Detective Fiction And The Rise Of The Japanese Novel 1880 1930

In Detective Fiction and the Rise of the Japanese Novel, Satoru Saito sheds light on the deep structural and conceptual similarities between detective fiction and the novel in prewar Japan. Arguing that the interactions between the two genres were not marginal occurrences but instead critical moments of literary engagement, Saito demonstrates how detective fiction provided Japanese authors with the necessary frameworks through which to examine and critique the nature and implications of Japan’s literary formations and its modernizing society. Through a series of close readings of literary texts by canonical writers of Japanese literature and detective fiction, including Tsubouchi Shoyo, Natsume Soseki, Shimazaki Toson, Sato Haruo, Kuroiwa Ruiko, and Edogawa Ranpo, Saito explores how the detective story functioned to mediate the tenuous relationships between literature and society as well as between subject and authority that made literary texts significant as political acts. By foregrounding the often implicit and contradictory strategies of literary texts—choice of narrative forms, symbolic mappings, and intertextual evocations among others—this study examines in detail the intricate interactions between detective fiction and the novel that shaped the development of modern Japanese literature.

"As an anthologist, Ellery Queen is without peer, his taste unequalled. As a bibliographer and a collector of the detective short story, Queen is, again, a historical personage. Indeed, Ellery Queen clearly is, after Poe, the most important American in mystery fiction." — Otto Penzler, from Detectionary: A Biographical Dictionary of Leading Characters in Mystery Fiction A newspaper receives a letter from a man claiming to have been murdered—it's impossible but the truth is not so simple; five strangers who share the same initials are invited to spend the night in a luxury hotel but one of them is a murderer. The 12 stories in this book will lead you through dramatic twists and unexpected turns. The legendary Ellery Queen selected these stories by award-winning Japanese authors from among many thousands published in postwar Japan. Each story features an unusual crime and a complex set of clues investigated by a diverse and colorful cast of characters that includes a calculating inspector, a tenacious journalist, and a determined scientist. The thrilling stories in this volume include: "Perfectly Lovely Ladies" by Kawabata Award winner Yasutaka Tsutsui: Eight women fight the high cost of living using violent means but will they get away with murder? "The Cooperative Defendant" by Akutagawa Prize winner Seicho Matsumoto: After a man confesses to a killing, he retracts his confession and accuses the detectives of coercion. But who is right? "Devil of a Boy" by Edogawa Rampo Prize winner Seiichi Morimura: A schoolboy may still be very young but he is as sinister as the most hardened of criminals…or is someone else involved? "The Kindly Blackmailer" by Mystery Writers of Japan Award winner Kyotaro Nishimura: A man involved in a fatal hit-and-run is blackmailed by a mysterious witness. Who is this enigmatic stranger? Ellery Queen's Japanese Mystery Stories is a collection that is sure to delight lovers of great detective and crime fiction. The book features a new foreword by Japanese detective fiction expert Satoru Saito which places the stories within the context of Japanese society and modern Japanese literature.

Little is known about the boy detective in Japanese detective fiction despite his popularity. Who is he, and what mysteries does he unveil about cultural understandings of youth in Japanese society? Manga, Murder and Mystery answers these questions by exploring the figure of the shonen (boy) detective in commercially successful manga series such as Detective Conan, The Case Files of Young Kindaichi, Death Note and Moriarty the Patriot. The book explores how these popular works tackle the crisis of young adult culture within the socioeconomic climate of Japan's 'lost decade' and Heisei era, broadly speaking. Mimi Okabe shows how detective manga materialized in a nation undergoing a state of crisis and how the boy detective emerged as a site of national trauma to address perceived youth problems but in thematically different ways.

The first systematic account of crime fiction as a global genre, offering unprecedented coverage of distinct traditions across the world.

In Satō Haruo and Modern Japanese Literature, Charles Exley examines Satō’s novels and short stories from the 1910 s through the 1930s, placing them in discursive and historical context.

Who are the most important Canadian crime and detective writers? How do they help represent Canada as a nation? How do they distinguish Canada’s approach to questions of crime, detection, and social justice from those of other countries? The Routledge Introduction to Canadian Crime Fiction provides a much-needed investigation into how crime and detection have been, are, and will be represented within Canada’s national literature, with an attention to contemporary popular and literary texts. The book draws together a representative set of established Canadian authors who would appear in most courses on Canadian crime and detective fiction, while also introducing a few authors less established in the field. Ultimately, the book argues that crime fiction is a space of enormously productive hybridity that offers fresh new approaches to considering questions of national identity, gender, race, sexuality, and even genre.

"Rise of a Japanese Chinatown is the first English-language monograph on the history of a Chinese immigrant community in Japan. It focuses on the transformations of that population in the Japanese port city of Yokohama from the Sino–Japanese War of 1894–1895 to the normalization of Sino–Japanese ties in 1972 and beyond. Eric C. Han narrates the paradoxical story of how, during periods of war and peace, Chinese immigrants found an enduring place within a monoethnic state.This study makes a significant contribution to scholarship on the construction of Chinese and Japanese identities and on Chinese migration and settlement. Using local newspapers, Chinese and Japanese government records, memoirs, and conversations with Yokohama residents, it retells the familiar story of Chinese nation building in the context of Sino-Japanese relations. But it builds on existing works by directing attention as well to non-elite Yokohama Chinese, those who sheltered revolutionary activists and served as an audience for their nationalist messages. Han also highlights contradictions between national and local identifications of these Chinese, who self-identified as Yokohama-ites (hamakko) without claiming Japaneseness or denying their Chineseness. Their historical role in Yokohama’s richly diverse cosmopolitan past can offer insight into a future, more inclusive Japan."

Madness in the Family traces the history of how family became crucial in the care of those considered mad, as well as in creating gendered explanations of madness, in turn-of-the-twentieth-century Japan. As women and families navigated a shifting therapeutic landscape of madness, they produced their own understandings and approaches to madness that, like elsewhere in the world, would take precedence over the claims of psychiatry, the law, and the state in everyday life.