process their ex-
periences as meaning, which must be produced through the acts of sym-
bolic reconstruction within the subject. Rather than rejecting the subject
as the proper source of ‘truth’ who preserves his experiences as informa-
tion, Ranpo posits the unconscious—a notion rapidly gaining currency
in the 1920s—as a psychical storage place for information, including
those that are unregistered or misrecognized by the conscious mind, and
thereby salvages the subject’s connection to external reality. But the un-
conscious is not a mere storage place for experiences as information; it
is also a site of symbolic reconstruction as a linguistic link between the
subject and his experiences of external reality. And it is precisely because
such a link affects the subject at an observable level to reveal what it con-
tains that Akechi’s method can understand the existence and the work-
ings of the unconscious. Akechi’s method of detection to “penetrate psy-
chologically the deepest part of a person’s soul” bases itself not only on
the understanding of this dichotomy between the conscious as unreliable
and the unconscious as reliable source of ‘truth’ but also on the power of
the unconscious to constitute the subject on the level of consciousness
and behavior.
Within this dichotomy between the conscious and the unconscious,
moreover, the act of confession, which appeared as a methodological
failure within Ranpo’s epistemological project in our earlier discussions,
 Detecting the Unconscious 269

reveals its critical function. As Franco Moretti states of the criminal

in Western detective fiction: “The criminal is the opposite of Raskol-
nikov, who must confess to his action, bare himself to the world, and
demolish his individual shield by himself: whence the irrelevance of de-
tection in Crime and Punishment. On the contrary, detective fiction al-
ways presents the criminal as a self-sufficient watertight consciousness
wholly bent on an aim.”58 Although this observation may be true within
the Western tradition, we have seen throughout the course of this study
that detective fiction in Japan had much to do with the fundamental
problem posed by the figure of Raskolnikov, and the same can be said
on this topic of confession.
Through its exploration of the notion of the unconscious, “Yaneura
no sanposha” negotiates the two extremes of confession, one necessary
and willing, the other an afterthought to the detective’s determination of
the criminal’s guilt, problematizing the opposition between confession
and detection as well as this definition of the criminal. The criminal may
believe himself to be “a self-sufficient watertight consciousness,” but he is
in actuality never “watertight” because he, like any other subject, is nec-
essarily constituted by what lies beyond consciousness. To the extent
that breaking of a habit leads Akechi to grow suspicious of Saburō, Sa-
burō’s unconscious betrays his intention to hide his identity as the cul-
prit by sending clues to Akechi to decipher. In direct opposition to the
criminal as a conscious agent, the unconsciousness is marked by its desire
to confess. Thus, the criminal who desires to hide the truth of his crime is
an example par excellence of a consciousness whose desire is in absolute
opposition to that of the unconscious.
By suggesting the capacity of the unconscious to incorporate experi-
ences that consciousness has failed to register or ‘digest,’ Ranpo re-claims
these ‘lost’ experiences as ‘stored’ experiences that retain the possibility
of their recovery at a future time and offers Akechi as the ‘retriever’ who
makes this possibility a reality. Akechi aligns the criminal (the conscious)
with Raskolnikov who already exists in the unconscious and unites the
criminal-as-subject with the fleeting realities of the external world by
which the subject is constituted. And to the extent that Akechi’s method
relies on the criminal’s express confession for the proof of guilt, Akechi’s
incrimination of the criminal entails also the criminal’s imaginary recu-
peration of his status as the most suitable narrator of his own experi-

—————
58. Moretti, “Clues,” 138. Emphasis in the original.
270 Detecting the Unconscious

ences, however fleeting they may be. But in so doing, Ranpo encounters
the limitation of detective fiction to accomplish such an ideological task
of maintaining the connection between the subject and his experiences
within the epistemological quest for the truth of the crime. Although de-
tective fiction as literature cannot focus only on its ‘whodunit’ aspect but
also requires other elements that make itself interesting to the readers,
the sole focus of Akechi, as a detective, must remain in his search for the
truth of the crime. To satisfy this single objective, Akechi does not need
to retrieve the ‘lost’ experiences of the unconscious at all; he merely has
to decipher a single bit of information that pertains to the criminal case
at hand. In this sense, detective fiction, or at least Ranpo’s early detective
stories, was not particularly suited to negotiate the ills of modernization
facing the urban readership of Shinseinen.
Indeed, for such a task, there was a more suitable literary trend (al-
though to call it a trend is somewhat problematic) rising to prominence
in the mid-1920s: the I-novel or shishōsetsu. Commonly understood as “an
autobiographical narrative in which the author is thought to recount
faithfully the details of his or her personal life in a thin guise of fiction,”
the I-novel has been considered “the most salient and unique form of
modern Japanese literature.” 59 And within such an understanding, the
I-novel often follows a distinct course of development, with Katai’s Futon
as the prototype and the writings of the Shirakaba group, which “advo-
cated the development of the individual self through sincere, direct, and
immediate self-expression,” as its successor.60 But as Tomi Suzuki has
aptly argued, the I-novel’s rise to prominence had as much, if not more so,
to do with the critical discourses surrounding the genre as compared to
the intrinsic characteristics of its members and, as such, the I-novel is
best understood as “a mode of reading that assumes that the I-novel is a
single-voiced, ‘direct’ expression of the author’s ‘self’ and that its written
language is ‘transparent’ ” and thus, as “a historically constructed domi-
nant reading and interpretive paradigm” that emerged in the mid-1920s.61
As Suzuki’s argument makes clear, the I-novel as a literary phenome-
non is better characterized as a particular mode of reading that takes
what is written on the page as the immediate experiences of the author
rather than as a protocol for literary production in which the author
faithfully records his experiences. Thus, the I-novel phenomenon in the
—————
59. Tomi Suzuki, Narrating the Self, 1.
60. Ibid., 92.
61. Ibid., 1, 10.
 Detecting the Unconscious 271

mid-1920s was a result of a discursive foregrounding of the connection

between the writer and the content of his or her endeavor that had al-
ready existed in various degrees within the development of modern Japa-
nese literature, including examples prior to Katai’s Futon, such as Ōgai’s
Maihime and Sōseki’s “Rondon tō.” Whether supportive or critical of
such a connection at the level of literary production, the various essays on
the subject functioned to instill within the readers that this connection
was a fashionable if not legitimate form of artistic expression. To put it
another way, the rise of these essays in the mid-1920s suggests that a read-
ing mode that identifies the content of literary works as depictions of
authors’ private lives became ideologically significant during this period.
And from our previous discussion, it is understandable why such would
be the case. The emergence of the I-novel as a discursive phenomenon in
the mid-1920s can be seen as a reflection of a growing need on the part of
the readers to be able to have faith in the immediate perceptions that
make up their everyday lives. In other words, the I-novel discourses func-
tioned to institutionalize a mode of reading through which the value of
everyday life could be recuperated precisely because individuals had be-
come unable to make sense of their immediate realities, an inability that
rendered their everyday lives phantasmagoric and thus inconsequential.
Of course, what made it possible for this mode of reading to take
root was the predisposition of the so-called I-novels themselves to with-
stand or rather excel within such interpretative paradigm, as illustrated
by the writings of Kasai Zenzō (1887–1928) whom the “new I-novel crit-
ical discourse designated . . . as the most representative contemporary
I-novelist.”62 As the representative work of his later years “Kohan shuki”
(Notes from the lakeside; 1924) clearly shows, Kasai’s works presented
themselves as a dizzying collage of the protagonist’s immediate emotions
and thoughts that resulted from the intertwining of present impressions
with flashbacks from the past in a manner that can be classified as stream
of consciousness. And through such a presentation that has the effect of
disorienting the readers, Kasai depicts a passive subject who is over-
whelmed by his external environment and circumstances, trapped in the
mundane problems of everyday life such as money and women and left to
wonder if “everything is the doing of what is called delusion.”63 Indeed,
—————
62. Ibid., 7.
63. Kasai, “Kohan shuki,” 443. In his insightful analysis of Kasai’s works, Ed-
ward Fowler writes that “his hero is purely the victim of circumstance, purely at
the mercy of outside forces” (The Rhetoric of Confession, 257).
272 Detecting the Unconscious

the insignificance and triviality of what he wrote were such that they
functioned to serve as the defining characteristic of Kasai’s writings. As
Edward Fowler states in his analysis of Kasai’s oeuvre, what set Kasai
apart was “the will to write when there is in fact nothing to write about,
when life itself has reached a seemingly irreparable impasse.”64
It is this “will to write,” I would argue, that constitutes the central
ideological cog of the I-novel phenomenon. In order to affirm the seem-
ingly meaningless life of the reader, it is not enough for the writer to
present such a life on a culturally legitimated forum, namely, general-
interest magazines such as Chūō kōron, Kaizō, and Bungei shunjū that
served as the primary site where the representative ‘I-novelists’ like Kasai
and Makino Shin’ichi (1896–1936) published their works.65 While the de-
piction of insignificant life affirms such a life as socially acceptable to the
extent that it is published, that is, culturally legitimated, the fictionality
of the details—if this is the case—negates the operation of legitimation
precisely because a selection to be made the subject matter of writing
suggests a certain importance and value of that subject matter. It is only
through appearing to “faithfully record” the author’s autobiographical
details—that is, understood by the readers to be as such—that the ideo-
logical operation of the I-novel takes full effect. The details of the text
present themselves as wholly insignificant in content to the readers, leav-
ing only the form as significant, for the author tells his or her readers:
‘while what I write might not be worth writing, I must write because it
is my real life.’
If Ranpo’s early detective stories—by criticizing the subject’s capacity
to accurately observe and digest his external world—probed the painful
symptom itself and posited the detective as the cure, then the I-novel
functioned to legitimate by virtue of its cultural worth the fleeting and
meaningless everyday experiences of its readers like an anesthesia that
masks the symptom. In this sense, the I-novel phenomenon represents
an inversion of Tsubouchi Shōyō’s literary project: whereas Shōyō es-
poused the importance of private life by depicting the true feelings (ninjō )
of the average person as an ‘authentic’ experience that the novelist must
unearth, the I-novel ‘authenticates’ the seemingly meaningless everyday
life of the average person by virtue of his identification with the novelist
as an established figure of cultural authority. In the process, the Japanese
—————
64. Fowler, The Rhetoric of Confession, 257.
65. For details on general-interest magazines and their expanding readership
during the 1920s, see Nagamine, Modan toshi no dokusha kūkan.
 Detecting the Unconscious 273

novel abandons its rhetoric of truth as something hiding behind the

surface—the rhetoric buttressed by its colluder, the detective story—and
becomes a site where suitable ‘surfaces’ as covers are produced for its
readers.
As an inversion of the emphasis underlying the literary formations of
modern Japan that we have discussed in the course of this study, the
I-novel’s prominence in the mid-1920s may appear as an instance of the
separation of the collusion between the Japanese novel and the detec-
tive story. But even so, such separation was short lived, as Ranpo would
go the way of the colluder. Soon after “Yaneura no sanposha,” Ranpo
became the premier writer of the ero guro nansensu movement by publish-
ing detective stories that relied heavily on the detailed depictions relat-
ing to transgressions of sociocultural norms, in general, and sexual per-
versions (abnormal sexuality), in particular. In a sense, this shift in focus
to represent fantasy, and thereby the unconscious, is continuous with
and a necessary result of his early detective fiction because this turn to
fantasy, in effect, expands the uncovering of the unconscious, which was
previously limited by the detective’s single objective of discovering the
identity of the criminal. But at the same time, in extending his descrip-
tion of the unconscious, Ranpo abandons it as an object of knowledge
and, instead, represents it through its manifestation in the ‘real’ world
as fantasy-come-true: the unconscious no longer exists at an observable
level as a secret message to be deciphered but as unbridled desire that
explodes in the external world.
This is nowhere clearer than in his full-length novel Kumo otoko (Spider
man; 1929–1930). Not only is the story about a madman who dreams of
constructing a three-dimensional exhibition of his perverse fantasy, in-
cluding the corpses of 49 girls used as mannequins, but Akechi, who
rescues the girls before they are killed, actually helps reproduce the mad-
man’s fantasy by using mannequins and undercover police officers despite
the fact that he could have easily arrested the madman prior to the time
of the exhibition. That the reading public ardently welcomed such works
over his early detective stories and that Ranpo gained mass recognition
only after this shift (his Ōgon kamen [Golden mask] would be serialized
in the paradigm-changing mass-circulation magazine Kingu from Sep-
tember 1930 to October 1931) are suggestive of the trajectory of literary
production as a whole. Toward the end of the 1920s, the rhetoric of truth
as something hiding behind the surface—a rhetoric that underlay the
profound connection between detective fiction and the Japanese novel—
collapses, replaced by the understanding of text as a site where sensa-
274 Detecting the Unconscious

tional ‘surfaces’ as expressions of the unconscious are posited as standing

in for the subjective core of our being.

D
In March 1927, just after completing the serialization of Issun bōshi (One-
inch boy) in Asahi shinbun, Edogawa Ranpo left Tokyo to travel around
Japan. Self-documented as stemming from “the self-loathing” of the
“childishness” of Issun bōshi—despite the story’s huge popularity (appear-
ing in one of the largest newspapers in Japan and already being made
into a film in 1927)—this “aimless wandering,” which took him away from
writing for over a year, was a period of self-reflection not unlike the one
Natsume Sōseki experienced during his absence from writing due to
illness prior to his serialization of Higan sugi made.66 And if Sōseki’s self-
reflection led him to return to a critical and direct engagement with the
theme of the detective with which he began his literary career and to
the examination of the intimate relationship between the Japanese novel
and the detective story, then Ranpo’s resulted in a similar endeavor from
the side of a professional detective story writer to explore the theoretical
issues lying at the heart of this relationship. This endeavor was Injū
(Shadowy beast), whose serialization in his old home Shinseinen began in
August 1928 and which sold so quickly that it required the unprecedented
reprint of the magazine’s issue containing the story’s final installment.67
Injū is a first-person narrated account of a detective-story writer
Samukawa (appearing as the first-person “watashi” for the most of the
story) who is asked by Shizuko, the wife of a wealthy man (Oyamada Ro-
kurō), to resolve her real-life troubles with another detective-story writer
named Ōe Shundei. Whereas the protagonist-narrator is known for his
“healthy” detective stories that explored the analytical and the scientific,
the suspect is known for his unhealthy ones that explored the abnormal
and the sexual.68 Importantly, Shundei’s criminal actions mimic the sto-
ries he has written, which, as any reader of Ranpo would be quick to real-
ize, are all plays on Ranpo’s own stories. The primary example is “Yane-
ura no yūgi,” a slight change from “Yaneura no sanposha,” the plot line
and tricks of which the story revisits in detail. There is also “Ichimai no
kitte,” which is “Ichimai no kippu,” and “B-zaka no satsujin” is, of course,
—————
66. Edogawa, “Jichū jikai,” in Kohan-tei jiken, 345.
67. Nakajima Kawatarō, Nihon suiri shōsetsu shi, vol. 2, 228.
68. Edogawa, Injū, in Edogawa Ranpo zenshū, vol. 3, 203.
 Detecting the Unconscious 275

“D-zaka no satsujin jiken.” And what’s more, the real name of Ōe Shundei,
which is a pen name, is Hirata Ichirō, which immediately evokes Ranpo’s
real name, Hirai Tarō. In these ways, Ranpo constructs the suspect
Shundei in the image of himself, perhaps as a sarcastic response to critics
like Hirabayashi Hatsunosuke who, as we saw in this chapter’s introduc-
tion, categorized Ranpo’s stories as unhealthy and abnormal from the
mid-1920s. And this self-referential dynamic becomes further compli-
cated when the protagonist-narrator determines, in the ensuing investi-
gation after Oyamada Rokurō’s murder, that Shundei is, in fact, a phan-
tom created by Shizuko, the supposed victim of his stalking.
As the above summary indicates, Injū is a highly metafictional work
that presents itself as a parody of the I-novel. But the value of the story
does not lie simply in its playfulness, mimicking a fashionable genre for
the entertainment of the readers. Rather, in telling a story of how a de-
tective story writer is at once a criminal and a woman, Injū engages in the
critical elucidation of the major theme of the Japanese novel, namely, the
woman and the criminal as mysteries-to-be-solved for the Japanese stu-
dent/intellectual. And to the extent that the narrator-detective becomes
involved in a sadomasochistic relationship with Shizuko, who is Shundei,
who, in turn, is Ranpo, Injū frames the relationship of the subject-as-
detective to the woman and the criminal as a search for the self wherein
they assert themselves as narcissistic projections of the self as mystery.
Indeed, that abnormal sexuality inserts itself within such linking of the
subject to the woman and the criminal seems fitting, for abnormal sex-
uality offers an instance where the subject’s relationship with a woman
also entails a transgression of social norms, which, in turn, ‘criminalizes’
the male subject.
Significantly in this context, moreover, the text posits Shizuko’s maso-
chistic predilection as being Western in origin through the riding crop—
a symbolic instrument of sadomasochism—brought back from Europe
by Shizuko’s sadist husband Rokurō.69 In such a way, Injū seems to frame
Shizuko’s masochism in terms similar to R. N.’s opium addiction in

—————
69. Mark Silver writes: “It is . . . striking that the novel should trace its char-
acters’ sadomasochistic impulses back to a West that is imagined as a perverting
influence on Japanese sexuality. This West’s influence is most powerfully concen-
trated in the riding crop, which in the course of the novel comes to take on an
almost talismanic significance. . . . Both the riding crop and its associated sadism
have, it turns out, been brought back by Mr. Oyamada from Europe” (Purloined
Letters, 155).
276 Detecting the Unconscious

“Shimon,” suggesting the dangers and pitfalls of Japan’s encounter with

the West that corrupts the Japanese subject. But the revelation of
Shizuko’s identity as Shundei problematizes this understanding of West-
ern influence, for Shundei’s writings that vividly portray abnormal sex-
uality begins with Rokurō’s leaving for—not returning from—his trip to
Europe. Thus, Injū denies the explanatory power of the West as an an-
swer to the question of origin as it relates to one’s desires and beliefs as
well as a source of criminality, positing itself as a text written by a detec-
tive about the criminal-as-woman-as-self in which the source of his/her
abnormal and criminal desires is never unearthed.
And fittingly, the story’s ending reiterates such a message. Injū ends
when Shizuko commits suicide after the narrator-detective confronts her
with the evidence he has collected on the murder of her husband. Yet,
while his deductions and evidence point to her as the culprit, not to men-
tion the effect of suicide as a confirmation of her guilt, the narrator-
detective cannot ever get rid of the feeling that Shizuko was not Shundei
and that Shundei still exists somewhere in this world as his “horrible sus-
picions deepen with time.”70 In the context of Ranpo’s literary project
and on the developmental trajectory of the Japanese novel, the message
produced by Injū’s ending is clear: the Japanese search for the true self—
whose often perverse and sometimes criminal nature is crystallized in its
relationship to the West but nonetheless cannot be reduced to the influ-
ence of the West—can never reach its destination, always being outside
the jurisdiction of the “healthy” and analytical ego that characterizes the
student/intellectual.

—————
70. Edogawa, Injū, in Edogawa Ranpo zenshū, vol. 3, 263.
 EPILOGUE

The Detective, the Masses, and the State

As an agent of the state and the embodiment of its powers to police the
activities of its citizens, the detective, as Walter Benjamin notes, emerges
as a hero in the modern age precisely because such policing becomes dif-
ficult with the growth of the metropolis and “the obliteration of the in-
dividual’s traces in the big-city crowd.”1 In this sense, one of the fun-
damental antagonisms of the detective fiction genre in general and of
Western analytical detective fiction (exemplified by the Dupin trilogy
and the Sherlock Holmes tales) in particular is that of the individual and
the masses, wherein the position of this distinctively modern genre is
clear: detective fiction resists the anonymity of the masses and celebrates
individuality, whether through the portrayal of the detective as an eccen-
tric individual with extraordinary powers of observation and analysis or
of the criminal as a mastermind behind atrocious and often selfish deeds.
At the same time, the detective’s private and academic nature—as an
ordinary citizen whose involvement in the criminal case is presented as
having nothing to do with the desire to police or punish the criminal but
rather deriving from purely personal and asocial interests in the case as a
puzzle—functions to preserve the detective story’s focus on the antago-
nism between the individual and the masses by masking the conspirato-
rial relationship between the detective and the state. Western analytical
detective fiction attempts to dissociate its protagonist from the state and
its police by presenting the detective’s motivation behind his actions as
being unrelated to official policing. In so doing, detective fiction not only
—————
1. Benjamin, “The Paris of the Second Empire in Baudelaire,” 43.
278 The Detective, the Masses, and the State

asserts the capacity of the detective-as-individual to single-handedly

combat the masses head-on but also assists in making more acceptable
the faceless gaze of the state, which was penetrating deeper and deeper
into the everyday lives of its citizens in the course of the nineteenth and
early twentieth centuries, whether in Europe or in Japan.
But in the case of Japan, this ideological function of detective fic-
tion—making more acceptable the penetrating gaze of the state by dis-
sociating the individual from the masses—is problematized by the fact
that there is no process of picking the individual out of faceless masses in
much of Japan’s detective stories. There is no placing of a fake ad in the
newspaper in order to lure out the owner of the orangutan as Dupin does
in “The Murders in the Rue Morgue.” Instead, we have Fukiya of “Shinri
shiken” who goes through a convoluted line of reasoning based on legal
technicality to report the money that he had robbed from the miserly
landlady to the police, thereby emerging instantly as a possible suspect in
the eyes of the investigating judge and the detective Akechi. Or we have
Saburō of “Yaneura no sanposha” who is a friend of Akechi and was, in
fact, introduced to the world of crime by the detective himself.
As these examples reveal, Japanese detective stories—including many
of Ruikō’s translations but especially the early stories of Ranpo—seem
to bypass the problem of masses altogether. No doubt, such tendencies
have much to do with the intricate relationship between detective fic-
tion and the Japanese novel whose paradigmatic foundations were found
in Shōyō’s literary theories that described the novel’s reason for being
as exploring the rifts between internal thoughts/emotions and external
appearances/behavior and between private life and public life. By impli-
cating itself within such a worldview that Ruikō’s detective stories not
only adopted but functioned to popularize, the relationship between the
detective and the criminal in Japan developed as a battle of how a detec-
tive turns a suspicion held against the criminal into positive knowledge.
Similar to that of the novelist/narrator, the detective’s task ultimately
involved the bridging of the gap between who people seemed/claimed to
be and who they actually are, rather than in picking an individual out of
a “big-city crowd.”
And within this context we can reconsider the significance of the re-
liance on confession in Ranpo’s detective stories, which was discussed in
the previous chapter. In requiring the criminal’s confession for the pur-
pose of his or her conviction, the early detective stories of Ranpo sug-
gest that the penetrating gaze of the detective as an agent of the state
 The Detective, the Masses, and the State 279

can reach its final destination—the official determination of the truth of

the crime—only with the active participation of the criminal as subject.
Indeed, Ranpo emphasizes this aspect of the criminal by putting the
epistemological validity of the positivist paradigm into question and of-
fering Akechi’s psychological method in its stead. In so doing, confes-
sion becomes an empowering (albeit paradoxical) act, in which the crim-
inal preempts the total objectification of his being by the state and its
regime of social control and policing, and salvages the understanding of
the subject as the ultimate source of meaning by participating in his
own demise, with the detective emerging as the savior of the symbiotic
relationship between the individual and the state in the process.
Of course, the fact that one must commit a crime to become an ac-
tive participant in the workings of the state is absurd, but one could ar-
gue that such absurdity reflected the desperate situation of the declining
relevance of the educated class—to which Ranpo’s characters invariably
belonged—as historical agents and productive subjects, a situation that
was brought about by the radical shift in the relationship between the
individual, the masses, and the state during the 1920s. In other words, as
clearly heralded by Arishima Takeo’s 1922 declaration “Sengen hitotsu”
(One declaration) that denied the well-off intellectual’s ability to under-
stand the rising proletarian class, the early 1920s witnessed the emer-
gence of the masses as an undeniable category of symbolic and social
significance. And the significance of the masses in the context of state
machinery grew exponentially after the Great Kantō Earthquake, which
brought about a sociopolitical atmosphere that seems to reject alto-
gether the notion of the individual as the foundational unit of society,
revealing Ranpo’s detective stories as site of fictional consolation rather
than of ideological negotiation between the individual and the state.
In the immediate aftermath of the earthquake, which resulted in
around 100,000 casualties and demolished much of Tokyo and Yoko-
hama, there arose rumors that the Korean residents of Tokyo were us-
ing the chaos after the earthquake as a smokescreen to commit various
crimes including poisoning of wells. Reacting to these rumors—which,
as historians have demonstrated, were wholly unfounded—the citizens
of Tokyo took to the streets and brutally beat and murdered over 6,000
Korean residents. Moreover, there arose rumors that behind the sup-
posed rioting of the Korean residents lay the leftist political and labor
groups, and various members of these groups, including the anarchist
Ōsugi Sakae (1885–1923) and his wife, were murdered by those belonging
to the military.
280 The Detective, the Masses, and the State

These events following the Great Kantō Earthquake not only recon-
firmed the despotic tendencies of the authorities through the violent ac-
tions of the military taken against leftist activists but also revealed that
such tendencies had reached the level of individual subjects. On the one
hand, the violence against leftist activists was executed by the members
of the military but without the authority of the law or the government,
and, as such, such acts reiterated the fluidity between agents of authority
and the criminal-as-individual. On the other hand, to the extent that the
brutal murders of Korean residents were carried out for the most part
by ‘ordinary’ citizens acting as a mob, this atrocity revealed the funda-
mental tenet of detective fiction—that evil is confined in the criminal-as-
individual—as nothing but fiction and fantasy by signaling the emergence
of the masses as criminals and murderers. In this sense, the violence in
the immediate aftermath of the earthquake radically questioned the re-
ality of detective fiction, which celebrated individuality by telling the
story of the battle of wits between the detective and the criminal.
The significance of the atrocities in the wake of the earthquake within
the discourse of detective fiction does not end there but becomes more
provocative when we consider the government’s reaction to these crimes
committed by the masses. In his discussion of the atrocities after the
earthquake, Sugamoto Yasuyuki—who posits the primary function of
detective fiction as “making legible for the readers = bourgeois the ex-
tremely opaque ‘masses’ and ‘metropolis’ ”—argues that what happened
was a radical reversal of this function of detective fiction.2 He writes:
The murderers who participated in the earthquake terrorism were not pursued
persistently and exposed of their brutal actions like the criminals of detective
stories. Indeed, some of the murderers were questioned by the police and or-
dered to appear before the courts. . . . The court, which is rarely depicted in de-
tective fiction, appeared in this case to lawfully erase the criminal acts of the
murderers. . . . By utilizing the unfounded rumors, [the government] guided and
connived the terrorism of the masses, and made the criminals who massacred
Koreans and Chinese and murdered radical leftist elements disappear into the
masses—this was the terrible and grotesque inversion of detective fiction.3

Rather than discovering “the individual’s traces in the big-city crowd”—

“the obliteration” of which was “the original social content of the detec-
tive story” according to Walter Benjamin—the government and its police
did not seek out the individuals among the masses responsible for the
—————
2. Sugamoto, “Tantei shōsetsu, gunshū, Marukusu shugi,” 78–79.
3. Ibid., 80. Emphasis in the original.
 The Detective, the Masses, and the State 281

atrocities to prove their guilt in the court of law but treated the masses
as a whole as culprits who by virtue of their faceless and unidentifiable
nature were inculpable.4 In short, the state utilized the opaqueness of the
masses to hide and wipe away the crimes that they had committed.
And significantly, it was precisely this inversion of the ideological
function of detective fiction that made possible the actual materialization
of panopticism that is implied in the fictional world of the detective story.
While Sugamoto describes the citizens who were involved in the massa-
cre of Korean residents in the earthquake’s aftermath as “murderers” and
“criminals”—and they were—they could also be described as those who
took the power of policing and authority into their own hands and be-
came the detective/police, judge, and executioner.5 Indeed, the govern-
ment had been fostering such possibilities after the Rice Riots of 1918 by
actively organizing vigilante groups among its citizens as a way to combat
growing unrest across the country.6 In this sense, the mass hysteria in the
immediate aftermath of the earthquake demonstrated that the govern-
ment’s program of “making police out of the masses” was working.7 If
Ruikō’s adaptations of Western detective stories in the late 1880s, in
seeking to depoliticize their readers, actively manipulated them into
forming a conspiratorial relationship with the authorities, then this rela-
tionship finds its ultimate result in the mid-1920s when the people be-
came the pawns of the state, doing its dirty work.

—————
4. Benjamin, “The Paris of the Second Empire in Baudelaire,” 43.
5. Although there is no doubt that there were mistakes made in the identifi-
cation of national origin, the citizens functioned as ‘detectives’ who ‘identified’
the Korean residents who, in turn, were no different in appearance from the
Japanese that formed the masses. In this sense, we could argue that this situa-
tion entailed the eruption of the fear that was described in Ruikō’s Muzan. As
we saw in Chapter 2, this story posited the possibility that a Chinese living in
Japan can become indistinguishable from a Japanese simply by wearing Japanese
clothes and hairstyle.
6. For details on the development of vigilante groups, see Obinata, Tennōsei
keisatsu to minshū, 139–73.
7. Ibid., 141. Those who became targets of mob violence—the Koreans and
the leftists—were precisely the two stereotyped groups of anti-government dis-
senters who had given the government the most trouble in the late 1910s and
the early 1920s, whether demonstrating against Japan’s colonization of Korea or
for universal male suffrage and better working conditions in the Taishō Democ-
racy movement.
282 The Detective, the Masses, and the State

While the extent to which the government was involved in guiding

and fueling the violence in the wake of the earthquake has been a topic
for debate among historians, it seems indisputable that the citizens of
Tokyo as mobs operated and functioned as agents of the state who, just
like the detective, exposed its ‘enemies.’ But unlike the detective, who
as an individual can only be in one place at one time and thus must
wait for the crime to be committed to showcase his skills, the masses—
unlocalizable and ubiquitous—made possible the panoptic gaze that not
only discerned and exposed but also preempted ‘criminal’ activities. And
indeed, this state of panopticism characterized Japanese society after the
promulgation of the Maintenance of Public Order Act in 1925 when
Japanese citizens, inculcated by the government to act as vigilantes, be-
came part of the panoptic gaze to spy on their neighbors and inform the
government of any suspicious activity. The effectiveness of this gaze
would become clear in the ease with which the state suppressed the
Communist Party in the early 1930s as its members—as well as many
who had no involvement—were arrested one after another in violation
of the Maintenance of the Public Order Act. Significantly enough, these
suspects were not simply tried and imprisoned but were forced to con-
fess their crimes against the state and sign a statement that they had
‘converted’ (tenkō ) their ‘criminal’ ways. In the mid-1920s, the detec-
tive dissolved into and became incorporated by the masses, making the
detective-as-individual—the hero of detective fiction—obsolete, and this
union brought about the advent of a modern-day Inquisition.
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 Index

Abnormal sexuality, 257, 273, 275– Andreyev, Leonid: Der Gedanke,

76 172–73
Adultery, 36, 63, 90–91, 93, 95, 124, Arishima Takeo: “Sengen hitotsu”
175, 206n15, 213 (One declaration), 279
Aeba Kōson, 46, 116 Asahi shinbun (newspaper), 274
Akutagawa Ryūnosuke, 5, 11, 199; Assembly Ordinance (Shūkai
and kaika-mono, 201, 205–6 jōrei), 74
—“Kaika no satsujin” (Murder in Authority, 200; and detective, 6,
the age of enlightenment), 12–13, 54, 220–21, 233; of first-
200–210, 233; Akutagawa’s person narrator, 53; of the
misgivings in writing of, 200– novelist, 24, 272; of the state,
201; and bunmei kaika, 206–7; 12–13, 155, 220–21, 232, 280; of
comparisons to Kokoro, 201–2, third-person narrator, 54, 58;
205; Girard’s triangular struc- of translator, 56
ture of desire in, 201–2; ideal
of love (ren’ai ) in, 203–4, 206, Baba Kochō, 250n25
209; moral framework of, 202– Belatedness, sense of, 212, 214–15,
5; narrative frame of, 207–9; 246
plot summary of, 201n9 Benjamin, Walter, 27, 106, 260,
—Other texts: “Futatsu no 267, 277
tegami” (Two letters), 212–14; Boissonade, Gustave Emile, 67n17,
“Giwaku” (Suspicion), 204n13; 74
“Kaika no otto” (Husband of Bungei shunjū (magazine), 272
enlightenment), 206; Kairaishi Bunmei kaika (civilization and
(Puppeteer), 208 enlightenment), 6, 259n39; and
Allegorical interpretative frame- the Japanese intellectual, 6,
work, 15–16, 60–64; aristo- 206–7; and newspapers, 35, 37–
crats-as-peers, 89–91, 95–97; 38; and Shōyō’s notion of the
falsely accused-as-political ac- novel, 20–22; and translation,
tivists, 72, 75–76, 90, 95–97 56; and Western education, 121
296 Index

Bunshō sekai (magazine), 139, Country, and city, 12, 260n43,

146n64 261–64, 267. See also Urbaniza-
Burakumin, 10, 125n29; and criti- tion
cism of Meiji government, 130; Crime of disrespect ( fukeizai), 74,
and detective fiction frame- 191
work, 132; and Emancipation Crime: Meiji understanding of,
Edict, 130; literary portrayal 123; reporting of, 36, 68, 70;
of, 125, 131; as the Other, 138, rise in, 68n19
143n58; and risshin shusse ideol- Criminal: and confession, 80, 129,
ogy, 130–31; and social preju- 150, 255–56, 269, 279; detective
dice, 127, 129, 135, 137, 149n69, as, 11, 158, 160; within interior/
152. See also Shimazaki Tōson: exterior dichotomy, 23, 83–84;
Hakai Meiji understanding of, 123;
narrative focus on, 18, 68, 115,
Chida Hiroyuki, 134–35 250, 254; subject as, 10–11, 110,
Chūgaku sekai (magazine), 145–46 114, 122, 173, 185–86, 221, 275–76;
Chūō kōron (magazine), 11, 163n11, and task of the detective, 6, 47,
199, 272; “Himitsu to kaihō” 77, 112, 199, 238, 277
(Secrets and liberation) issue, Criminal Code (Keihō), 67, 74, 90,
11, 199–200, 208, 232–33 102
Code of Criminal Procedure Criminality: foreign, 104, 106, 132,
(Chizaihō), 67, 74 276; of student/intellectual,
Confession: and determination of 10–11, 123, 152
truth, 252–53, 255–56; and dy-
namic of secret and exposure, Deleuze, Gilles, 220
10, 125, 199; and eavesdropping Democracy, 12–13, 122, 197
narrator, 28, 35; and first- Der Student von Prag (The student
person narration, 45–46; in of Prague), 226–27
Futon, 142, 149–50; Japanese Desire: of eavesdropper, 20, 34, 37,
detective story’s reliance on, 39; epistemological (desire to
80; in Hakai, 128–30, 135, 138– know), 6, 9, 39, 97, 192, 195;
39, 150; in “Kaika no satsujin,” fulfillment and non-fulfillment
201–2, 205, 208; and the state, of personal, 206–7, 209, 211;
278–79; and the unconscious, Girard’s triangular structure of,
268–69 200–202, 205, 206n15, 213; of
Conspiratorial relationship, be- the novel, 20, 58; vs. reason, 21,
tween: authorities and reader, 47n55; sexual, 154; to succeed,
93, 95, 281; detective and 144, 150, 151n71; to transgress
reader, 55, 58, 93; detective and boundaries, 37, 160–61; of the
state, 277; masses and state, 281; unconscious, 177, 268–69, 273;
narrator and reader, 19, 28, 42, West as source of, 276; woman
53n59, 55, 58 as object of, 33n29, 141, 149
Constitution, 8, 13n17; Meiji, 1, 13, Detective fiction: booms and
14n17, 76, 97n55, 105n69, popularity of, 1, 5–6, 11–12,
192n51 108–9, 238, 263n49; and Japa-
Conway, Hugh: Dark Days, 1 nese novel, 2, 4–6, 11–12, 20, 27,
 Index 297

52, 59, 80–81, 96, 109–10, 273– Dokusatsu saiban (The trial of poi-
74, 278; Japanese, reception of, son murder), 69
2, 98, 235–38; literary value of, Doppelgänger. See Double
2–3, 44, 201; and science, 6, Double: and cinema, 226–27; in
235–36, 239n9; theoretical con- “Futari no geijutsuka no hana-
sideration of, 6, 12–13, 14n18, shi,” 212; in “Futatsu no
15n19, 27, 94, 225n47, 277–78; tegami,” 212–14; rise in stories
tōjo tantei shōsetsu (inverted de- about, 212, 213n27, 226; in
tective story) format of, 250; of “Shimon,” 224–26, 228–29;
Western analytical tradition, 6, and “William Wilson,” 212,
98, 100–101, 240, 244–46, 269, 224
277 Dostoevsky, Fyodor, 127, 217, 238;
Detective: as agent of the state, Raskolnikov (character), 114,
12–13, 277–79; ambivalence to- 116–22, 125–27, 150, 174, 216–17,
ward, 9–10, 97–98, 113, 158, 269
168–69; and confession, 256, —Crime and Punishment, 4, 10,
269, 279; and criminal, 9–11, 114, 121, 125, 139, 233, 251n26,
158, 160–61, 278, 280; as fic- 269; comparisons to Hakai and
tional hero in Japan, 9, 11, 64, Futon, 142, 150, 152; influence
77, 97, 233; historical, as enemy on Hakai by, 125–27, 129n38;
of the people, 8–9, 64; as ideal and Japanese intellectual, 173–
narrator/novelist, 23–24, 46n52, 74; utilization of, in “Futari no
51, 54, 57, 59; and Japanese geijutsuka no hanashi,” 216–17;
student/intellectual, 6–7, 9, 16, various translations of, 217. See
168; Japanese writers’ under- also Uchida Roan: Tsumi to
standing and criticism of, 10–11, batsu
47–48, 157–58, 160–61; as model Doyle, Arthur Conan, 6, 13, 98;
within Japan’s Westernization, “The Adventure of Dancing
7, 9, 112, 122; modern individual Men,” 240; “The Adventure of
as, 157–58, 161, 168, 176, 182–83, the Engineer’s Thumb,”
195; readers as, 180, 188, 231; 249n23; Sherlock Holmes
Western models of, 6, 12–13, 23, (character), 100, 215–17, 221,
100–101, 221, 277–78 239; Sherlock Holmes tales, 23,
Diet, 1, 8n13, 14n17, 76, 89, 97n55 104n68, 240, 243, 249n23,
Dime novels, 1, 65, 91n51 252n27; Watson (character), 51,
Disavowal, 125, 200, 215, 220–21; 54n59, 222
detective’s emergence from Du Boisgobey, Fortuné, 1, 66n12,
framework of, 232; and the 71
double, 213–14, 227; of egoism Dumas, Alexander: Taking the
and self-interest, 205, 210; fe- Bastille, 72
tishistic, 230; and masochism, Dupin, Auguste (character). See
220; second-floor room as Poe, Edgar Allan
space of, 112–13; of Western in-
fluence, 215–17, 219, 233–34 E’iri jiyū shinbun (newspaper),
Dokufu-mono (poisonous women 60n1, 62n6, 65–66, 70–71, 73,
tales), 18, 68–70 76, 83, 87–88, 98n58
298 Index

Eavesdropper, 20, 50; desire of, 34, —“Ichimai no kippu” (One

37, 39; detective as, 49, 51, 54; ticket), 238, 243–46, 249; criti-
gaze of, 28, 39–40, 54; narrator cism of physical evidence in,
as, 19, 28, 166–67; novelist as, 243–45; and detective as novel-
40–41, 59, 166–67; and public ist, 244–45; plot summary of,
and private dichotomy, 39; and 243n17
translator, 56 —“Ni-sen dōka” (Two-sen copper
Eavesdropping: allure of and de- coin), 238–43, 246, 264; critical
sire for, 19–20; and cinematic reception of, 238–40; and first-
experience, 227; and the detec- person narration, 240–41; as
tive, 48–49, 51, 57; in Imotose parody of Western detective
kagami, 30–31; and narration, fiction, 239–41, 243; plot sum-
28, 31, 42; problematization of, mary of, 240n15; real vs. fic-
34–35; as resistance against the tional world in, 241–42
visual, 39, 231; Shōyō’s criticism —“Shinri shiken” (The psycho-
of, 39–40, 43; structure of, 50; logical test), 238, 250–56, 278;
in Western fictions, 29n23; and Crime and Punishment,
zappō columns and, 36–37 251n26; plot summary of,
Edogawa Ranpo, 5, 11–12, 14n18, 250n24; problems of detec-
98, 250n25; Akechi Kogorō tive’s method in, 252–53; use of
(character), 11, 181n33, 264–65, word-association test in, 251
269–70, 279; categorization of —“Yaneura no sanposha” (The
and shift in detective stories wanderer in the attic), 237–38,
by, 236–38, 273, 275; as ero guro 253–57, 265–69, 278; compari-
nansensu writer, 237, 273; epis- sons to “Shinri shiken,” 253–54;
temological project of, 238, as failure of epistemological
252–54, 256–57; Hirabayashi’s project, 255–56; and kōtō yūmin,
reception of, 234–37; framing 264–65; and modern experi-
technique, use of, by, 245–46; ence as trauma, 265, 267–68;
and Freudian psychoanalysis, notion of the unconscious in,
257–59; positivistic paradigm, 256–57, 269–70; plot summary
criticism and rejection of, by, of, 253n29; and transgression of
243–47, 257, 268; and psycho- social norms, 265–66
logical method of detection, —Other texts: “Akai heya” (The
articulation of, by, 248–59 pas- red room), 254n32; “Gakuya
sim; urbanization process, por- banashi” (Inside story), 245;
trayal of, by, 263–64; notion Injū (Shadowy beast), 238n7,
of unconscious, use of, by, 274–76; Issun bōshi (One-inch
268–70, 273 boy), 274; Kumo otoko (Spider
—“D-zaka no satsujin jiken” man), 273; “Muyūbyōsha no
(Murder case on D-hill), 238, shi” (The death of a sleep-
247–50, 252, 261n44, 264; criti- walker), 238n7; Nanimono
cism of witness accounts in, (Who), 238n7; Ōgon kamen
247–48; detective’s method of (Golden mask), 273; “Sōseiji”
Akechi in, 249, 252; plot sum- (Twins), 254n32
mary of, 247n21 Einstein, Albert, 236
 Index 299

Emancipation Edict (Kaihō rei), of those involved in, 9, 65, 77,

130–32 109, 113; and the Meiji consti-
Emperor, Meiji, 8, 13, 130n40, tution, 14n17; Meiji govern-
173n24, 195, 198; death of, 191– ment’s incorporation of activ-
92; imperial pardon by, 105n69; ists in, 105fn69; Meiji
and peerage system, 89n49 government’s suppression of,
Ero guro nansensu (erotic, gro- 74–75; Meiji government’s use
tesque, nonsense), 237, 273 of detective in, 8–9, 64; and
Experience: authentic, 259, 272; the political novels, 22n10, 61,
cinematic, 226–27; and I-novel, 72, 96; and risshin shusse, 92;
270, 272; vs. intellectual Shōyō’s use of rhetoric of, 40;
knowledge, 120, 214; Japanese, and sōshi, 76–77; trials of activ-
214, 221; modern and urban, ists in, 69
traumas of, 260, 263, 267–68; Freeman, R. Austin, 98, 250n25
past, power of, 182, 195; vs. Freud, Sigmund, 226, 230n58, 257–
scientific reasoning, 100; 58, 267n57. See also Psycho-
unconscious, 269–70 analysis, Freudian
Fukuzawa Yukichi, Gakumon no
Falsely accused, the, 71–73, 75, 77, susume (Encouragement of
84n42, 90, 93n53, 95–97. See learning), 7n11, 91
also Allegorical interpretative Futabatei Shimei: “Aibiki” (The
framework rendezvous), 52n57; Bunzō
Fetishism, 221, 230–31 (character), 10, 92, 111–13, 116–
Film: and close-up, 222, 231; and 17, 121–23, 136, 140, 171–73;
double, 226–27; as emergent “Meguriai” (The encounter),
genre, 225 52n57; Ukigumo (Drifting
Fingerprint: as fetish, 230–31; in clouds), 10, 33n29, 34n30, 91,
“Shimon,” 223–26, 229–32; 111–13, 122
theoretical consideration of,
224–25 Gaboriau, Émile, 1, 66n12, 71; File
First-person narration. See Narra- No. 113, 65; Other People’s Money,
tion, first-person 66; The Widow Lerouge, 65;
Fragmentary (or fragmented): Within an Inch of His Life, 70,
allegiance, 209, 221, 233; identi- 90–91
ties, 81, 96; nature of Japanese Gaze: of the eavesdropper, 28, 39–
intellectual, 11, 206; subject, 40, 54; of the masses, 282;
209, 214, 226, 232–34 moral and objective, 51, 54, 57;
Framing technique. See Narrative novelistic, 24–26, 30; of social
frame prejudice, 130; of the state, 155,
Freedom and People’s Rights 278; subject’s inward, 172–73;
movement, 8, 63–64; and de- Western, 38n39
tective fiction boom, 12; as Girard, René, 200, 202
framework for fantasy, 105; Great Kantō Earthquake, 12, 261–
falsely accused as allegorical 63, 267–68, 279–82
substitute of activists in, 75, 90, Great Treason Incident (Tai-
95; frustrated political energies gyaku jiken), 173–74, 198, 219
300 Index

Green, Anna Katharine, 4, 44 Jogaku zasshi (magazine), 117, 120,

—XYZ, 4, 43–44, 57–58, 228; de- 148n67
tective’s curiosity in, 45, 47, Jōkyō shōko gohan roku (Records of
50–51; as failed detective story, wrong judgments based on cir-
44–45; as first-person narrative, cumstantial evidence), 67
45–46, 52–53; plot summary of, Judicial system: attachments to
44n49; textual comparison premodern, 80; interest in
with Nisegane tsukai, 48–49; and anxiety over, 68–69; Meiji
title of, 54. See also Tsubouchi reality of, 73–75; and Public
Shōyō: Nisegane tsukai Order Ordinance, 65n11, 75;
—Other texts: The Leavenworth Ruikō’s criticism of, 66–67,
Case, 71, 87 71, 73, 75–76; Westernization
of, 67; in Yūzai muzai, 78–79,
Hasegawa Tenkei, 127, 130 82–83, 93–94. See also Criminal
Hentai shinri (magazine), 257n34 Code; Code of Criminal
Hirabayashi Hatsunosuke, 235–37, Procedure
275
Holmes, Sherlock (character). See Kabayama Sukenori, 148
Doyle, Arthur Conan Kaizō (magazine), 258, 272
Hototogisu (magazine), 159 Kanzen chōaku (encouraging virtue,
chastising vice), 19, 41
Ideal, Western, 9–11, 155, 206, 210, Kasai Zenzō, 271–72
216; art as, 211, 215; vs. Japanese Katayama Sen, 143, 151
law, 209, 220–21, 233; ren’ai Katsu Kaishū, 63
(love) as, 203–4, 206, 209 Kawana, Sari, 5n8, 265
Iida Yūko, 200–202, 218 Ken’yūsha, 2
Industrialization, 212, 261, 267 Kikutei Kōsui: Sanpū hiu: sero
Inoue Kaoru, 63, 107 nikki (Walks of life diaries),
I-novel (shishōsetsu), 270–73, 275 91–92
Intellectual. See Student/ Kingu (magazine), 273
intellectual Kinmonth, Earl, 143, 162–63
Interior: conflation with private, Kitamura Tōkoku, 116, 126;
31, 35, 41; and exterior, dichot- “Ensei shika to josei” (Disillu-
omy of, 21–25, 28, 31–34, 80–86, sioned poets and women), 120–
140, 161, 182, 195, 278; as object 21; reviews of Tsumi to batsu by,
of the novel, 20n4, 23–25, 51 117–19, 122
Ishibashi Ningetsu, 30–31 Knowledge: and crime, 86, 90,
Itō Hideo, 72n26 208–9; detective’s 6–7; dis-
Itō Hirobumi, 62–63, 89, 124 avowal of, 213–14, 227; vs. ex-
Iwamoto Yoshiharu, 115n9, 116, perience, 120–21, 214; object
118n15 of, 6, 9, 33n29, 58, 183, 190, 192,
195, 285; within Ranpo’s epis-
Jameson, Fredric, 13–14 temological project, 238, 252–
Jauss, Hans Robert, 14–15 56, 278; reader’s sharing of, 28,
Jiyū shinbun (newspaper), 72; 95; Western, 7, 27, 56–57, 112–
“Tantei-ron” (On detectives), 8 13, 207, 214, 220n41
 Index 301

Kōga Saburō, 237n4 —Muzan (Merciless), 65, 68, 97–

Kokujihan jiken kōhan bōchō hikki 109, 169, 281n5; comparisons
(Records of hearings on the to Western detective fiction,
incident of the crimes against 100–101, 104n68; critical re-
the state), 69n23 ception of, 98; and Hakai, 132;
Kokumin no tomo (magazine), and extraterritoriality clause,
58n64, 76–77, 162; and criti- 102–5; power of Western
cism of detective fiction in learning in, 99–100, 108–9,
“Bungaku shakai no genjō” 112–13, 122; racial/national
(Present state of the literary stereotyping in, 103–4, 106–7;
world), 2, 4, 44, 58–59 and repressed political ener-
Komori Yōichi, 25n16, 31n26, 46, gies, 104–5
51, 112n2, 146n65, 183–87 —Yūzai muzai (Guilty, not guilty),
Konnichi shinbun (newspaper), 1, 65, 70, 72–73, 77–86, 90–91, 93–
66, 73n27 96; and adultery, 90–91, 95;
Koshinbun (small newspaper), 36, allegory of, 95–96; comparisons
39, 65, 68, 70 to the English version, 90–91;
Kōtō yūmin (upper-class vagabond), dismantling of trial system
173–74, 176, 196, 264–65 in, 78–79; interior/exterior
Kozakai Fuboku, 238–40, 242 dichotomy in, 82–86; narrative
Kraft-Ebbing, Richard von, structure of, 86, 93; and the
257 newspaper medium, 78–79, 93–
Kravichinsky, S. M.: Underground 94; plot summary of, 78n35;
Russia, 72 psychological reasoning, use of,
Kume Masao, 199 in, 83–84; reliance on confes-
Kuriyagawa Hakuson, 258 sion in, 80; role of rumors in,
Kuroiwa Ruikō, 1, 3–5, 9, 62n6, 81–82; role of secrets in, 84–86,
64–65; classification of adapta- 93–95; Ruikō’s introduction to,
tions by, 70–71; classification 73–76; as sensational novel, 72–
of stories about crime by, 71; 73; significance of aristocrats in,
and Crime and Punishment, 115– 86–87, 91; and Tsubouchi
17; and criticism of Meiji judi- Shōyō’s literary project, 80–81,
cial system, 73–75; early detec- 85, 96–97
tive stories of, 65–66, 70; em- —Other texts: Baikarō, 70; Dai-
phasis on the falsely accused tōzoku (The great thief ), 65, 70;
by, 71–73, 75, 77; function and Hito ka oni ka (Man or devil?),
implications of detective sto- 65–67, 70–72, 84n41, 86, 93n53;
ries by, 109, 122, 154, 175, 278, Hōtei no bijin (A beauty in
281; and Meiji literary and dis- court), 1, 4, 64–66; “Kaitakushi
cursive forms, 70; political kanri no shobun o ronzu”
agenda of, 66–67, 71, 73; and (Argument for the punishment
political novels, 72, 77, 96–97; of officials of Colonization
popularity of, 72n26, 108–9; Bureau), 75n32; Majutsu no zoku
and Tokutomi Sohō, 76–77; (Villain of magic), 83, 132;
and Yorozu chōhō, 108, 115, 124, Makkura (Utter darkness), 71,
145, 175 80n37, 86–90, 94n54; Tanin no
302 Index

zeni (Other people’s money), 65; Moretti, Franco, 244n19, 267n57,

“Tantei-dan ni tsuite” (On de- 269
tective stories), 3, 71n25 Mori Arinori, 63
Mori Ōgai, 124; Maihime (The
Libel Law (Zanbōritsu), 61, 74 dancing girl), 2, 91, 271; Seinen
Liberal Party ( Jiyūtō), 8, 65, 73, 76, (Youth), 146n65
102, 105n69 Morishita Uson, 238, 239n10
Loti, Pierre ( Julien Viaud), 63 Morita Shiken, 46n53, 116, 119n18
Morita Sōhei, 127
Maeda Ai, 7n11, 25n15, 31n26, 41, Mushanokōji Saneatsu, 218
42n46, 60–61, 91–92, 113, Mystery: self as, 171, 194, 204, 234,
170n20, 176 275; woman as, 33, 140, 171, 275
Maintenance of Public Order Act
(Chian iji hō), 12, 282 Nakae Chōmin, 76
Masamune Hakuchō, 114n7, 199 Nakamura Hakuyō, 217
Masochism, 220–21, 275 Nakamura Kichizō, 199
Matsubara Iwagorō: Saiankoku no Nakamura Masanao: Saigoku ris-
Tokyo (The darkest Tokyo), shi-hen (Success stories of the
124 West), 7n11, 91
Matsuyama Iwao, 124n27, 261n44, Narration, first-person: authority
264n51 of, 53; and detective fiction, 51–
Maupassant, Guy de, 141, 157 52, 53n59, 222, 240–41; dichot-
Metropolis, 12, 27, 260, 267n57, omy between narrating and
268, 277 narrated self in, 45, 165–66, 184,
Miyako no hana (magazine), 112 187; limited perspective of, 51,
Miyako shinbun (newspaper), 1n1, 165n12; Meiji boom in, 46; and
58n64, 73n27, 108 readers, conspiratorial rela-
Miyazaki Muryū: Jiyū no kachidoki tionship between, 28, 55; self-
(Torch of freedom), 72; interest within, 53; and transla-
Kishūshū (Demons softly cry- tion, 57
ing), 72 Narration, third-person, 46, 51–52,
Modern individual, 85, 140, 161, 180–81; authority of, 54–56, 58
176, 182–83, 190, 195. See also Narrative frame, 207–9, 213–14,
Student/intellectual 245–46
Modernization: detective as Narrator: eavesdropping, 28, 35,
metaphor within, 157; detec- 41–42; of Edo fiction, 25–28;
tive fiction as gauge for, 100– fundamental immorality of,
101; and phenomenon of the 166–67. See also Detective: as
double, 212; and emergence ideal narrator/novelist
of detective as fictional hero, Natsume Sōseki, 5, 10–11, 179n31,
9; and social Darwinism, 21; 274; criticism of detective by,
Sōseki’s understanding of, 157–58; and Japanese Natural-
175–76, 259; and student/ ism, 158; London experience
intellectual, 6, 9, 264; tribula- of, 156–57, 260; mediations
tions within Japan’s, 175–76, on modern experience by,
233–34; as Westernization, 6–7 259-61
 Index 303

—Higan sugi made (Until after the modern-day Japan), 175n27,

equinox), 168–82; comparisons 219n39, 259–60, 264n52; Ku-
to Hakai, 169–70; comparisons samakura (Pillow of grass), 167;
to Kokoro, 181–82, 187, 195; and Nowaki (Autumn wind), 167–
Crime and Punishment, 172–74; 68; “Rondon tō” (Tower of
criticism of risshin shusse ideol- London), 259–60, 265, 271;
ogy in, 169–70; dynamic of Sanshirō, 260n43; “Shumi no
truth-as-secret in, 175–80; and iden” (The heredity of taste),
kōtō yūmin, 173–74, 264; defini- 167
tion of detective in, 168–69; Naturalism, Japanese, 10, 114, 158
meditations on the modern New Criminal Code (Shin-keihō),
Japanese intellectual in, 175–76; 123
and woman as mystery-to-be- Newspaper Ordinance (Shinbun-
solved, 171–72 shi jōrei), 35, 61, 74
—Kokoro, 181–96, 199, 234; be- Newspaper, 35–37; and allegorical
trayal of the narrator in, 188– interpretative framework, 61–
89; comparisons to Higan sugi 63; and bunmei kaika, 35–37;
made, 181–82, 187, 195; compari- circulation numbers for,
sons to “Kaika no satsujin,” 39n42; and death of Meiji em-
200–201, 205–6; and detective peror, 192; Meiji readership of
fiction paradigm, 191, 194; dy- koshinbun and ōshinbun, 36n34;
namic of first-person narration and literature as institution,
in, 183–88; dynamic of trau- 145, 146n65; and novel-writing
matic past in, 186–88, 193–94; contests, 145; power of, 8n13;
and General Nogi, 191–94; Ruikō’s effect on sales of, 1n1,
Komori Yōichi’s analysis of, 108; scandal reporting in, 60–
183–85, 187; meditations on the 63, 108, 124, 153–54; and serial-
modern Japanese intellectual ized fiction, 94; as venue for
in, 182–83; and Meiji emperor, Meiji introduction of detective
191, 192n52; as schizophrenic stories, 1, 65–66; in Yūzai
narrative, 190–91 muzai, 78–79, 93–94. See also
—Wagahai wa neko de aru (I am a Koshinbun; Ōshinbun; Tsuzuki-
cat), 158–68, 182, 195; cat as de- mono; Zappō
tective in, 163–65; criticism of Ninjō (human feelings), 19–21, 24,
detective in, 160–61; first- 26, 28, 31, 44, 272
person narration of, 165–66; Ninjōbon (books on human feel-
and monetary success, 144, ings), 20–21, 25–26, 28
162–63; as shaseibun, 159; and Niroku shinpō (newspaper), 124,
Shōyō’s novelistic worldview, 153
161, 166–67 Nogi Maresuke, 191–94
—Other texts: Botchan (The Normanton Incident, 69
young master), 167; “Bungei no Novel: Japanese, 5–6, 11, 15, 33n29,
tetsugaku-teki kiso” (The phi- 59, 109–10, 111, 273–76, 278;
losophical foundations of liter- modern, 5, 10, 21, 25, 41, 43, 52,
ary arts), 157; “Gendai Nihon 54, 57, 111, 166; realistic, 16, 26,
no kaika” (The civilization of 42, 44; Western, 26, 29n23, 44
304 Index

Novel-writing contests, 145–46 chotomy, 25; identities, 82,

85, 268; spheres, dichotomy
Ōi Kentarō, 104–5 between, 25, 266; spheres,
Ordinance of Transgressions and production of, 37–39; spheres,
Negligence (Ishiki kaii jōrei), transgression between, 37, 39,
37 161, 164
Originality, notion of, 212, 215–20 Public Order Ordinance (Chian
Osaka Incident, 69, 105n69 jōrei), 12, 64, 75–77
Ōshinbun (large or prestige news-
paper), 36, 39 Reader: private enjoyment of, 51,
Ōsugi Sakae, 279 94–95, 97; expectation, 14–15,
Ōtsuka Kusuoko, 129n38 55, 246
Reason: and detective, 7, 100;
Peerage, 89–92, 105n69, 108n74 within interior/exterior di-
Peerage Ordinance (Kazoku rei), chotomy, 21–23, 26–27, 31, 33–
89, 92 34, 47n55, 80, 172n23
Poe, Edgar Allan, 6, 13; “The Ren’ai (love). See Ideal, Western
Black Cat,” 46; Dupin, Au- Reportage writings, 124
guste (character), 23, 100, 215– Revised Law (Kaitei ritsuryō),
17, 221, 278; Dupin trilogy, 67n17
51n57, 100, 104n68, 222, 240; Rice Riots of 1918, 198, 281
“The Gold-Bug,” 239, 243; Risshin shusse (rising in the world),
“The Murder in the Rue ideology of, 7, 91–92, 144, 158;
Morgue,” 23, 46, 51n57, 278; alternative modes of, 144–46,
“William Wilson,” 212, 224 163; and burakumin, 130, 139;
Police, the, 168, 220n41; and detective as emblem of success
detective fiction, 13, 100–101, in, 7, 112; fictional negotiation
113, 277; Japanese, 8n13, 38n41, of difficulties within, 112, 150–
62n6, 68, 155n75; masses as, 281 52; and immigration, 139, 143,
Political novel, 22n10, 61, 63, 65, 262n43; and middle-school
72, 75–77, 96–97 system, 144; and novel-writing
Privacy: of Meiji emperor, 191–92; contests, 145–46; and peers,
and the novel, 40–41, 58; viola- 92, 109; and scandal journalism,
tion of, 141, 164–65, 169 124, 154; and Shinseinen, 262–
Private life, 37–38, 271; impor- 63; tribulations of student/
tance of and respect for, 40, intellectual within, 10, 114,
96; as object of depiction of 142–43; and woman, 149
the novel, 19–20, 24–25, 40–41, Rockwood, Harry: Donald Dyke,
51, 166, 272 83
Psychoanalysis, Freudian, 257–59 Rokumeikan: balls, 62–64, 89, 91–
Psychology: criminal, 123; within 92; building, 62; diplomacy,
detective fiction framework, 62–65
83–84, 115–16, 248–59 passim; Rumors, 63–64, 91, 156–57, 279–80;
and the novel, 23–24 in fictional works, 48, 81–82, 85,
Public and private: conflation 131, 137, 172n23, 202
with interior and exterior di- Russo-Japanese War, 10, 145, 155
 Index 305

Ryōsai kenbo ( good wife, wise —Hakai (The broken command-

mother), ideology of, 147–49, ment), 10, 114, 125–39, 169, 174,
154–55 262n48; confession scene in,
128–31, 135, 138; and Crime and
Satō Haruo, 5, 11, 199, 233–34 Punishment, 125–27, 150; critical
—“Shimon” (The fingerprint), 11, reception of, 127, 129n38; and
221–32; as constructed by ex- Emancipation Edict, 130–31;
cessive clues, 228–29, 234n60; narrative construction of
and the film medium, 222–23, Ushimatsu as criminal in, 133–
225–28, 231; and issue of the 35; as political criticism, 130–31;
double, 224–27; and fetishism, and risshin shusse ideology, 130–
230–31; plot summary of, 31, 139, 142–43, 150–52; and
221n42; role of the state in, 232 Ruikō’s Muzan, 132; and Ushi-
—Other texts: “Tantei shōsetsu matsu’s immigration to Texas,
shōron” (Brief thoughts on de- 138–39, 143. See also Burakumin
tective fiction), 236n3; “Tsuki —Other text: Haru (Spring), 126
kage” (Moon shadow), 224n46 Shimizu Shikin: “Imin gakuen”
Satomi Ton, 199 (School of émigrés), 126n30
Science: and bunmei kaika, 6, 207; Shinkei suijaku (mental break-
and detective, 6–7, 112–13, 122; down), 118
and detective fiction, 235–36, Shinseinen (magazine), 197, 235–36,
239n9, 240; and Meiji intellec- 238, 239n9, 239n10, 246, 262–64,
tual, 207; Ranpo’s rejection of 270, 274
positivistic, 257, 268 Shin-shumi (magazine), 263n49
Secret, 40, 199; adulterous, 85, 91, Shirakaba group, 218–19, 258, 270
175; aristocratic, 86, 92, 97; and Shiratori Shōgo, 197, 219
crime, 86, 93–95; and exposure, Shōnen sekai (magazine), 146n64
dynamic of, 6, 10, 114, 133, 135, Silver, Mark, 5n8, 67n15, 275n69
142, 150, 208–9; harboring of, Simmel, Georg, 265, 267
84–85; haunting of past, 181, Sino-Japanese War, 144, 163
186–88, 234; truth as, 176–80, Social mobility. See Risshin shusse,
194 ideology of
Seinen (youth), 76–77 Sōshi (boisterous youth), 76–77, 97,
Self-interest: of first-person nar- 105, 128
rator, 53; and Kokoro’s narrator, State: authority of, 220–21; and
187, 190; literary representa- confession, 279, 282; consolida-
tion of, 161, 174n25; and mod- tion of Japan as modern, 1;
ern individual, 11, 182–83, 195; democracy and, 12–13; detec-
and suppression of interior, 32; tive as agent of, 6, 12–13, 277–78;
vs. universal ideals, 205–6, 210– ideology of, 154–55; and masses,
11 281–82; submission to, 232
Sensational novel, 29n23, 71–73, 98 Student/intellectual: criminality
Shiga Naoya: “Han no hanzai” of, 9–11, 110, 118–19, 122–23, 150,
(Han’s crime), 204n13 152, 173–74; detective and, 6–7,
Shimamura Hōgetsu, 129n38 9, 16, 168; as emblematic sub-
Shimazaki Tōson, 5, 114, 126–27 jects of Japan’s modernization,
306 Index

6–7, 9–10, 27, 171, 173, 175–76, 210–12, 215–21, 246; and art as
264, 279; as kōtō yūmin, 173–74; ideal, 211, 215, 217; comparison
positive model for, 109, 112–13, to “Kaika no satsujin,” 210–11;
122; fantastic projections of, and Crime and Punishment, 216–
33n29, 275; Raskolnikov as, 17; and the double, 212;
116–19; and risshin shusse ideol- mechanism of disavowal in, 215,
ogy, 10, 91–92, 151–52; search 217, 219–21; as parody, 216, 218–
for self by, 276; from sōshi to 19; plot summary of, 210n21;
seinen, 77; tribulations of, 10, Western signifiers in, 215–17
111–14, 144, 200; turn away —Other texts: “A to B no hana-
from, as subject of literary ex- shi” (A story of A and B),
ploration, 123–25; and Western 212n25; “Hakuchū kigo” (The
ideals, 122, 206, 209, 233. See ghost in broad daylight),
also Western education/ 241n16; “Katsudō shashin no
learning genzai to shōrai” (The present
Subject: ills of modern Japanese, and future of the moving pic-
260, 267; interpellation by tures), 231n59
detective fiction framework Tanizaki Seiji, 212
as, 6–7, 9, 279; within Japan vs. Tantei (detective), use of term, 8–
West opposition, 173, 206, 9, 161, 162n9, 167, 199
233–34, 246, 276; Meiji, 65, 77, Tantei shōsetsu (detective novel),
209. See also Modern individual; use of term, 3, 70
Student/intellectual Tayama Katai, 5, 114, 126, 139,
Suehiro Tetchō: Setchūbai (Plum 146n64, 199; and novel-writing
blossoms in the snow), 72 contests, 145–46
Suicide: in fictional works, 30, —Futon (The quilt), 10, 114, 139–
93n53, 181, 185–89 passim, 194, 43, 146–55 passim, 174; compari-
201–2, 204-5, 208, 243n17, sons to Hakai, 140, 142; and
246, 253n29, 276; in history, Crime and Punishment, 139, 142,
126, 191–93 150; and I-novel discourse,
Suzuki, Tomi, 114n7, 141n52, 270–71; and risshin shusse ideol-
203n12, 218–19, 270 ogy, 142–43, 146, 149–50; and
ryōsai kenbo ideology, 147, 149,
Taishō Democracy, 12, 197–98, 154–55; Tokio as detective in,
233, 281n7 140–41; Tokio as model of
Taishō period, transition from success in, 152–54; and West-
Meiji: 206, 207n17, 210 ern novels, 141; and woman
Takada Incident, 8n14 as mystery-to-be-solved, 140;
Takahashi Oden, 68n21 and yellow journalism frame-
Takahashi Osamu, 47n55, 52, 55, work, 153–54
100n61, 115 Third-person narration. See Nar-
Tamenaga Shunsui, 20, 28n21 ration, third-person
Tanizaki Jun’ichirō, 5, 11, 199, 233, Three major issues petition
257 movement (Sandai jiken
—“Futari no geijutsuka no hana- kenpaku undō), 63–64,
shi” (The story of two artists), 76
 Index 307

Toda Kindō: Jōkai haran (A storm Shōyō’s introduction to, 43–44,

on the passionate seas), 61 47–48, 56, 64; structure of
Tokutomi Sohō, 2, 76–77 eavesdropping in, 50; as trans-
Tōkyō Asahi shinbun (newspaper), lation, 55–57. See also Green,
157, 167–68, 181 Anna Katharine: XYZ
Tōkyō Nichinichi shinbun (news- —Shōsetsu shinzui (The essence of
paper), 36, 60, 62 the novel), 4, 16, 18–25, 80–82;
Torture, prohibition and practice 96–97, 182; criticism of tsuzuki-
of, 67n17, 74, 80 mono in, 18–19; and didactic
Translation, 55; of Crime and Pun- framework, 19, 41–42; and
ishment in Japan, 4, 115, 217; focus on the private, 19–20, 25;
and introduction of detective interior/exterior dichotomy,
fiction in Japan, 1, 4–5, 9, use of, in, 21–22, 24–25; task
66n12, 246; Meiji essays on, 55; of the novelist articulated in,
techniques and strategies of, 21–24, 249; and two gazes of
46–47, 49–50, 54–57, 90–91, 115 the novelist, 24–25
Translator, 55–58, 121 —Other texts: Daisagishi (The
Tsubouchi Shōyō, 4–5, 116, 119n18, swindler), 58n64; Saikun (The
217n34; epistemological para- wife), 2, 52n58, 58n64; “Tane
digm, literary theory, and hiroi” (Gleaning the seeds), 17,
novelistic worldview of, 81, 96, 19–20, 46; Tōsei shosei katagi
123, 140, 161, 166–67, 182, 195, (Manners and lives of contem-
266, 272, 278; political project porary students), 25n16, 26–30,
of, 96–97; and “Shōyō-esque” 35, 41–42, 91, 111
clichés, 59, 81 Tsuzukimono (serials), 3n5, 17–20,
—Imotose kagami (Mirror of 39, 42, 42n46, 68
marriage), 29–43; act of eaves-
dropping in, 30–31, 33–35, 41; Uchida Roan, 4, 115–16, 119n18
critical reception of, 30–31; —Tsumi to batsu (Crime and pun-
criticism of eavesdropping in, ishment), 115–19, 121–23, 139;
39–40; and the moral author, and comparisons between
43; and paradox of the novel, Japan and Russia, 121–22; as
40–41; plot summary of, detective story, 115–16; Kita-
29n24; and woman as mystery, mura Tōkoku’s review of, 117–
32–33; and zappō column, 35, 19, 122; Meiji reception of, 116;
39 and Meiji understanding of
—Nisegane tsukai (The counter- crime and criminals, 123; poor
feiter), 4, 43–44, 46–58, 140, sale of, 115; and Ukigumo’s
169, 228; allegorical signifi- Bunzō, 116–17, 121–23
cance of, 63–64; comparisons Uchida Ryūzō, 5n8, 100–101,
to XYZ, 46–52; detective 157n3, 158n5
as metaphor in, 51, 54; eaves- Unconscious, 177, 225–26, 230n58,
dropping as duty of the detec- 256–58, 267–70, 273–74
tive in, 47–50; role of title in, Unequal treaties, 38n40, 62, 105,
54–55; shift of narrative per- 107; extraterritoriality clause
spective in, 46–48, 51–52, 54; of, 102–6
308 Index

Universal male suffrage of 1925, 12, Yanagita Kunio, 129n38

198 Yanase Keisuke: Shakai gai no
Upper-Girls’ School Act (Kōtō shakai: eta hinin (Society out-
jogakko rei), 147–48 side society), 143n58
Urbanization, 27, 212, 261–62, 264, Yellow journalism. See News-
267 paper: scandal reporting in
Yoda Gakkai, 46n53, 115n9, 117
Voting, 12–13 Yokoyama Gennosuke: Nihon no
kasō shakai (The lower societies
Waseda bungaku (magazine), of Japan), 124
129n38, 154 Yomiuri shinbun (newspaper), 17,
Watanabe Masahiko, 213n27, 225– 35–36, 43n46, 44, 46, 55, 69,
28 127
Watanabe Naomi, 131, 192n52 Yorozu chōhō (newspaper), 1n1, 108,
Western education/learning, 7, 11, 115, 124, 153, 175; “Chikushō no
77, 109, 111–13, 122–23, 136, 173. jitsurei” (The actual examples
See also Student/intellectual of keeping a mistress), 124;
Westernization, 6–7, 9, 21, 62, 67, House of Sōma scandal, 108;
92, 196, 233. See also Moderni- and novel-writing contests, 145;
zation “Tantei-dan ni tsuite,” 3
Williams, Raymond, 7n12
Woman: models of success for, Zappō (miscellaneous reports), 35–
148; as mystery-to-be-solved, 33, 40, 42n46
140, 171, 275 Zola, Émile, 114n7, 157
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39. Jerome Alan Cohen, ed., The Dynamics of China’s Foreign Relations
40. V. V. Vishnyakova-Akimova, Two Years in Revolutionary China, 1925–1927, trans.
Steven L. Levine
41. Meron Medzini, French Policy in Japan During the Closing Years of the Tokugawa
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42. Ezra Vogel, Margie Sargent, Vivienne B. Shue, Thomas Jay Mathews, and
Deborah S. Davis, The Cultural Revolution in the Provinces
43. Sidney A. Forsythe, An American Missionary Community in China, 1895–1905
*44. Benjamin I. Schwartz, ed., Reflections on the May Fourth Movement.: A Symposium
*45. Ching Young Choe, The Rule of the Taewŏngun, 1864–1873: Restoration in Yi Korea
46. W. P. J. Hall, A Bibliographical Guide to Japanese Research on the Chinese Economy,
1958–1970
47. Jack J. Gerson, Horatio Nelson Lay and Sino-British Relations, 1854–1864
48. Paul Richard Bohr, Famine and the Missionary: Timothy Richard as Relief
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49. Endymion Wilkinson, The History of Imperial China: A Research Guide
50. Britten Dean, China and Great Britain: The Diplomacy of Commercial Relations,
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51. Ellsworth C. Carlson, The Foochow Missionaries, 1847–1880
52. Yeh-chien Wang, An Estimate of the Land-Tax Collection in China, 1753 and 1908
53. Richard M. Pfeffer, Understanding Business Contracts in China, 1949–1963
 Harvard East Asian Monographs

*54. Han-sheng Chuan and Richard Kraus, Mid-Ching Rice Markets and Trade: An
Essay in Price History
55. Ranbir Vohra, Lao She and the Chinese Revolution
56. Liang-lin Hsiao, China’s Foreign Trade Statistics, 1864–1949
*57. Lee-hsia Hsu Ting, Government Control of the Press in Modern China, 1900–1949
*58. Edward W. Wagner, The Literati Purges: Political Conflict in Early Yi Korea
*59. Joungwon A. Kim, Divided Korea: The Politics of Development, 1945–1972
60. Noriko Kamachi, John K. Fairbank, and Chūzō Ichiko, Japanese Studies of Modern
China Since 1953: A Bibliographical Guide to Historical and Social-Science Research on the
Nineteenth and Twentieth Centuries, Supplementary Volume for 1953–1969
61. Donald A. Gibbs and Yun-chen Li, A Bibliography of Studies and Translations of
Modern Chinese Literature, 1918–1942
62. Robert H. Silin, Leadership and Values: The Organization of Large-Scale Taiwanese
Enterprises
63. David Pong, A Critical Guide to the Kwangtung Provincial Archives Deposited at the
Public Record Office of London
*64. Fred W. Drake, China Charts the World: Hsu Chi-yü and His Geography of 1848
*65. William A. Brown and Urgrunge Onon, translators and annotators, History of the
Mongolian People’s Republic
66. Edward L. Farmer, Early Ming Government: The Evolution of Dual Capitals
*67. Ralph C. Croizier, Koxinga and Chinese Nationalism: History, Myth, and the Hero
*68. William J. Tyler, tr., The Psychological World of Natsume Sōseki, by Doi Takeo
69. Eric Widmer, The Russian Ecclesiastical Mission in Peking During the Eighteenth
Century
*70. Charlton M. Lewis, Prologue to the Chinese Revolution: The Transformation of Ideas and
Institutions in Hunan Province, 1891–1907
71. Preston Torbert, The Ching Imperial Household Department: A Study of Its
Organization and Principal Functions, 1662–1796
72. Paul A. Cohen and John E. Schrecker, eds., Reform in Nineteenth-Century China
73. Jon Sigurdson, Rural Industrialism in China
74. Kang Chao, The Development of Cotton Textile Production in China
75. Valentin Rabe, The Home Base of American China Missions, 1880–1920
*76. Sarasin Viraphol, Tribute and Profit: Sino-Siamese Trade, 1652–1853
77. Ch’i-ch’ing Hsiao, The Military Establishment of the Yuan Dynasty
78. Meishi Tsai, Contemporary Chinese Novels and Short Stories, 1949–1974: An
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*79. Wellington K. K. Chan, Merchants, Mandarins and Modern Enterprise in Late
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80. Endymion Wilkinson, Landlord and Labor in Late Imperial China: Case Studies from
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*81. Barry Keenan, The Dewey Experiment in China: Educational Reform and Political Power
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*82. George A. Hayden, Crime and Punishment in Medieval Chinese Drama: Three Judge
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 Harvard East Asian Monographs

*83. Sang-Chul Suh, Growth and Structural Changes in the Korean Economy, 1910–1940
84. J. W. Dower, Empire and Aftermath: Yoshida Shigeru and the Japanese Experience,
1878–1954
85. Martin Collcutt, Five Mountains: The Rinzai Zen Monastic Institution in
Medieval Japan
86. Kwang Suk Kim and Michael Roemer, Growth and Structural Transformation
87. Anne O. Krueger, The Developmental Role of the Foreign Sector and Aid
*88. Edwin S. Mills and Byung-Nak Song, Urbanization and Urban Problems
89. Sung Hwan Ban, Pal Yong Moon, and Dwight H. Perkins, Rural Development
*90. Noel F. McGinn, Donald R. Snodgrass, Yung Bong Kim, Shin-Bok Kim, and
Quee-Young Kim, Education and Development in Korea
*91. Leroy P. Jones and II SaKong, Government, Business, and Entrepreneurship in
Economic Development: The Korean Case
92. Edward S. Mason, Dwight H. Perkins, Kwang Suk Kim, David C. Cole, Mahn
Je Kim et al., The Economic and Social Modernization of the Republic of Korea
93. Robert Repetto, Tai Hwan Kwon, Son-Ung Kim, Dae Young Kim, John
E. Sloboda, and Peter J. Donaldson, Economic Development, Population Policy, and
Demographic Transition in the Republic of Korea
94. Parks M. Coble, Jr., The Shanghai Capitalists and the Nationalist Government,
1927–1937
95. Noriko Kamachi, Reform in China: Huang Tsun-hsien and the Japanese Model
96. Richard Wich, Sino-Soviet Crisis Politics: A Study of Political Change and
Communication
97. Lillian M. Li, China’s Silk Trade: Traditional Industry in the Modern World, 1842–1937
98. R. David Arkush, Fei Xiaotong and Sociology in Revolutionary China
*99. Kenneth Alan Grossberg, Japan’s Renaissance: The Politics of the Muromachi Bakufu
100. James Reeve Pusey, China and Charles Darwin
101. Hoyt Cleveland Tillman, Utilitarian Confucianism: Chen Liang’s Challenge to Chu Hsi
102. Thomas A. Stanley, Ōsugi Sakae, Anarchist in Taishō Japan: The Creativity of the Ego
103. Jonathan K. Ocko, Bureaucratic Reform in Provincial China: Ting Jih-ch’ang in
Restoration Kiangsu, 1867–1870
104. James Reed, The Missionary Mind and American East Asia Policy, 1911–1915
105. Neil L. Waters, Japan’s Local Pragmatists: The Transition from Bakumatsu to Meiji in
the Kawasaki Region
106. David C. Cole and Yung Chul Park, Financial Development in Korea, 1945–1978
107. Roy Bahl, Chuk Kyo Kim, and Chong Kee Park, Public Finances During the Korean
Modernization Process
108. William D. Wray, Mitsubishi and the N.Y.K, 1870–1914: Business Strategy in the
Japanese Shipping Industry
109. Ralph William Huenemann, The Dragon and the Iron Horse: The Economics of
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*110. Benjamin A. Elman, From Philosophy to Philology: Intellectual and Social Aspects of
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111. Jane Kate Leonard, Wei Yüan and China’s Rediscovery of the Maritime World
 Harvard East Asian Monographs

112. Luke S. K. Kwong, A Mosaic of the Hundred Days:. Personalities, Politics, and Ideas
of 1898
*113. John E. Wills, Jr., Embassies and Illusions: Dutch and Portuguese Envoys to K’ang-hsi,
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114. Joshua A. Fogel, Politics and Sinology: The Case of Naitō Konan (1866–1934)
*115. Jeffrey C. Kinkley, ed., After Mao: Chinese Literature and Society, 1978–1981
116. C. Andrew Gerstle, Circles of Fantasy: Convention in the Plays of Chikamatsu
117. Andrew Gordon, The Evolution of Labor Relations in Japan: Heavy Industry,
1853–1955
*118. Daniel K. Gardner, Chu Hsi and the “Ta Hsueh”: Neo-Confucian Reflection on the
Confucian Canon
119. Christine Guth Kanda, Shinzō: Hachiman Imagery and Its Development
*120. Robert Borgen, Sugawara no Michizane and the Early Heian Court
121. Chang-tai Hung, Going to the People: Chinese Intellectual and Folk Literature,
1918–1937
*122. Michael A. Cusumano, The Japanese Automobile Industry: Technology and
Management at Nissan and Toyota
123. Richard von Glahn, The Country of Streams and Grottoes: Expansion, Settlement, and
the Civilizing of the Sichuan Frontier in Song Times
124. Steven D. Carter, The Road to Komatsubara: A Classical Reading of the Renga Hyakuin
125. Katherine F. Bruner, John K. Fairbank, and Richard T. Smith, Entering China’s
Service: Robert Hart’s Journals, 1854–1863
126. Bob Tadashi Wakabayashi, Anti-Foreignism and Western Learning in Early-Modern
Japan: The “New Theses” of 1825
127. Atsuko Hirai, Individualism and Socialism: The Life and Thought of Kawai Eijirō
(1891–1944)
128. Ellen Widmer, The Margins of Utopia: “Shui-hu hou-chuan” and the Literature of
Ming Loyalism
129. R. Kent Guy, The Emperor’s Four Treasuries: Scholars and the State in the Late
Chien-lung Era
130. Peter C. Perdue, Exhausting the Earth: State and Peasant in Hunan, 1500–1850
131. Susan Chan Egan, A Latterday Confucian: Reminiscences of William Hung (1893–1980)
132. James T. C. Liu, China Turning Inward: Intellectual-Political Changes in the Early
Twelfth Century
*133. Paul A. Cohen, Between Tradition and Modernity: Wang T’ao and Reform in Late
Ching China
134. Kate Wildman Nakai, Shogunal Politics: Arai Hakuseki and the Premises of
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*135. Parks M. Coble, Facing Japan: Chinese Politics and Japanese Imperialism, 1931–1937
*136. Jon L. Saari, Legacies of Childhood: Growing Up Chinese in a Time of Crisis, 1890–1920
137. Susan Downing Videen, Tales of Heichū
138. Heinz Morioka and Miyoko Sasaki, Rakugo: The Popular Narrative Art of Japan
139. Joshua A. Fogel, Nakae Ushikichi in China: The Mourning of Spirit
 Harvard East Asian Monographs

140. Alexander Barton Woodside, Vietnam and the Chinese Model: A Comparative Study
of Vietnamese and Chinese Government in the First Half of the Nineteenth Century
*141. George Elison, Deus Destroyed: The Image of Christianity in Early Modern Japan
142. William D. Wray, ed., Managing Industrial Enterprise: Cases from Japan’s Prewar
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*143. T’ung-tsu Ch’ü, Local Government in China Under the Ching
144. Marie Anchordoguy, Computers, Inc.: Japan’s Challenge to IBM
145. Barbara Molony, Technology and Investment: The Prewar Japanese Chemical Industry
146. Mary Elizabeth Berry, Hideyoshi
147. Laura E. Hein, Fueling Growth: The Energy Revolution and Economic Policy in
Postwar Japan
148. Wen-hsin Yeh, The Alienated Academy: Culture and Politics in Republican China,
1919–1937
149. Dru C. Gladney, Muslim Chinese: Ethnic Nationalism in the People’s Republic
150. Merle Goldman and Paul A. Cohen, eds., Ideas Across Cultures: Essays on Chinese
Thought in Honor of Benjamin L Schwartz
151. James M. Polachek, The Inner Opium War
152. Gail Lee Bernstein, Japanese Marxist: A Portrait of Kawakami Hajime, 1879–1946
*153. Lloyd E. Eastman, The Abortive Revolution: China Under Nationalist Rule, 1927–1937
154. Mark Mason, American Multinationals and Japan: The Political Economy of Japanese
Capital Controls, 1899–1980
155. Richard J. Smith, John K. Fairbank, and Katherine F. Bruner, Robert Hart and
China’s Early Modernization: His Journals, 1863–1866
156. George J. Tanabe, Jr., Myōe the Dreamkeeper: Fantasy and Knowledge in Kamakura
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157. William Wayne Farris, Heavenly Warriors: The Evolution of Japan’s Military,
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158. Yu-ming Shaw, An American Missionary in China: John Leighton Stuart and Chinese-
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159. James B. Palais, Politics and Policy in Traditional Korea
*160. Douglas Reynolds, China, 1898–1912: The Xinzheng Revolution and Japan
161. Roger R. Thompson, China’s Local Councils in the Age of Constitutional Reform,
1898–1911
162. William Johnston, The Modern Epidemic: History of Tuberculosis in Japan
163. Constantine Nomikos Vaporis, Breaking Barriers: Travel and the State in Early
Modern Japan
164. Irmela Hijiya-Kirschnereit, Rituals of Self-Revelation: Shishōsetsu as Literary Genre and
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165. James C. Baxter, The Meiji Unification Through the Lens of Ishikawa Prefecture
166. Thomas R. H. Havens, Architects of Affluence: The Tsutsumi Family and the Seibu-
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167. Anthony Hood Chambers, The Secret Window: Ideal Worlds in Tanizaki’s Fiction
168. Steven J. Ericson, The Sound of the Whistle: Railroads and the State in Meiji Japan
169. Andrew Edmund Goble, Kenmu: Go-Daigo’s Revolution
 Harvard East Asian Monographs

170. Denise Potrzeba Lett, In Pursuit of Status: The Making of South Korea’s “New”
Urban Middle Class
171. Mimi Hall Yiengpruksawan, Hiraizumi: Buddhist Art and Regional Politics in Twelfth-
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172. Charles Shirō Inouye, The Similitude of Blossoms: A Critical Biography of Izumi Kyōka
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173. Aviad E. Raz, Riding the Black Ship: Japan and Tokyo Disneyland
174. Deborah J. Milly, Poverty, Equality, and Growth: The Politics of Economic Need in
Postwar Japan
175. See Heng Teow, Japan’s Cultural Policy Toward China, 1918–1931: A Comparative
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176. Michael A. Fuller, An Introduction to Literary Chinese
177. Frederick R. Dickinson, War and National Reinvention: Japan in the Great War,
1914–1919
178. John Solt, Shredding the Tapestry of Meaning: The Poetry and Poetics of Kitasono Katue
(1902–1978)
179. Edward Pratt, Japan’s Protoindustrial Elite: The Economic Foundations of the Gōnō
180. Atsuko Sakaki, Recontextualizing Texts: Narrative Performance in Modern
Japanese Fiction
181. Soon-Won Park, Colonial Industrialization and Labor in Korea: The Onoda
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182. JaHyun Kim Haboush and Martina Deuchler, Culture and the State in Late
Chosŏn Korea
183. John W. Chaffee, Branches of Heaven: A History of the Imperial Clan of Sung China
184. Gi-Wook Shin and Michael Robinson, eds., Colonial Modernity in Korea
185. Nam-lin Hur, Prayer and Play in Late Tokugawa Japan: Asakusa Sensōji and Edo
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186. Kristin Stapleton, Civilizing Chengdu: Chinese Urban Reform, 1895–1937
187. Hyung Il Pai, Constructing “Korean” Origins: A Critical Review of Archaeology,
Historiography, and Racial Myth in Korean State-Formation Theories
188. Brian D. Ruppert, Jewel in the Ashes: Buddha Relics and Power in Early Medieval Japan
189. Susan Daruvala, Zhou Zuoren and an Alternative Chinese Response to Modernity
*190. James Z. Lee, The Political Economy of a Frontier: Southwest China, 1250–1850
191. Kerry Smith, A Time of Crisis: Japan, the Great Depression, and Rural Revitalization
192. Michael Lewis, Becoming Apart: National Power and Local Politics in Toyama,
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193. William C. Kirby, Man-houng Lin, James Chin Shih, and David A. Pietz, eds.,
State and Economy in Republican China: A Handbook for Scholars
194. Timothy S. George, Minamata: Pollution and the Struggle for Democracy in
Postwar Japan
195. Billy K. L. So, Prosperity, Region, and Institutions in Maritime China: The South Fukien
Pattern, 946–1368
196. Yoshihisa Tak Matsusaka, The Making of Japanese Manchuria, 1904–1932
 Harvard East Asian Monographs

197. Maram Epstein, Competing Discourses: Orthodoxy, Authenticity, and Engendered

Meanings in Late Imperial Chinese Fiction
198. Curtis J. Milhaupt, J. Mark Ramseyer, and Michael K. Young, eds. and comps.,
Japanese Law in Context: Readings in Society, the Economy, and Politics
199. Haruo Iguchi, Unfinished Business: Ayukawa Yoshisuke and U.S.-Japan Relations,
1937–1952
200. Scott Pearce, Audrey Spiro, and Patricia Ebrey, Culture and Power in the
Reconstitution of the Chinese Realm, 200–600
201. Terry Kawashima, Writing Margins: The Textual Construction of Gender in Heian and
Kamakura Japan
202. Martin W. Huang, Desire and Fictional Narrative in Late Imperial China
203. Robert S. Ross and Jiang Changbin, eds., Re-examining the Cold War: U.S.-China
Diplomacy, 1954–1973
204. Guanhua Wang, In Search of Justice: The 1905–1906 Chinese Anti-American Boycott
205. David Schaberg, A Patterned Past: Form and Thought in Early Chinese Historiography
206. Christine Yano, Tears of Longing: Nostalgia and the Nation in Japanese Popular Song
207. Milena Doleželová-Velingerová and Oldřich Král, with Graham Sanders, eds.,
The Appropriation of Cultural Capital: China’s May Fourth Project
208. Robert N. Huey, The Making of ‘Shinkokinshū’
209. Lee Butler, Emperor and Aristocracy in Japan, 1467–1680: Resilience and Renewal
210. Suzanne Ogden, Inklings of Democracy in China
211. Kenneth J. Ruoff, The People’s Emperor: Democracy and the Japanese Monarchy,
1945–1995
212. Haun Saussy, Great Walls of Discourse and Other Adventures in Cultural China
213. Aviad E. Raz, Emotions at Work: Normative Control, Organizations, and Culture in
Japan and America
214. Rebecca E. Karl and Peter Zarrow, eds., Rethinking the 1898 Reform Period: Political
and Cultural Change in Late Qing China
215. Kevin O’Rourke, The Book of Korean Shijo
216. Ezra F. Vogel, ed., The Golden Age of the U.S.-China-Japan Triangle,
1972–1989
217. Thomas A. Wilson, ed., On Sacred Grounds: Culture, Society, Politics, and the
Formation of the Cult of Confucius
218. Donald S. Sutton, Steps of Perfection: Exorcistic Performers and Chinese Religion in
Twentieth-Century Taiwan
219. Daqing Yang, Technology of Empire: Telecommunications and Japanese Expansionism in
Asia, 1883–1945
220. Qianshen Bai, Fu Shan’s World: The Transformation of Chinese Calligraphy in the
Seventeenth Century
221. Paul Jakov Smith and Richard von Glahn, eds., The Song-Yuan-Ming Transition in
Chinese History
222. Rania Huntington, Alien Kind: Foxes and Late Imperial Chinese Narrative
223. Jordan Sand, House and Home in Modern Japan: Architecture, Domestic Space, and
Bourgeois Culture, 1880–1930
 Harvard East Asian Monographs

224. Karl Gerth, China Made: Consumer Culture and the Creation of the Nation
225. Xiaoshan Yang, Metamorphosis of the Private Sphere: Gardens and Objects in Tang-Song
Poetry
226. Barbara Mittler, A Newspaper for China? Power, Identity, and Change in Shanghai’s
News Media, 1872–1912
227. Joyce A. Madancy, The Troublesome Legacy of Commissioner Lin: The Opium Trade
and Opium Suppression in Fujian Province, 1820s to 1920s
228. John Makeham, Transmitters and Creators: Chinese Commentators and Commentaries on
the Analects
229. Elisabeth Köll, From Cotton Mill to Business Empire: The Emergence of Regional
Enterprises in Modern China
230. Emma Teng, Taiwan’s Imagined Geography: Chinese Colonial Travel Writing and
Pictures, 1683–1895
231. Wilt Idema and Beata Grant, The Red Brush: Writing Women of Imperial China
232. Eric C. Rath, The Ethos of Noh: Actors and Their Art
233. Elizabeth Remick, Building Local States: China During the Republican and Post-
Mao Eras
234. Lynn Struve, ed., The Qing Formation in World-Historical Time
235. D. Max Moerman, Localizing Paradise: Kumano Pilgrimage and the Religious Landscape
of Premodern Japan
236. Antonia Finnane, Speaking of Yangzhou: A Chinese City, 1550–1850
237. Brian Platt, Burning and Building: Schooling and State Formation in Japan, 1750–1890
238. Gail Bernstein, Andrew Gordon, and Kate Wildman Nakai, eds., Public Spheres,
Private Lives in Modern Japan, 1600–1950: Essays in Honor of Albert Craig
239. Wu Hung and Katherine R. Tsiang, Body and Face in Chinese Visual Culture
240. Stephen Dodd, Writing Home: Representations of the Native Place in Modern
Japanese Literature
241. David Anthony Bello, Opium and the Limits of Empire: Drug Prohibition in the
Chinese Interior, 1729–1850
242. Hosea Hirata, Discourses of Seduction: History, Evil, Desire, and Modern
Japanese Literature
243. Kyung Moon Hwang, Beyond Birth: Social Status in the Emergence of Modern Korea
244. Brian R. Dott, Identity Reflections: Pilgrimages to Mount Tai in Late Imperial China
245. Mark McNally, Proving the Way: Conflict and Practice in the History of
Japanese Nativism
246. Yongping Wu, A Political Explanation of Economic Growth: State Survival, Bureau-
cratic Politics, and Private Enterprises in the Making of Taiwan’s Economy, 1950–1985
247. Kyu Hyun Kim, The Age of Visions and Arguments: Parliamentarianism and the
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248. Zvi Ben-Dor Benite, The Dao of Muhammad: A Cultural History of Muslims in Late
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249. David Der-wei Wang and Shang Wei, eds., Dynastic Crisis and Cultural Innovation:
From the Late Ming to the Late Qing and Beyond
 Harvard East Asian Monographs

250. Wilt L. Idema, Wai-yee Li, and Ellen Widmer, eds., Trauma and Transcendence in
Early Qing Literature
251. Barbara Molony and Kathleen Uno, eds., Gendering Modern Japanese History
252. Hiroshi Aoyagi, Islands of Eight Million Smiles: Idol Performance and Symbolic
Production in Contemporary Japan
253. Wai-yee Li, The Readability of the Past in Early Chinese Historiography
254. William C. Kirby, Robert S. Ross, and Gong Li, eds., Normalization of U.S.-China
Relations: An International History
255. Ellen Gardner Nakamura, Practical Pursuits: Takano Chōei, Takahashi Keisaku, and
Western Medicine in Nineteenth-Century Japan
256. Jonathan W. Best, A History of the Early Korean Kingdom of Paekche, together with an
annotated translation of The Paekche Annals of the Samguk sagi
257. Liang Pan, The United Nations in Japan’s Foreign and Security Policymaking, 1945–
1992: National Security, Party Politics, and International Status
258. Richard Belsky, Localities at the Center: Native Place, Space, and Power in Late
Imperial Beijing
259. Zwia Lipkin, “Useless to the State”: “Social Problems” and Social Engineering in
Nationalist Nanjing, 1927–1937
260. William O. Gardner, Advertising Tower: Japanese Modernism and Modernity in
the 1920s
261. Stephen Owen, The Making of Early Chinese Classical Poetry
262. Martin J. Powers, Pattern and Person: Ornament, Society, and Self in Classical China
263. Anna M. Shields, Crafting a Collection: The Cultural Contexts and Poetic Practice of the
Huajian ji 花間集 (Collection from Among the Flowers)
264. Stephen Owen, The Late Tang: Chinese Poetry of the Mid-Ninth Century (827–860)
265. Sara L. Friedman, Intimate Politics: Marriage, the Market, and State Power in
Southeastern China
266. Patricia Buckley Ebrey and Maggie Bickford, Emperor Huizong and Late Northern
Song China: The Politics of Culture and the Culture of Politics
267. Sophie Volpp, Worldly Stage: Theatricality in Seventeenth-Century China
268. Ellen Widmer, The Beauty and the Book: Women and Fiction in Nineteenth-
Century China
269. Steven B. Miles, The Sea of Learning: Mobility and Identity in Nineteenth-
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270. Lin Man-houng, China Upside Down: Currency, Society, and Ideologies, 1808–1856
271. Ronald Egan, The Problem of Beauty: Aesthetic Thought and Pursuits in Northern Song
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272. Mark Halperin, Out of the Cloister: Literati Perspectives on Buddhism in Sung China,
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273. Helen Dunstan, State or Merchant? Political Economy and Political Process in
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274. Sabina Knight, The Heart of Time: Moral Agency in Twentieth-Century Chinese Fiction
275. Timothy J. Van Compernolle, The Uses of Memory: The Critique of Modernity in
the Fiction of Higuchi Ichiyō
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276. Paul Rouzer, A New Practical Primer of Literary Chinese

277. Jonathan Zwicker, Practices of the Sentimental Imagination: Melodrama, the Novel, and
the Social Imaginary in Nineteenth-Century Japan
278. Franziska Seraphim, War Memory and Social Politics in Japan, 1945–2005
279. Adam L. Kern, Manga from the Floating World: Comicbook Culture and the Kibyōshi
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280. Cynthia J. Brokaw, Commerce in Culture: The Sibao Book Trade in the Qing and
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281. Eugene Y. Park, Between Dreams and Reality: The Military Examination in Late
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282. Nam-lin Hur, Death and Social Order in Tokugawa Japan: Buddhism, Anti-Christianity,
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283. Patricia M. Thornton, Disciplining the State: Virtue, Violence, and State-Making in
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284. Vincent Goossaert, The Taoists of Peking, 1800–1949: A Social History of
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285. Peter Nickerson, Taoism, Bureaucracy, and Popular Religion in Early Medieval China
286. Charo B. D’Etcheverry, Love After The Tale of Genji: Rewriting the World of the
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287. Michael G. Chang, A Court on Horseback: Imperial Touring & the Construction of
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288. Carol Richmond Tsang, War and Faith: Ikkō Ikki in Late Muromachi Japan
289. Hilde De Weerdt, Competition over Content: Negotiating Standards for the Civil Service
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290. Eve Zimmerman, Out of the Alleyway: Nakagami Kenji and the Poetics of Outcaste
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291. Robert Culp, Articulating Citizenship: Civic Education and Student Politics in
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292. Richard J. Smethurst, From Foot Soldier to Finance Minister: Takahashi Korekiyo,
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293. John E. Herman, Amid the Clouds and Mist: China’s Colonization of Guizhou, 1200–
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294. Tomoko Shiroyama, China During the Great Depression: Market, State, and the World
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295. Kirk W. Larsen, Tradition, Treaties and Trade: Qing Imperialism and Chosŏn Korea,
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296. Gregory Golley, When Our Eyes No Longer See: Realism, Science, and Ecology in
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297. Barbara Ambros, Emplacing a Pilgrimage: The Ōyama Cult and Regional Religion in
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298. Rebecca Suter, The Japanization of Modernity: Murakami Haruki between Japan and
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299. Yuma Totani, The Tokyo War Crimes Trial: The Pursuit of Justice in the Wake of
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300. Linda Isako Angst, In a Dark Time: Memory, Community, and Gendered Nationalism
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301. David M. Robinson, ed., Culture, Courtiers, and Competition: The Ming Court (1368–
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302. Calvin Chen, Some Assembly Required: Work, Community, and Politics in China’s Rural
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303. Sem Vermeersch, The Power of the Buddhas: The Politics of Buddhism During the Koryŏ
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304. Tina Lu, Accidental Incest, Filial Cannibalism, and Other Peculiar Encounters in Late
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305. Chang Woei Ong, Men of Letters Within the Passes: Guanzhong Literati in Chinese
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306. Wendy Swartz, Reading Tao Yuanming: Shifting Paradigms of Historical Reception
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307. Peter K. Bol, Neo-Confucianism in History
308. Carlos Rojas, The Naked Gaze: Reflections on Chinese Modernity
309. Kelly H. Chong, Deliverance and Submission: Evangelical Women and the Negotiation of
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310. Rachel DiNitto, Uchida Hyakken: A Critique of Modernity and Militarism in Prewar
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311. Jeffrey Snyder-Reinke, Dry Spells: State Rainmaking and Local Governance in Late
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312. Jay Dautcher, Down a Narrow Road: Identity and Masculinity in a Uyghur Community
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313. Xun Liu, Daoist Modern: Innovation, Lay Practice, and the Community of Inner Alchemy
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314. Jacob Eyferth, Eating Rice from Bamboo Roots: The Social History of a Community of
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315. David Johnson, Spectacle and Sacrifice: The Ritual Foundations of Village Life in North
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316. James Robson, Power of Place: The Religious Landscape of the Southern Sacred Peak
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317. Lori Watt, When Empire Comes Home: Repatriation and Reintegration in Postwar Japan
318. James Dorsey, Critical Aesthetics: Kobayashi Hideo, Modernity, and Wartime Japan
319. Christopher Bolton, Sublime Voices: The Fictional Science and Scientific Fiction of Abe
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320. Si-yen Fei, Negotiating Urban Space: Urbanization and Late Ming Nanjing
321. Christopher Gerteis, Gender Struggles: Wage-Earning Women and Male-Dominated
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322. Rebecca Nedostup, Superstitious Regimes: Religion and the Politics of Chinese Modernity
323. Lucien Bianco, Wretched Rebels: Rural Disturbances on the Eve of the Chinese Revolution
324. Cathryn H. Clayton, Sovereignty at the Edge: Macau and the Question of Chineseness
325. Micah S. Muscolino, Fishing Wars and Environmental Change in Late Imperial and
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326. Robert I. Hellyer, Defining Engagement: Japan and Global Contexts, 1750–1868
327. Robert Ashmore, The Transport of Reading: Text and Understanding in the World of
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328. Mark A. Jones, Children as Treasures: Childhood and the Middle Class in Early
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329. Miryam Sas, Experimental Arts in Postwar Japan: Moments of Encounter, Engagement,
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330. H. Mack Horton, Traversing the Frontier: The Man’yōshū Account of a Japanese
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331. Dennis J. Frost, Seeing Stars: Sports Celebrity, Identity, and Body Culture in Modern
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332. Marnie S. Anderson, A Place in Public: Women’s Rights in Meiji Japan
333. Peter Mauch, Sailor Diplomat: Nomura Kichisaburō and the Japanese-American War
334. Ethan Isaac Segal, Coins, Trade, and the State: Economic Growth in Early Medieval
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335. David B. Lurie, Realms of Literacy: Early Japan and the History of Writing
336. Lillian Lan-ying Tseng, Picturing Heaven in Early China
337. Jun Uchida, Brokers of Empire: Japanese Settler Colonialism in Korea, 1876–1945
338. Patricia L. Maclachlan, The People’s Post Office: The History and Politics of the Japanese
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339. Michael Schiltz, The Money Doctors from Japan: Finance, Imperialism, and the Building
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340. Daqing Yang, Jie Liu, Hiroshi Mitani, and Andrew Gordon, eds., Toward a
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341. Sonia Ryang, Reading North Korea: An Ethnological Inquiry
342. Susan Huang, Picturing the True Form: Daoist Visual Culture in Medieval China
343. Barbara Mittler, A Continuous Revolution: Making Sense of Cultural Revolution Culture
344. Hwansoo Ilmee Kim, Empire of the Dharma: Korean and Japanese Buddhism,
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345. Satoru Saito, Detective Fiction and the Rise of the Japanese Novel, 1880–1930