Having learned nothing from my Sekai post about the perils of reviewing novels that few people have read, the work that we are covering in this post is exceptionally niche. The benefit of this is that anyone who even knows what Tsukumojuuku is—let alone has the interest to read an essay about it—should be reasonably deep into some particular subcultures. This hopefully allows for enough assumed knowledge that we can focus on the details rather than getting bogged down in ancillary context.
The result of this approach is that I can proceed as though Tsukumojuuku is far from your first Japanese novel, your first mystery novel, or even your first Japanese mystery novel. I can probably also operate as though you are aware of the kinds of things that I covered in the aforementioned Sekai post and have at least a general idea of the common buzzwords and tropes of this blog.
If this is not the case, the first thing I would say is “may GOD (God Of Detectives) have mercy on your soul.” The second, I suppose, is that I may as well provide a small piece of guidance for anyone who is here by coincidence: Tsukumojuuku is a 2003 novel by Outarou Maijou. At least go read it before continuing with this post. That is all the help you are getting.
I expect this will be quite long for something that is not one of my scheduled deep dive posts; strap yourselves in.
This post contains major spoilers for Outarou Maijou’s Tsukumojuuku and Speedboy!, as well as more minor spoilers for his Disco Detective Wednesdayyy, ID Invaded, The World is Made of Closed Rooms, and Drill Hole in my Brain. There are also spoilery explanations of content from Ryuusui Seiryouin’s Cosmic and Jorker, as well as the 2019 film Joker (the Batman one, nothing to do with Seiryouin)
The text in the following widget just establishes some academic definitions. It also isn’t interesting to read. Depending on your knowledge of world history, it might be worth skipping it for the “real” start of the post.
The context of artistic realism
The invention of the photograph in the 19th century was the first time that a medium of communication carried a depiction of “reality” by default. In all prior technologies that humans used to relay ideas, experiences, or scenes, reality emerged from the human imagination instead of the properties of the medium itself. In this context, it is important to understand the deceptive quality of realism as an artistic decision: Realism is used to overlap the content of an artwork with the sensation that it is an extension of our own reality, as though we are experiencing it through our own eyes (and other senses). However, since this art is created from the ground up by humans, there is no guarantee of the convergence between artistic realism and the actual content of reality. It might be that something which does not exist at all is depicted with flawless realism, and something that definitely exists is communicated solely through abstract symbols.
The fascination with realism in the West largely came into force during the Renaissance. Renaissance artists were heavily inspired by the perceived loss of “classical” and “ancient” culture due to the fragmented political history of Europe since the fall of Rome. In particular, they saw the stark realism of Greek sculpture work during the Classical and Hellenistic periods as reflective of a more advanced artistic culture that had been lost in the chaos of the Middle Ages. This idea largely came into vogue as Greek sculptures, such as the below example, were witnessed, and sometimes looted, by Western European crusaders and traders who had become more intimately involved with the Middle East during the Late Middle Ages.
In emulation of these long-lost cultural values, the realistic depiction of the human form came to be a central development of the Renaissance. To be clear, Renaissance art was not actually a thorough or direct return of Classical and Hellenistic aesthetics. Greek art on the whole, beyond the importance of realistic sculpture work, was highly varied, and often featured the same spatially non-literal styles that carried over into Roman and Medieval painting styles. Regardless, during the Renaissance, realistically proportioned, full-body sculptures became a common sight in several prominent Italian cities. And in the realm of painting, mural, mosaic, and other two-dimensional visual art, unimaginably realistic styles became highly valued.
This pursuit of realism was in direct contrast to the highly symbolic religious art that had previously dominated the Middle Ages in Europe, such as below:
However, the realism of Renaissance art was fundamentally deceptive. Just as the art of their Greek inspirations had depicted ancient myths and legends, the art of the Renaissance was immensely focused on Biblical stories and scenes from Ancient Greece, as in the earlier Renaissance mural, which was The School of Athens by Raphael Sanzio da Urbino. Although every person within that mural is depicted with such realistic detail as to imply that they had been seen by the artist himself, the artist was living well over a millennium after the hypothetical scene could have taken place. The conceit that it is a window into a real moment in Ancient Greek life is entirely a fictive illusion. It is the product of the imagination of those living during the Renaissance. This contrasts itself to later styles of realism, such as those that arose in the 19th century, which were focused on painting portraits and landscapes directly in front of the artists’ own eyes.
There is a temptation to think of the movement from abstract art towards the highly realistic styles that we just discussed was the product of a linear historical development towards “sophisticated” culture. However, this is a baseless and Eurocentric assumption. Take, for example, these works from Qichang Dong, who lived contemporaneously to these Renaissance art movements. Dong lived in the economically prosperous territory of the Ming dynasty that ruled China.
In contrast to European realism, which was used in service of the reproduction of fictional scenes from myth and history, these Chinese works captured very real landscapes that were in front of the artist’s eyes by expressing their shapes in non-literal, physically impossible spatial proportions. In doing so, Qichang Dong captured the symbolic essence of the starkness of a real space rather than trying to capture naked reality through the European standard of realism. Dong’s art is demonstrative of the reasons that we should treat the development of European realism with a critical and analytical gaze, rather than assuming its inevitability.
Premodern literature
Of course, these ideological developments in visual art paralleled commensurate shifts in other mediums. Since this post is nominally about a work of literature, we should focus on the development of literature over the same period. According to the literary historian and critic Ian Watt, the emergence of modern literature, as embodied by the novel, emerged out of shifts in the approach to realism in modern artistic expression. These modern novels correspond closely to the realism that emerged in the generalised philosophical perspectives that informed later European portraits and landscapes, where the content of the art mirrored that which was seen directly by the artist in reality. To quote Watt:
Modern realism, of course, begins from the position that truth can be discovered by the individual through his senses … The general temper of philosophical realism has been critical, anti-traditional and innovating; its method has been the study of the particulars of experience by the individual investigator, who, ideally at least, is free from the body of past assumptions and traditional beliefs; and it has given a peculiar importance to semantics, to the problem of the nature of the correspondence between words and reality. All of these features of philosophical realism have analogies to distinctive features of the novel form, analogies which draw attention to the characteristic kind of correspondence between life and literature which has obtained in prose fiction since the novels of Defoe and Richardson.
While literature and visual art do have their own particular nuances that distinguish their respective historical development, it is important to remember that the forces that shaped visual art, which we summarised in the prior section, were present and intimately reflected in the development of literature. Naturally, we will not cover the entire history of the development of literature, even if such detail would highlight these differences. Instead, we will use the basic framework that we constructed for thinking about realism in the realm of visual arts, and then trace out how these same concepts were relevant for the development of literature from its premodern form into the modern idea of a novel.
The earliest forms of written literature share their lineage with the much older tradition of oral storytelling. Before the emergence of sophisticated printing technology and bureaucratised education, the educational barriers to literacy and labour involved in transcription were prohibitive to the widespread adoption of literature as a medium. The main use of literature once it did develop was for the storage and transmission of these oral legends among a narrow class of the highly educated, such as the clergy. As a result, our earliest known classics of literature, such as Homer’s foundational duology of epic poetry—the Illiad and Odyssey—were composed in a style that was intended to be transmitted via the spoken word.
Much of the remnants of the shift from oral traditions to literature are widely understood and have an obvious internal logic. For example, beyond just being an aesthetic tool, poetry was especially dominant in premodern literature precisely because rhythm, rhyme, and similar poetic tools helped to make the stories easier to memorise. Beyond this, rhyme in particular acted as a self-correction tool similar to the verification digits used in modern cryptography: Even if a particular storyteller forgot the middle of a phrase, the rhyming scheme ensured the order and ending of each phrase in relation to one another.
Such tendencies extended far beyond poetry from Ancient Greece. We can still see the limitations on literary technology when we look at the poetic nature of Elizabethan theatre—as in, the period of William Shakespeare. And before the arrival of European modernisation, both technologically and ideologically speaking, many nations had their own particular traditions of premodern literature and storytelling. For example, the Japanese koudan featured the telling of memorised historical epics to the strict rhythm of a traditional wooden clapper (a form that shares a lineage with the likely more well known and recent tradition of rakugo).
This is all to say that the technological condition of premodern society was closely associated with the particular form that fiction took within the medium of literature. Beyond just the tendencies towards memorisable and poetic language, the stories and characters of premodern literature were naturally shaped by these limitations as well. Put another way, just as the use of verse corresponded to ensuring that information was easy to transmit and remember without reference to a written record, there were particular tropes and methodologies used to ensure that the audience could follow along with the characterisation and flow of a complex story even under the limitations of oral storytelling.
These considerations were a major driver of the heavy use of symbolic context in premodern storytelling. For an audience that lacked the massive media literacy of the contemporary age, and who also could not scrutinise the nuances of a written work of literature themselves, information needed to be transmitted through unambiguous and clearly signposted categories. This is precisely why premodern drama made such extensive use of stock characters, as well as the associated costumes that signalled these categories instead of any individualised sense of character. I am sure that many readers are aware of the sock and buskin mask symbols, as manifestations of comedy and tragedy. These symbols have seen continued use in the modern day, being generally associated with the dramatic arts, but they had a far more literal and practical purpose in earlier eras of theatre.
These symbols have a very concrete lineage, going back to Greek theatre, where characters wore particular costumes—usually well-known kinds of footwear instead of these more elaborate and expensive masks—to symbolise their association with established character archetypes. Such tendencies continued in primarily spoken storytelling art forms throughout European history, such as in the Italian commedia dell’arte, where recurring stock characters wore standardised costumes in order to communicate their role to the audience. This has an obvious correspondence to the traditions that led to kabuki masks in kabuki theatre in Japan.
It is no coincidence that these sock and boskin masks, which have become a widely known shorthand for such tendencies in theatre, are directly associated with specific genres (tragedy and comedy). Genres themselves embody many of these same tendencies towards categorisation and symbolisation that defined premodern literature. Just as the use of symbolic characters ensured that the audience could follow along with the ‘noisy bandwidth’ of oral storytelling, genres guaranteed that the same was true of the general structure and flow of the narrative. While genres today are a broad sorting mechanism used to categorise the mood and tone of artwork, for premodern literature, they corresponded to very particular and rigid structures that were designed to allow an audience to follow the structure of narratives as they were performed in real time. For example, in a Greek tragedy, the audience knew that after the narrator explains the context of the story in the prologue, the key characters of the drama will be introduced in turn in the parados. In fact, the rejection of these rigid genre boundaries was a key motivating force behind the intellectual preference for modern literature, with the 19th century critic Friedrich Schlegel going as far as calling the traditional use of genre “as primitive and childish as the old pre-Copernican ideas of astronomy [as in, the belief that the Sun revolved around the Earth].”
Returning to kabuki theatre for a moment: as the author and essayist Kiyoshi Kasai clarifies, kabuki does not employ anything like the self-contained settings of modern fiction. Instead, kabuki uses the pre-established ‘world’ of a particular historical or mythological setting so that there is no need for exposition within the story. In explaining this tendency, he draws a direct parallel to the tendencies of Greek epics and theatre. To quote Kasai:
All three great [Greek] tragedy writers wrote of the legend of Electra … in addition, Sophocles wrote two different stories in the tradition of the Oedipus myth. These stories were conceived of with the lore of Oedipus as an established ‘world’ to draw from. In the same manner as kabuki’s established use of a ‘world’ such as chuushingura, Greek tragedy used the ‘world’ of Oedipus.
Herein we find the central tendency in premodern literature and art: Archetypal stories that make heavy use of symbolised space. This conclusion matches with the general intuition that results from our own contemporary stereotypes of premodernity, which have been formed by our exposure to the era’s myths and legends. From the Greek theatre referenced by Kasai to the Medieval tales of pseudohistorical legendary knights such as Saint George, Roland, and King Arthur, our image of premodern myths as these highly symbolic, didactic tales fits closely with the picture of premodern literature that we have drawn so far. Congruently to their roots in the oral storytelling tradition, such premodern myths and legends made heavy use of these same conventions: poetic language, stock characters, the rigid application of narrative structures determined by pre-defined genres, and high symbolic thematic developments.
We should be sure not to confuse the presentation of myths as historical—or at least pseudohistorical—with the kind of realism that would later come to define modern art and literature. As in how we discussed visual art, realism is not fundamentally concerned with the reality of the underlying subject, but instead in the credibility and internal logic of the presentation of that subject in art. An AI generated photorealistic painting of a fictional space corresponds to realism, whereas an abstract and esoteric artistic depiction of an entirely real space is not realistic. In the same manner, premodern literature depicts the culturally “real” spaces of myth and religion in a highly symbolic and didactic manner lacking in what could be conceived of as modern realism. This mirrors ideas such as the earlier Medieval visual art that depicted the (contemporaneously assumed to be) real visage of Jesus in an abstract and spatially non-literal manner. These mythic stories took events that may or not have been real, and portrayed them highly poetically, using symbolic stock characters that embodied clear morals to teach the audience, all within rigid and well understood genre structures.
Modern literature and the realistic novel
While we have focused our discussion of realism—something that became central to modern literature—on the influence of technology, it is important to mention that there was a wide-ranging historical and ideological context to the development of that idea of realism. And there are many different angles from which we could attack this problem with some basis. The shift in thinking that took place from the Middle Ages to the early modern period is oftentimes called the Cartesian shift—named after the importance of the philosopher René Descartes. While modernity emerged under the influence of many specific continencies that never eventuated until long after Descartes’ death, everything that followed still existed under the shadow of Descartes. In particular, his most famous philosophical claim, which is still known all across the world, which was simply “I think, therefore I am.”
Plenty of readers might have heard the famous story that multiple people invented the light bulb simultaneously. While this simplifies a great deal of scientific history, as well as the interesting tale of some of the first patent wars, the essential moral of the story is unavoidably true: Often, the historical conditions for certain ideas lead to the parallel development and adoption of those ideas far beyond the influence of any one individual. While Descartes’ famous ‘cognito’ (I think) claim was representative of the shifting mental landscape of the early modern age, we do not need to concern ourselves with whether it was technology or the words of this particular philosopher that had the stronger impact on this shift. It is simply enough to note that in parallel to the time of Descartes, the basis for his claims were becoming spreading across the minds of the people of Europe. The modern conception of ‘I’ as an interior and psychologically individual being was becoming inescapable.
This expressed itself as a drastic shift across all manner of artistic expression. At the beginning of this post, we discussed the modern use of photographs as an extension of the audience’s senses. Even prior to the invention of the photograph, similar attitudes developed for the technology that was available. Realistic painting came to be seen as a tool that could substitute the artists’ eyes with one’s own. Through the dramatic historical and philosophical shifts that took Europe from the Middle Ages to the early modern period, people became aware of their own individual perspective as embodied by the claim “I think, therefore I am” and therefore it became inescapably important to interrogate the perspective of each work of art. In other words, the cognition of ‘I’ as the source of a perspective on the world very precisely negated the same conventions of premodern literature and art that we established in the prior section.
In the development of literature, this became most prominent in the issue of character. It was the need to depict characters that corresponded to the newly modern man which led to the emergence of the novel as the modern alternative to the forms of literature that were rooted in the oral, premodern tradition of myth. To return to Ian Watt:
Philosophically the particularising approach to character resolves itself into the problem of defining the individual person. Once Descartes had given the thought processes within the individual’s consciousness supreme importance, the philosophical problems connected with personal identity naturally attracted a great deal of attention … The parallel here between the tradition of realist thought and the formal innovations of the early novelists is obvious: both philosophers and novelists paid greater attention to the particular individual than had been common before.
The various technical characteristics of the novel … all seem to contribute to the furthering of an aim which the novelist shares with the philosopher—the production of what purports to be an authentic account of the actual experiences of individuals. This aim involved many other departures from the traditions of fiction besides those already mentioned.
Watt precisely and directly draws out the connections between the discovery of the philosophical individual and the emergence of literary realism. Just as visual art by the 19th century slowly came to be defined by the direct reproduction of that which could be seen by the artist, the novel emerged across modernity as the natural form of literature for depicting individuals as realistic human beings with their own interior lives. Indeed, the picture of the most pristine work of modern literature is a confessional and serious work of introspection, and the expression of the author’s own ‘unique’ voice and perspective. These human characters could not be the vague, symbolic existences that were typical of premodern literature.
With the basic contours of modern literature traced out, we have hopefully reached the point where we can save some time under the assumption that most readers are familiar with the basics of mystery fiction—that most peculiar genre that emerged suddenly and violently at the peak of modernity. Still, we should take a few sentences to explain the genre’s broad importance in terms of the history of the novel, which is a medium built on modern realism. Mystery fiction came to dominate the Western zeitgeist in the context of the aftermath of the First World War, where this ‘I’ of modernity had been banalified and anonymised by the mechanised mass death of individuals: In other words, at the height of modernity, its central premise was negated in a massive event that involved almost the whole world. In this context, mystery fiction’s peculiarities take on some clear importance. Characters in mystery fiction are assigned clear roles: detective, culprit, victim, suspect. In addition, there is a transparent fictionality to the genre—the entire premise carries a naked antagonism to the realism and psychology of modern literature.
With this in mind, instead of repeating a discussion of the fundamentals of mystery fiction, we are here to talk about the work of a particular author. One who takes this interplay between the premodern and the modern that is inherent to mystery fiction and twists its entire foundation into a unique and novel (pun intended) shape.
Ryuusui Seiryouin
(Sorry, the answer to the above foreshadowing is not Ryuusui Seiryouin.)
While not unheard of, it is relatively rare for authors to be given complete freedom to write in another author’s setting. Indeed, while there have occasionally been sanctioned pastiches of popular franchises, such as with John Dickson Carr’s officially recognised Sherlock Holmes stories, it is still the case that the very idea of writing a work that does not represent the author on their own terms is anathematical to the standards of modern literature. Modern literature, as we have discussed, takes on a confessional purpose, as if to extend the author’s perspective on the world and share it with the audience. In this view, the work is purely a medium of communication between author and audience and has no clear purpose on its own. Such notions would have been foreign to premodern literature, where much of the cultural canon relied on oral traditions whose authorship had been lost to the sands of times. As Kiyoshi Kasai puts it:
The modern literature that arrived after Rousseau begins with the vertical three-limbed structure of author-work-reader, which is taken to be natural and inevitable. With this structure, the author (my truth) is objectified and transposed into the work (my narrative). This work becomes an author surrogate for the reader. And with this framework, the reader can reach the author (my truth) through the act of accurately reading the work—that is, the author surrogate (my narrative). In fact, he must reach it: That is the irreplaceable, solemn meaning of reading in modern literature.
As a result, each word takes on only one meaning. Each sentence provides its own context. And the work solely represents the author. As long as we rely on the author-work-reader triad in our approach to modern literature, it will naturally be reduced to a direct author-reader structure. The work—down to its component words and sentences themselves—becomes a mere medium between the two. This medium is a regrettably necessary barrier in order to overlap the author’s truth with the reader’s truth, but nothing more.
Taking modern literature to be a medium of communication that exists between the author and audience leaves little room for derivative works such as pastiches and fanfiction. As Kasai correctly noted, the contents of each work must be their own context so as to provide a direct path to the author’s truth. This is in no small part why fanfiction has seen such a dramatic boom and re-evaluation in the contemporary age that has undergone a transformation from modernity to postmodernity. While the attitudes of critics and readers have not universally shifted from the values of modern literature, postmodernity has seen a revival of the text as independent from its use as a medium. As Kasai explains:
Postmodern critical theory attempted to liberate the unique contents of the work from being crushed within the author-reader structure and reduced to nothingness. The work itself has resultantly returned to the realm of text and criticism. It is no longer just an expendable and regrettable medium used for communication between the author (my truth) and the reader (their truth).
With the return of the text-as-itself, fanfiction and derivative works emerged from the underbelly of subculture and into the realm of ‘serious’ literature. Indeed, subculture more broadly has risen to particular prominence, as intermediating institutions and gatekeepers have been relentlessly trampled and relativised by the entertainment industry of contemporary capitalism. We can see this most clearly in the case of Japanese pop culture; shifts that are only now taking place in Western culture have been endogenous in Japan for decades, with derivative works and intertextual referentiality taken as the norm. It is important that we begin our direct discussion of Tsukumojuuku in this context, which is what makes the concept of a JDC tribute novel even conceivable.
Fortunately, I think I am safe to assume that anyone that is reading this post and has made it this far is aware of the biographical details of the JDC series, so we do not need to linger on those. Basically, the JDC (Japan Detective Club) series refers to a bunch of novels written by some hack named Ryuusui Seiryouin. Tsukumojuuku was commissioned as a tribute to promote the release of the fourth novel in this series. This title itself ruthlessly discards any compatibility with the notions of modern literature that we have discussed previously. The titular Tsukumojuuku (九十九十九) Katou shares a name with one of the most prominent characters in the JDC series named Juuku Tsukumo (still 九十九十九 in Japanese). At this level, the novel presents its foundation as that of a JDC novel, seeming to be titled Juuku Tsukumo as far as existing fans of the franchise would be concerned. It is only the difference of author that alludes to any decisive split with Seiryouin’s novels.
As the critic Hiroki Azuma correctly noted, the work of Ryuusui Seiryouin embodied the shift from modernity to postmodernity. In contrast to the rigid distinctions between each work that existed in the author-reader model of modern literature—or even extending that out to an author-work-reader model—Azuma proposed that Seiryouin’s work fits into the shift to a model of database consumption. In Azuma’s model, each work in postmodernity is consumed as an accumulation of their component elements, which can bleed across works through the shared database of memetic elements. As Azuma defines it:
Therefore, to consume [an otaku work] is not simply to consume a work (a small narrative) or a worldview behind it (a grand narrative), nor to consume characters and settings (a grand nonnarrative). Rather, it is linked to consuming the database of otaku culture as a whole. I call this consumer behaviour database consumption…”
In both Kasai’s summation of the postmodern text—that is, as something that gains independence from the author and reader—and in Azuma’s model of database consumption, the component elements of a work gain the ability to take on varied contexts beyond the communication between the author and audience. This leads to the re-symbolisation of narrative as it diverges from the kind of realism that was obligated by modern literature. Literature that interfaces with this contemporary standard of realism, such as Seiryouin’s, allows for the various components of their story to be given a freedom of context that causes them to almost become interactive—to be broken down and reformulated freely within the database. Such media has become highly symbolised and gamified. Put another way, Seiryouin’s work offer a game-like liberty from the author who was so highly privileged by the structure of modern literature. Tamaki Saitou explains this tendency vividly:
Seiryouin’s works display a remarkable division of setting and narrative. As a representative example, a list of the JDC’s detectives is presented in the novels as a standalone element separate from the story. This is just one of the game-like properties of a Seiryouin novel that cannot be ignored. This is despite the fact that a novel is itself the natural form of modern literature, carrying the non-game-like implication of an author who controls the characters independently from the readers.
Regardless, what is crucial is this technique that separates the narrative from the setting. It is precisely what frees the reader from the nearly insurmountable perception of the story as the sole dominion of the author. In addition, as this separation evokes an illusory feeling of control over the narrative, it symbolically hints at the limitless hypothetical worlds beyond the story itself. Put another way, the reader feels like they are viewing just one possible story among the many possibilities among many futures. This might be the primary origin of the game-like feeling in Seiryouin’s work.
While Saitou does hint at its importance, the collision between the postmodern and the novelistic (which is to say, modern) is even more fundamental to contemporary writers like Seiryouin than this explanation might suggest. For example, Seiryouin himself makes multiple appearances in different forms throughout the JDC series—ranging from trivial cameos of avatar characters to being something like the author of the universe. This frivolous insertion of the author into a work that structurally deteriorates the importance of the role of the author is profoundly important. It is not just that Seiryouin captured something game-like in the form of a novel. Instead, Seiryouin crafted a schizophrenic playground that mirrors the disconnected mental landscape of contemporary society, which is itself game-like in its many authors (institutions) that display no real authorship (control) over society. Seiryouin’s multiple manifestations in the universe of the JDC highlight how the author has lost control of the novel while still taunting the reader for the fact that this control has not passed on from the author to the reader—it has disappeared into the void.
It is for this reason that the idea of writing a fanfiction or derivative work for the JDC universe is inherently paradoxical. In order to achieve its thorough cleansing of the spirit of the modern novel, the JDC series contains a comprehensive database of elements that can be reconfigured into the work of other authors. And yet, it is a work that relentlessly taunts its readers by highlighting the contradictions inherent to any literary mindset which attempts to transcend the limits of the author. The JDC tribute was a trap, and it goes without saying that the novel Tsukumojuuku involved Outarou Maijou walking into that trap.
Confession and games
Speaking of Outarou Maijou, we should return to that earlier piece of foreshadowing about an author that embodies the interplay of modern and premodern literature: This was of course in reference to Maijou, not Ryuusui Seiryouin. The relationship of Seiryouin to modernity is not one of interplay but of destruction. We have already established the importance of gamification to the nature of mystery fiction on this blog, and we can correspondingly view Seiryouin’s development of a game-like and disconnected reality as an attempt to extract the gamified essence of mystery fiction out from its original context. That being precisely as a trend in popular literature that arose in inter-war modernity. The literature of Outarou Maijou is decidedly different, even as it shares much of Seiryouin’s lineage.
Regarding his own literature, Maijou described his process as “writing these novels to resolve problems I’m carrying, dunno if it’s to alleviate them or dig deeper, but anyway, I’m doing it to face all that dark stuff in my head, my heart, and my mind.” Put another way, Maijou’s fundamental goal in literature is comparable to the confessional character of modern literature; Maijou structures and communicates ideas that arise out of his own personality and attempts to align them with the experiences of the audience as a means of communication. This would seem to suggest some utility in the author-work-reader framework when dealing with the works of Maijou. However, there is also a deceptive inversion lurking in this conclusion and the preceding quote, because it would not be entirely accurate to attribute this quote to Outarou Maijou per se.
Outarou Maijou is a thoroughly anonymised author that maintains no public biography and personality. Instead, the above comments were delivered ‘in-character’ in the same manner as all of Maijou’s public communications are. In this case, they came from an essay that was penned under the name of Juuzou Ehimegawa—in reference to a recurring self-insert author character present in many of Maijou’s works. This tendency towards masked personas is not just a random and frivolous idiosyncrasy on Maijou’s part: It cuts to the heart of what makes Maijou’s style distinct from the prior centuries of confessional style literature. Rather than attempting to confess the inner life of a tangible and real person, Maijou emulates the form of confessional literature whilst attributing these confessions to fake and symbolic author personas. To be clear, this is distinct from the emphasis on privacy taken by some other contemporary Japanese authors like Nisio, Isin and Rifujin na Magonote, who exist only as faceless pseudonyms. Maijou does not just cover his face and present his works as the product of a vague brand that is independent from himself. He attributes these works to elaborate fictional characters and allows the public to interact with these personas as though they were the real authors of his novels. Additionally, as far as privacy is concerned, this whole approach would be a redundant measure, since the name Outarou Maijou is in all likelihood just a pseudonym to begin with. Given all of this, it is most accurate to say that, in the above quote, Maijou described his works as a means to resolve the emotional problems of ‘Juuzou Ehimegawa’ rather than his own problems. It is unclear the degree to which this quote is meant to speak to the works that are instead attributed to characters such as Owaru Anbyouin, Saburou Mitamura, or Matarou Echizen. It is an unusually complex and convoluted approach to the idea of authorship.
As I hinted at earlier, it is not these habits themselves that we are concerned with, but the literary tendencies that they represent. The novels of Ryuusui Seiryouin and Outarou Maijou could both be said to elude the conventional author-work-reader framework, but Maijou’s works have a particular reliance on this framework that is worth exploring in detail—it goes without saying that our interest in Maijou’s various pseudonyms was for the sake of understanding this aspect of his literature. In order to do so, we should quickly revisit this framework. As Kasai summarised, a key aspect of the author-work-reader framework as it manifested in modern literature was how it gradually eroded the presence of the middle category of the work itself. The work came to be seen as merely a vehicle for the author with no independent value on its own. We could summarise this tendency with a formula such as author=>work-reader, meaning that the work is defined by its equivalence to the author, reducing the framework to an author-reader framework.
The literature of Outarou Maijou can also be represented using a formula of this kind. In his case, the best rendition would be author<=work-reader. This is obviously a bizarre structure that bears some discussion. As we already considered in some detail, Maijou’s works do take on the style of confessional modern literature, but they also transplant a fictional author over the ‘real’ authorship of Maijou himself. In addition, these author characters appear throughout Maijou’s works, frivolously invading the diegesis in much the same manner as in Seiryouin’s works. However, the confessional role of Maijou’s novels marks these characters as very distinct from Seiryouin’s own cameos. The thematic development of Maijou’s novels trace along the detailed development of an interior psychology in order to reflect back an individual’s perspective on the human condition. However, this perspective cannot be credibly attributed to a ‘real’ person, but rather to characters who appear in the novels in question. The end result being a novel that recursively defines its own perspective on reality by way of a pathway back into its own fiction. The nature of authorship in Maijou’s stories is circular and ouroboros-like. Where Maijou’s literature overlaps with Seiryouin’s is their intersection with the game-like and interactive space of intercontextual database elements.
Of course, it is worth clarifying that the elevation of fictionality in the space of literature is not a entirely a novel feature of the work of Outarou Maijou. As explained earlier by Kiyoshi Kasai, postmodern critical theory involves deconstructionist lenses that attempted to revive the work-reader framework in place of the author-reader formulation:
Postmodern critical theory attempted to liberate the unique contents of the work from being crushed within the author-reader structure and reduced to nothingness. The work itself has resultantly returned to the realm of text and criticism. It is no longer just an expendable and regrettable medium used for communication between the author (my truth) and the reader (their truth).
The stable state that lies at the terminus of the novels of both Outarou Maijou and Ryuusui Seiryouin is a postmodern work-reader framework. Put another way, what we are considering here are not two wildly divergent endpoints for literature, but two different forms of contemporary literature, with overlapping heritages, that have both arisen out of and reflect the conditions of postmodernity. To be precise, Seiryouin’s deconstructive instincts are oriented towards the pop sensibilities of mystery fiction and mass consumption, whereas Maijou is more concerned with the form of confessional, serious literature. But this endlessly esoteric splitting of hairs will only transform into anything useful when read in the context of the actual features of particular examples of Maijou’s works.
Outarou Maijou and symbolic characters
In Tsukumojuuku and Drill Hole in my Brain—a contemporaneous short story penned by Maijou—the lead characters are both given the surname Katou. This shared narrative element does not fulfill the role of developing a large and interconnected extended universe, as might be the case in certain fantasy and sci-fi franchises. Indeed, there is no specific suggestion of any isolated meaning to the name Katou at all, and the stories seem unrelated. For most purposes, it is simply something like a cameo or reference to Tsukumojuuku contained within Drill Hole in my Brain. However, references of these kinds are a constant trademark of Outarou Maijou’s work. Rather than presenting many overlappingly intercoherent stories, as one might find in the works of Kouhei Kadono, Maijou’s works contain numerous incomprehensibly convoluted, but ultimately incompatible continuities: Characters appear and disappear across stories; sometimes with the same name, and sometimes with subtly different names. Someone who dies in one story might appear in a subsequent novel as though they were just turning up to the office on another dreary Monday without a care in the world.
From a diegetic perspective, it is simple enough to separate each story into their own continuity and largely ignore these intertextual references. But it is also natural to ask what the purpose of such a stylistic flourish would be if there is no clear utility in terms of the coherence of the story’s setting. As we discussed in an earlier section, premodern storytelling was filled with recurring characters and pre-determined roles for those characters. We associated this with the simplicity of symbolic context compared to the complex, interior characterisation of modern literature. This point of view makes the presence of these cameos seem incongruent with the confessional style of modern literature that we have developed and compared to the style of Outarou Maijou. Clarifying and reconciling this point will be the final piece of context necessary before we can talk about Tsukumojuuku directly.
Of course, there is at least one particularly striking precedent for the convolution of premodern and modern storytelling. As we discussed much earlier in this post, mystery fiction took on many of the forms of premodernity despite being undeniably a unique product of modernity. At that time, I said that “characters in mystery fiction are assigned clear roles: detective, culprit, victim, suspect. In addition, there is a transparent fictionality to the genre—the entire premise carries a naked antagonism to the realism and psychology of modern literature.” Put another way, in the same manner as the stock characters and established setting of kabuki theatre, mystery fiction involves various figurative masks that the characters wear in order to suggest a pre-ordained role in the narrative. We can draw a direct equivalence between this tendency of mystery fiction and the recurring characters of Maijou’s works. However, the roles of mystery fiction are in reference to a generalised genre structure rather than to something established by specific works. In Maijou’s case, a character is established as interior to the work in the manner of modern literature, only to subsequently be transferred into later works as though their personality were a mask in the manner of premodern literature. This particular style of symbolised characterisation has its origins in trends much more recent than the emergence of mystery fiction.
In the work of the philosopher and critic Hiroki Azuma, the shift from modern literature towards postmodern multimedia is characterised by what he calls database consumption. We referenced his definition of database consumption earlier in this post, and we will not linger on it broadly here. According to Azuma, postmodern media is not composed of standalone works, but of a shared memetic database of elements that take on their own meaning apart from their original context. This is particularly true of character elements, which have come to form a phenomenon known as moe culture. As Azuma explains:
As one can immediately see in specialty stores in the Akihabara or Shinjuku parts of Tokyo, the moe-elements are proliferating within otaku culture. The ‘characters’ circulating in these stores are not unique designs created by the individual talent of the author but an output generated from preregistered elements and combined according to the marketing program of each work.
We should not confuse the moe elements referenced by Azuma with the narrow subset of highly cutesy and spatially distorted art styles that are commonly associated with ‘moe art’ in pop culture. While cutesy anime art is often moe, it is not moe because of its cutesy attributes. The word moe has its origins in the Sailor Moon fandom, where it was used as slang in reference to the appeal of Sailor Saturn (Hotaru Tomoe). As those exposed to this slang participated in subsequent fan spaces, any characters that inspired similarly intense fascination from these fans were also referred to as evoking the emotion of moe. However, there was never any uniform consensus as to what it was about Sailor Saturn that appealed to fans; each fan had their own preference for certain elements of her character that appealed to them. As these fans came to associate later characters with the symbol of Hotaru Tomoe, there was a large divergence in what caused these associations. Some fans fixated on Tomoe’s grim backstory, others on her demure aesthetic, and yet others on hyper specific elements on her character design such as her short black hair or her notably pale complexion. The crucial point being that the unifying feature of moe-type characters was never any singular feature, but rather the act of comparing character elements was itself the origin of the concept of moe. Indeed, we can see a fairly direct continuity between the appeal of Hotaru Tomoe and the explosion in interest for Rei Ayanami following the release of Neon Genesis Evangelion. Both characters have short hair, a demure aesthetic, and similar grim backstories. As Azuma himself notes:
In fact, in the late 1990s, characters bearing a close resemblance to Rei Ayanami have been produced and consumed on a massive scale—in comics, anime, and novelizations, both in the commercial market and the fanzine market. It does not seem wise to attribute this expanse to the ‘influence’ of Evangelion.
I believe that it is more appropriate to use the image of the database to grasp this current situation. The emergence of Rei Ayanami did not influence many authors so much as change the rules of the moe-elements sustaining otaku culture. As a result, even those authors who were not deliberately thinking of Evangelion unconsciously began to produce characters closely resembling Rei, using newly registered moe-elements (quiet personality, blue hair, white skin, mysterious power). Such a model is close to the reality of the late 1990s. Beyond Rei, characters emerging in otaku works were not unique to individual works but were immediately broken into moe-elements and recorded by consumers, and then the elements reemerged later as material for creating new characters. Therefore, each time a popular character appeared, the moe-element database changed accordingly, and as a result, in the next season there were heated battles among the new generation of characters featuring new moe-elements.
By the point that Rei Ayanami came to dominate otaku culture, the word moe had expanded far beyond any of her particular character features (as an extension of Sailor Saturn) and instead came to represent a wide database of possible elements, as Azuma identified. Ayanami’s chief rival for the attention of the audience in Evangelion, Asuka Langley Sohryu, was also referred to as moe in a manner similar to Ayanami. However, instead of a lineage of demure or tragic characters, Asuka was compared to the assertive tsundere characters of prior works. And later works would find themselves recomposing these elements into completely new characters, such as Kei Shindou, a major character in Ef: A Fairy Tale of the Two who combines the short hair and visual profile of Ayanami-like characters with tsundere characteristics and energetic sports girl behaviour.
As we have discussed, modern literature existed in a lineage of realist art. As Ian Watt said, such literature exists for the purpose of “the production of what purports to be an authentic account of the actual experiences of individuals.” However, there is nothing realistic about the database orientation of the contemporary art identified by Azuma. Rather than the experience of any author, the perspective of otaku is built by interfacing with cultural metadata: It is expression of various hyperlinks and search engines rather than the interiority of the human condition. Instead of highlighting realism, an orientation towards characters composed of various moe symbols heightens the fictionality of the work and disorients any attempt to understand the characters as confessional author analogues in the style of modern literature.
This process is not actually limited to otaku culture and its focus on moe elements. As we already discussed, premodern literature was separated from modern literature by its own tendency to depict characters in terms of symbols and roles rather than fully psychologised modern people. There is a fundamental structural similarity between the use of the established ‘world’ of Greek mythology and the use of the database by contemporary otaku. However, premodern literature used these techniques in order to reduce complexity. By contrast, symbolic characters in the contemporary sense exist in order to inhabit a much denser and more complex media landscape. Put another way, the roles and masks of Greek or kabuki theatre existed in order to flatten various pieces of media into one story that would be simple to understand. The database present in contemporary media exists to fracture infinite pieces of media into their various elements to be consumed in parallel by a highly media-literate audience that is thoroughly aware of more kinds of media than has been the case at any other time in human history.
The intermediary between these two extremes is mystery fiction. It was the first genre structure to use the symbolic form of premodern literature, with its pre-defined roles and masks, to tackle a fundamentally modern subject—that is, the mass death of the 20th century. Outarou Maijou happens to be a writer that stands at the intersection of all of these trends: He is an author who deliberately attempts to write literature that freely bounces between mystery fiction and confessional modern literature, and he does so in the contemporary era of the database and otaku culture. This makes it startlingly difficult to categorise Maijou into any particular literary trends or movements. However, using what we have developed, we can nonetheless still reach certain conclusions about his style.
For example, returning to the name Katou: We do not necessarily need to explain the reuse of this surname in terms of a diegetic reference to some particular family, or anything similar. Nor is it meant to suggest a literally contiguous stock character as sometimes occurred in premodern literature. Instead, the name Katou is transferred from the work of Tsukumojuuku to Drill Hole in my Brain in order to bring about symbolic associations between the characters, as though Katou-ness is a transferrable element stored in a database rather than something associated with an independent, realistic human being. In this case, the name Katou is used for two characters who both invent elaborate fictional roles for themselves rather than facing their own physical trauma. With this idea in place, we might be able to build a framework to situate the novel Tsukumojuuku into a fuller context.
Who is Tsukumojuuku?
In Ryuusui Seiryouin’s Cosmic: End of Century Detective Myth, Juuku Tsukumo was not born as the extraordinarily beautiful God Of Detectives, even as this is eternally as he seems to the audience throughout the narrative. This is largely typical of mystery fiction, which is oriented towards the symbolic characterisation of the present rather than the full interior backstory of its characters: Sherlock Holmes had been a consulting detective long before John Watson’s first encounter with him in A Study in Scarlet; Hercule Poirot arrived in The Mysterious Affair at Styles fully formed, having already retired from a long and storied career in the Belgian police force.
The Bildungsroman—one the quintessential forms of novelistic literature during the 19th century—was entirely fixated on the interior process of change for its characters. This genre depicted the full transformation of their narrators from childhood of adulthood, so as to explain every aspect of their psychology. Even as the Bildungsroman in particular fell out of fashion over the time, so-called serious literature has continually revisited the form of the character study that depicts the evolution of a character’s psychology as its central subject. Therefore, setting out to depict the backstory of a detective or any symbolic character can be a rather contradictory pursuit.
The typical means of explaining the psychology of a character from a symbolic story is by way of a non-symbolic story. In other words, the eccentricities that align the character with their established role are usually stripped away as we tell the story of a ‘normal’ person transforming into the character that audiences know from the original story. Basically, an origin story. A rather easy to grasp example of this is Todd Phillips’ 2019 film Joker—titled after the well-known supervillain from the Batman franchise. The script of the film was directly based on several of the most famous films of Martin Scorsese; more particularly, Joker is based on Scorsese’s films from the New Hollywood period, when American cinema was largely taken in by a modernist zeitgeist that emphasised auteur theory and confessional storytelling. Joker attempts to transfer the symbolic character of the Joker from Batman into this era of highly realistic character dramas.
The Joker in this film is stripped of all of the symbolic components that make up the character in his traditional incarnation. Sure, he is a clown, but this attribute is reconfigured from an attribute attached to the Joker as a symbol and instead becomes a logical consequence of his particular backstory. He is not a clown by choice, but due to his particular place in the surrounding capitalistic sociological context. He is not a criminal associated with an elaborate and fantastical setting, but an ordinary and unremarkable individual. Indeed, the famously nameless Joker of the comics is instead given the name Arthur Fleck here, and also a concrete familial and social role to anchor him to the realism of the world. The core conceit of the film is precisely in depicting the full interior life of a ‘real’ person transforming into someone resembling the ‘symbolic’ Joker by way of a confessional narrative. This is in sharp contrast to the character as imagined in, say, the Nolan trilogy of Batman films, where the Joker appeared fully formed without any process of interior transformation.
With this in mind, any JDC reader who blindly stepped into Tsukumojuuku would expect it to be one of two possible kinds of stories: either a story that explains the transformation of a character that is unlike Juuku Tsukumo into Juuku Tsukumo, or a story that depicts the fully formed Juuku Tsukumo existing near-contemporaneously with the JDC series. Outarou Maijou did neither—or maybe both, depending on how you think of it. The opening lines of the novel Tsukumojuuku, features the birth of a fully formed insanely beautiful God Of Detectives. I do not mean literally fully formed—that comes at the end of the Episode. I mean in the sense of all of the symbolic components of the character being fully present and established. We are met with the cogent, detailed, analytical narration of an infant who fully embodies all of the symbolic components of Seiryouin’s character of Juuku Tsukumo. However, as established, this explanation of the history of the character is canonically incoherent given the universe of the JDC series, since Juuku Tsukumo gradually became himself in that continuity. Furthermore, Maijou’s rendition of the character is given the name Tsukumojuuku Katou, turning the entire full name of the original character into a ridiculously long given name. The relationship of this work to the JDC series is given immediate and unrelenting complexity. (While it is not yet our focus, it is worth a thought on the meaning of a character with a given name of Seiryouin’s making being adoptively given a family name decided on by Maijou.)
This kind of characterisation is strikingly heterodox; putting it in terms of the film Joker, it would be equivalent to the film opening on the birth of a child who shot out of the womb already covered in clown makeup and dressed in a purple suit—with that child naturally also being named Joker from the outset. Such a character would of course not belong in the realistic character studies typical of modern literature. Yet, the fundamental form of the story that is told in Tsukumojuuku is strikingly similar to the coming-of-age, biographical format of the Bildungsroman. We are taken along for a thorough, first-person character study of a boy in transition from childhood to adulthood. This combination may seem incoherent when taken in the abstract notions that we have spoken of so far; Tsukumojuuku Katou is a character who arrived in the world as a fully formed character symbol, and therefore there is no clear impetuous towards any change that should motivate this character-driven structure. And yet, this structure is precisely the core of Tsukumojuuku.
Earlier, we established how the author-work-reader triad of modern literature erases the work in favour of analysis of the author. Once the work is diminished in this manner, every aspect of it becomes reified and recontextualised as an extension of the author. This is why works that are analysed within this framework approach the issue of character as the formulation of various aspects of the author themselves. Basically, this view means that every character is some variety of authorial self-insert, and their distinctions between each other arise from the contradictory impulses or interests of the author. This is particularly true of the narrators of confessional style character studies, who are almost inevitably compared directly to the author. When studying the authors that rose to prominence during the era of the Bildungsroman, for example, the coming-of-age story is directly compared to a detailed biography of the author, in order to find a real-world psychological basis for the development of the lead character, who is the author-as-character. This is also true of shishousetsu form of confessional literature that dominated Japan during the first half of the 20th century. For example, the most popular remnant of this shishousetsu style, No Longer Human by Osamu Dazai, is inevitably read side by side with the events of the author’s life. As a result, the nameless narrator is universally read as a direct self insert of Dazai himself.
But such works naturally align themselves with such a reading, and their characters do generally correspond to the biographical details of their author. In contrast, this approach becomes complicated in works such as Tsukumojuuku, which are essentially confessional fanfiction. Tsukumojuuku’s confessionalism seems to make the interior psychology of the human condition a central pillar of its text. However, the main outlet of this tendency is the character of Tsukumojuuku Katou, who symbolically corresponds to a character originally written by Ryuusui Seiryouin. And we must remember that all of Outarou Maijou’s oeuvre complicates and obscures any view of the author and thereby corrupts any simple reading of his literature as being the confessions of a particular individual.
In Speedboy!, a pure literature novella written by Maijou, the lead character of Naruo (no surname) is, on the surface, an emotionally stunted and highly analytical overachiever that was raised by an adoptive family. It would be simple to draw a hasty conclusion by comparing these characteristics to the biography of Tsukumojuuku Katou. However, in other works by Maijou, such as Disco Detective Wednesdayyy, the lead character (the titular Disco Wednesdayyy) is characterised as having a happy and safe family waiting for him in the United States. Or we could emphasise the lead characters in ID Invaded and Hammerhead, two animated features written by Maijou that both prominently feature lead characters that highly value their family. Put another way, we cannot readily view Tsukumojuuku Katou or Naruo as corresponding to Maijou’s own real nature. In addition, the structure of Speedboy! complicates any attempt to draw conclusions from the biographical details presented in its narrative. Speedboy! is presented as a series of seven short stories, all narrated by the aforementioned Naruo—whose essential personality remains consistent between these stories. However, the events of his life as shown in each story freely contradict one another. For example, both chapter 4 and 6 depict Naruo living with his adoptive family, but these family structures do not correspond to one another in their details. In addition, Naruo leaves his adoptive family in chapter 4, but chapter 6 shows Naruo remaining with his family until a later chronological period. In addition, the character Hakken is killed in both chapter 4 and chapter 5, but reappears in chapters set much later in the story seamlessly, as well as occupying a central role in the climactic chapter 7. In summarising Speedboy!, it would be accurate to say that it depicts a confessional character study where the narrator is a constant symbolic presence that emerges independently of the shifting depiction of their own biography and backstory. This is directly in the opposition of the characters depicted in modern literature such as in the Bildungsroman and shishousetsu, who start as empty vessels whose content is filled in by the development of their biography, backstory, and actions in the narrative—often in correspondence with the author’s own life experience.
This element of Speedboy! is not at odds with the general approach of Maijou’s other works. While not all of his stories use a disconnected structure comparable to that of Speedboy!, their intertextuality is utilised in a way that leads to a fundamentally similar conclusion. Put another way, the relationship between the Naruos that exist in different chapters of Speedboy! on the micro scale can be compared to the relationship between Nyannyannyan Nekoneko in Disco Detective Wednesdayyy and Nyannyannyan Nekoneko in Tsukumojuuku Episode 2 on the macro scale; or the relationship between Runbaba 12 in The World is made out of Closed Rooms and Runbaba 12 in Disco Detective Wednesdayyy. Naruo from Speedboy! himself replicates this kind of intertextual context, being a recurrence of symbolic elements from the earlier Maijou novel Naruo Shimitomo of the Mountains. Furthermore, Maijou’s many author-personas are themselves symbolic characters that repeat in his fiction in this manner. The previously mentioned Runbaba 12 as he occurs in Disco Detective Wednesdayyy overlaps with that same novel’s Saburou Mitamura—a character with very complex symbolic elements, the most important of which being his role as Juuzou Ehimegawa in the universe of Disco Detective Wednesdayyy, making him a direct parallel to Outarou Maijou himself. However, Mitamura has many different personas, and several different characters could be said to inhabit his role of Outarou Maijou throughout the novel.
Tracing the details of all of these intertextual links down to their core would be a case of turtles all of the way down: In some fundamental sense it is simultaneously true that every character is Outarou Maijou and that no character is Outarou Maijou. Or perhaps more accurately, that Outarou Maijou exists in an equivalent fictive space to his characters. This is the recursive nature of the author<=work-reader framework and Maijou’s place within it—and the tendency hinted at by Maijou’s particular behaviour in his peculiar approach to remaining a masked author. Every attempt to trace the interior psychology of his characters inside the work along the path towards the author—as would be typical of modern literature—simply reveals that the apparent shadow of the author was merely more of the work itself. There is no concrete reality at the end of the structure, just metafiction that endlessly loops into itself.
In essence, we cannot rely on the classic interpretation of modern literature where the main character is a direct persona for the author—that is, the author-work-reader framework. But we can still say that the confessional structure of Tsukumojuuku reflects certain content on the fictional, intertextual persona of Outarou Maijou. This is the general nature of Maijou’s style: He combines the modern desire for confession with a highly postmodern recognition of the supremacy of fiction. In the general case, this means that his works take on the structure of trying to confess his own reality whilst negating that reality with the supposition that the author and his reality is fictional. At the beginning of this post, we characterised the spirit of modern art as involving the artist depicting reality as they see it from their own eyes. In those terms, a Maijou novel is akin to a painting of the artist trying to paint such a landscape—but depicting them as painting it within a studio apartment, subverting the intended implications of realism. It is a highly metatextual mode that makes the pursuit of realistic and authentic fiction into the subject rather than its form.
However, Tsukumojuuku itself is not just the embodiment of the general form of Maijou’s literature. It is a specific work defined by its own context. Namely, that of being a fanfiction-esque work that is to be read in the shadow of its derivation from another author. So, while in the first order we can reach the general conclusion that Tsukumojuuku Katou is a fragment of the recursive, fictional persona of Outarou Maijou as in the manner of his other confessional works, the character takes on an even more complex structure in the specific details of the novel Tsukumojuuku.
Jesus Christ Superdetective
One of the clearest parallels for the development of Tsukumojuuku Katou as a character is not the radical and contemporary fiction of Outarou Maijou and his peers, but the highly premodern form of myths and legends. Even Ryuusui Seiryouin’s JDC rendition of the character has something similar at its foundation with its consistent and deliberate use of religious motifs. More specifically, Juuku Tsukumo’s personality constantly alludes to elements of Christian theology. He quotes scripture and Christian numerology freely and takes on a Christ-like role as the Messiah of each case. No wonder he is called GOD (God Of Detective).
Juuku Tsukumo’s divine properties are a natural extension of the late Queen problem, which we covered extensively in the Sekai post and as such I will not explain it again in extraneous detail here. The second late Queen problem is concerned with whether “the detective plays the role of an arbitrary god and decide the fate of the rest of the cast.” Juuku Tsukumo’s aesthetic characteristics, and especially his deduction method known as Divine Connection, directly embodies the contours of this theory. The world of the JDC series is thoroughly removed from the limiting framework of the conventional genre metastructure of classical mysteries. Putting that more comprehensibly, the JDC series operates in a manner that makes the notion of a final, objective truth challenging to grasp. As a result, every deduction, no matter how convincing, would be operating in such a fluid state of metareasoning that it might seem as though it could be overturned at the slightest whim. (Such problems in contemporary mysteries are the explicit subject of Outarou Maijou’s Disco Detective Wednesdayyy.) Therefore, Juuku Tsukumo is characterised as a divine device, a deus ex machina that speaks for the author and aligns a particular deduction with the will of GOD, making it final.
In this light, the decision by Outarou Maijou to develop a backstory for the character of Juuku Tsukumo is fundamentally distinct from any attempt that could be made with any other character in the JDC series. Such a story would not just be the origin story of a superhuman detective, as with the other members of the JDC, and whose role can be largely understood in the fabric of contemporary fiction and its use of intertextual symbols. Juuku Tsukumo, as the figure of GOD, is situated into the role of the one who decides the story: While contemporary narratives are often interactive, so long as they are told in the form of a novel, there is still ultimately some authority that decides on their content. As Kiyoshi Kasai explained, “a novel is itself the natural form of modern literature, carrying the non-game-like implication of an author who controls the characters independently from the readers.”
In the form of the original JDC novels, this decisive role is under the direction of Ryuusui Seiryouin, and so the role of Juuku Tsukumo is particularly analogous to him. Moreso than any of the frivolous insertions of his own personality into the narrative, Juuku Tsukumo is an actually tangible vehicle for the impact of Seiryouin on the content of the JDC series novels. In fact, as already discussed, the other manifestations of Seiryouin are notably empty by comparison. As the game-like form of JDC’s constituent elements encourages diffuse, database-like consumption, the role of Juuku Tsukumo becomes distinctly fluid when it comes to the notion of derivative works like fanfiction. In fanfiction, the content of the work is decided by a much wider group than Seiryouin himself, and so the will of those alternative authors will manifest themselves in Juuku Tsukumo whenever they make use of the database element of Divine Connection. Put another way, Juuku Tsukumo is not just an avatar for the author himself, as with confessional characters like the narrator in No Longer Human. Instead, Juuku Tsukumo represents the structural necessity of the concept of authorship itself to the medium of the novel.
This aspect of Juuku Tsukumo is built directly on top of the general form of the detective character. This should be hardly surprising given the correlation between Juuku Tsukumo’s characteristics and the late Queen problem. While mystery fiction is an early manifestation of the concept of a gamified narrative, its reliance on the double-layered narrative structure still means that its game must end and the narrative must be reconciled via its conclusion into an ordered fabula that is compatible with the general notions of conventional literature. Put another way, the author-work-reader framework returns with a blistering pace during the dénouement, as the author finally appears to declare a final solution to the gamified narrative that had been experienced prior to that moment.
It is important that we keep this concept of the author separate from the author of confessional modern literature. In the former, the author arrives in a distinctly metatextual sense to constrain the work to the bounds of the novel and not allow it to extend forever beyond the limits of its pages. In the latter, the author is acting through the mask of the diegesis in order to communicate themselves. Put another way, we are talking about the difference between the author-as-structure and the author-as-character. Juuku Tsukumo, and detectives in general, take the place of the author because the author cannot exist in a space of symbolised characters, they require the interior psychology of non-symbolic characters in order to confess themselves as a persona.
Of course, the entire metatextual structure of Ryuusui Seiryouin’s work means that Juuku Tsukumo’s role is subtly distinct from the detectives of classic mystery fiction. Even as Juuku Tsukumo resolves an individual case to finality using Divine Connection, the notion of limitless cases as embodied by symbolic elements like L Cases are established with equal authorial explication. In other words, even as Ryuusui Seiryouin appears through Juuku Tsukumo to conclude a given case, he also appears to stuff the database full of canonical elements that imply infinite possible cases for JDC detectives to solve in derivative works that are yet to be explained by Juuku Tsukumo.
This peculiar arrangement forms the building blocks with which Outarou Maijou begins sketching out his character of Tsukumojuuku Katou. In the prior section, we discussed how the works of Maijou cannot be read either as simple confessional works nor as symbolic post-confessional works, as they manifest elements from both forms. In a Maijou work, characters are developed with complex interior psychologies relative to their role in any given work of literature, but their symbolic components also carry across continuities with a complex structure that is related to the form of contemporary multimedia. What is particularly striking about the development of Tsukumojuuku Katou is how he fits into this framework, but with a particular causal element inverted: Tsukumojuuku Katou does not carry forward a psychology developed by Maijou’s prior works into the future of Maijou’s work. This is self-evident insomuch as Tsukumojuuku Katou is not an entirely original character. Tsukumojuuku Katou has an interior, confessional psychology developed on top of symbolic elements built by Ryuusui Seiryouin. Basically, while his duality as a psychological and symbolic character is typical of Maijou’s work, he is developed in the order of symbolic -> psychology instead of psychology -> symbolic, with the latter being the typical process for any original character. In addition, as we have just established, Juuku Tsukumo’s symbolic characteristics correspond to the structural role of the author (and detective) in mystery fiction.
This is why the opening of Tsukumojuuku is, structurally speaking, so striking. (It is viscerally striking for its own reasons, of course.) The character of Tsukumojuuku Katou is born as the fully-formed symbol of Juuku Tsukumo, and then the interior psychology of a character original to this novel is developed atop those symbolic elements. This kind of birth is unfamiliar to both modern and postmodern literature, where characters either begin as empty vessels or exist as continuous symbols respectively; as we discussed earlier, establishing the origin of contemporary symbolic characters usually takes the form of modern literature, and shows the transformation from an empty vessel into a symbolic presence. The works that depict the full life of a character that can remain symbolic throughout the whole course are the didactic works of myths and legends. When premodern authors depicted an established ‘world’ of myth, such as the story of Heracles, his symbolic components—power that becomes misdirected through madness—are continuous and immutable even as the story depicts a full life rather than the extemporaneous existence of contemporary symbolic characters.
Beyond just Greek myths, these structural elements can also be found in a text that Tsukumojuuku intentionally parallels—that is, the Bible. The Gospel of John begins with:
In the beginning was the Word [theologically corresponds to Jesus Christ in Trinitarian sects], and the Word was with God, and the Word was God. He was in the beginning with God. All things were made through Him, and without Him nothing was made that was made. In Him was life, and the life was the light of men. And the light shines in the darkness, and the darkness did not comprehend it.
Put another way, Jesus is canonised as a continuous existence, whose role as the Messiah, Christ, and member of the Trinity was predetermined by the nature of God prior to his birth as a human person. This is directly repeated by Tsukumojuuku Katou, whose role as the user of Divine Connection was predetermined by Ryuusui Seiryouin prior to his birth as a human person in this work by Outarou Maijou. The symbolic precedes the psychological in the development of the figures of both Jesus Christ and Tsukumojuuku Katou. It comes as no surprise that the events of Episode 1 correspond to the highly symbolic, abstract structure of traditional myths or religious documents.
The repeated use of Biblical mitate are an important subject to consider in this context. The decision to structure the various cases of the story around these mitate unifies the mythological with the contemporary, as the mythological origin of the detective Juuku Tsukumo is situated via a database of Biblical elements that are taken from their original work (the Bible) and reused as context within a work of mystery fiction. The cases that Tsukumojuuku Katou must solve are built out of the de-contextualised database elements of religion that form the symbolic existence of Juuku Tsukumo.
Tsukumojuuku Katou is also made distinct from Ryuusui Seiryouin’s vision of the character by the extent to which Maijou’s use of Divine Connection deconstructs and parodies its use in the JDC series. Rather than declaring a truth that is determined as final due the authority of the author, Tsukumojuuku Katou makes deductions that are known to be false whilst arranging for them to be believed diegetically through falsehoods and deceptions. Put another way, Tsukumojuuku still fulfills the role of delivering a deduction that finalises each and every case, but due to the interior perspective of the novel, they are revealed as shoddy and half-hearted deductions that are only left intact due to the convenience of the narrative. Such a view behind the curtain of mystery fiction is typically obscured through the distant narration of a Watson character, or through similarly careful choices in narration.
In addition, in the movement between each Episode of the narrative, the ‘final’ deduction delivered via Tsukumojuuku Katou in his role that corresponds to Juuku Tsukumo is overturned by the emergence of a new continuity in each Episode. Earlier, we established how Divine Connection is a kind of symbolic role that aligns the character of Juuku Tsukumo with the author of a JDC story. Each Episode in Tsukumojuuku is diegetically depicted as the work of Ryuusui Seiryouin himself. The entire structure of Tsukumojuuku revolves around various discontinuous cases that are resolved by the deductions of Tsukumojuuku Katou only to be overturned by the diegetic Ryuusui Seiryouin. This conflict is made explicit in the plot of Episode 4, where Tsukumojuuku Katou confronts Juuku Tsukumo within the Castle of Illusions—the setting of Jorker, the second novel of the JDC series. During their confrontation, the follow exchange takes place between Juuku and Tsukumojuuku:
I said, “Juuku Tsukumo … tell me, who is the God who engraved that so-called wonderful mark upon you?”
Juuku Tsukumo raised his arms and pointed with his finger. “It is that gentleman.” Juuku Tsukumo’s finger was pointing above the altar, at the Christ statue crucified to the cross.
I put on a smile. “Rub your eyes and take a better look, Juuku Tsukumo. Is that really your God?”
Juuku Tsukumo softly closed his eyes. “It indeed is. The person up there is my God.”
I said, “Take another look. That’s just a human. It’s the dead author Ryuusui Seiryouin … Juuku Tsukumo, is that your God?”
Juuku Tsukumo answered:
“Yes, it is. That is my God.”
“… So, if I understand correctly, you are actively claiming that you are a fictional character created by the author Ryuusui Seiryouin, and that this Castle of Illusions and the whole world surrounding it is another creation of the author Ryuusui Seiryouin.”
Juuku Tsukumo nodded at that. “That is most exact. It is in your freedom to doubt that, but it is in no way the right thing to do.”
I said, “I, too, admit to being a fictional character created by an author. However, the fictional author who created me is not Ryuusui Seiryouin. I know that for a fact.”
In this exchange, Tsukumojuuku Katou’s deduction is directly pitted against Juuku Tsukumo’s, and each character acts in accordance with the attribute of Divine Connection as an avatar for separate Gods—or authors. However, Tsukumojuuku Katou is aligned with the author of the present work, Outarou Maijou, while Juuku Tsukumo is aligned with Ryuusui Seiryouin as the original author of the JDC series. This conflict comes out rather bluntly in Episode 4, but it is inherent to the structure of the entire novel. Outarou Maijou’s efforts to finalise each story is subverted by the diegetic character of Ryuusui Seiryouin. Of course, Ryuusui Seiryouin is not literally preventing Maijou from partaking in any particular resolution. Instead, it is a symbolic relationship where Tsukumojuuku Katou (Maijou) is unable to take on the role of Juuku Tsukumo (Seiryouin) and resolve the case conclusively using Divine Connection.
The reasons for this are relatively straightforward given what we have discussed thus far. As already established, Maijou’s literature exists to recursively confess the interior psychology of a fictional persona known as Outarou Maijou. However, as I stated much earlier in this post, Seiryouin has “crafted a schizophrenic playground that mirrors the disconnected mental landscape of contemporary society, which is itself game-like in its many authors (institutions) that display no real authorship (control) over society. Seiryouin’s multiple manifestations in the universe of the JDC highlight how the author has lost control of the novel while still taunting the reader for the fact that this control has not passed on from the author to the reader—it has disappeared into the void.” In the realm of contemporary, database-like consumption, Seiryouin’s playground takes on a jovial quality, where each reader engages with the setting interactively whilst authorship is only enforced as a series of restrictions—rules—over where certain concepts begin and end. However, confessional literature is something different.
In confessional literature, the author emerges in the development of the various psychological backstory elements that define the central character being studied. The role of author is inescapable to the development of such characters, as exemplified by the author-work-reader framework that we have covered extensively. As Outarou Maijou overlays psychological development on top the symbolic characteristics developed by Ryuusui Seiryouin for the character of Juuku Tsukumo, the structure of confessional literature becomes increasingly untenable. By way of Divine Connection, Tsukumojuuku Katou is meant to be able to define and finalise reality, and so the concept of a continuous character arc is constantly interrupted by his role as the ultimate detective of reality. The basis for his own psychology is predetermined by characteristics invented by Ryuusui Seiryouin. Furthermore, his backstory is continuously altered Episode to Episode, as it is determined in part by the contents of the diegetic texts being written by the diegetic Ryuusui Seiryouin: In repetition of the act of being born as a character made by Ryuusui Seiryouin in Episode 1, each episode features a new Tsukumojuuku Katou created by Ryuusui Seiryouin who appears fully formed.
Trauma, which is one of the central themes of Tsukumojuuku Katou’s psychological development, has an important position in this struggle over authorship. In sum, the various Episodes of Tsukumojuuku seem to depict a character who is trapped in multiple layers of fiction that obscures the origin of his trauma that developed in his relationship with his mother. While this affords a diegetic reading where each Episode is simply the delusions of the deeply traumatised Tolerant/Sincere/Honest Suzuki, it also aligns with the symbolic relationship of Outarou Maijou to the work itself: His attempts to explore the confessional psychology of an avatar of himself was obscured by several layers of fiction. As summarised in the previously mentioned Juuzou Ehimegawa essay, Maijou in writing Tsukumojuuku “would have to face the big, fundamental problem of how to bring someone else’s world into my own.” Put another way, the persona of Outarou Maijou faced the big, fundamental problem of how to express himself through a character whose role and characteristics were defined by someone else’s fiction.
Game-like realism and character
There are many specific details of the text that we could explore if this post was a comprehensive commentary of the entire novel. For example, the development of the characters Seshiru Katou and Serika Katou variously intersects with particular aspects of sekai-kei fiction that inform their role in the narrative. However, this is not that kind of post, so I would like to instead return to a theme developed earlier on. The purpose of realism in modern art is to align the world that is depicted through the art with the perspective of the artist so as to create a structure for authentic communication. However, the idea that a realistic point of view corresponds to a perspective that exists in reality is only maintained through the shared cultural assumptions that the audience brings to the artwork. As this assumption is eroded by the decline of the cultural consensus that perpetuated it, the perspective of the artist and the fabrication of realities is going to continue to become the subject of fiction rather than just assume features of it.
The work of Outarou Maijou is particularly striking in this regard: It does not fabricate a world for the sake of authentic communication, as in this prior model of realism, it fabricates a sense of perspective for the sake of imbuing its depiction of thoroughly unrealistic worlds with a sense of authenticity and sincerity that is endogenous to the world of fiction itself. The most important feature of Tsukumojuuku is not the raw contents of the fight it depicts between Tsukumojuuku Katou and Ryuusui Seiryouin for the authorship of his own life, but how it succeeds in crafting something that seems authentically confessional out of deconstruction and metatext. Put in a more straightforward way, Tsukumojuuku succeeds in its use of such distant ideas as a story-within-a-story or commentary on the role of authorship precisely because Maijou’s style is rooted in the authentic communication of a personality that is entirely fictional and existent within his stories. He builds a human person from scratch who can engage with contemporary, game-like realism sincerely as though it were a perspective on reality in the style of modern art.
His use of this contemporary, game-like realism is hardly unique. As already discussed, the sense of contemporary gamification present in Seiryouin’s work, among others, is far more prominent than in Maijou’s work. Maijou is rigidly attached the ideals of literature, which are struggling to find relevance in a world driven by network communication, and where artistic meaning is a collective, memeified experience. In such a world, literary engagement with the spirit of contemporary zeitgeist is generally polarised between those who attempt to embody it thoroughly and those who reject it outright. The former is embodied in the case of Seiryouin or those who set out to imitate him such as Nisio, Isin—or even more strikingly in the case of super-database literature such as narou-kei fantasy or massively online fanfiction. The case of those who reject the current trajectory is still given a sizable platform in the halls of legacy literature institutions. It might be the most obvious thing in the world given his publication history to say that Outarou Maijou dances in-between these two perspectives, but the particular method he uses to do so is rather remarkable.
The contemporary zeitgeist could be given the label of ‘collective fictionality’ while the legacy mode could instead be called ‘authentic individualism’, if we wanted to coin some rather dry buzzwords. Both approaches have their own idea of the purpose of realism in art. Originally, art depicted the authentic perspective of an individual artist. Now, art is an interactive concept, where the perspective of the audience, or player, is expected to interact with the world crafted by the artist in a game-like manner. The philosopher Hiroki Azuma therefore refers to art that captures this contemporary spirit as capturing game-like realism. In his book Otaku: Japan’s Database Animals, Azuma first identifies the work of Ryuusui Seiryouin as capturing this contemporary spirit. While establishing this concept further in the sequel book The Birth of Game-like Realism, Azuma identifies Outarou Maijou’s Tsukumojuuku as a distillation of the mentality of game-like realism.
However, grouping Ryuusui Seiryouin and Outarou Maijou together so intimately underestimates certain distinctions. While Seiryouin crafts game-like realism in his novels that can be engaged with interactively, Maijou’s literature is very different. Tsukumojuuku is not the platform for game-like realism, but a character study of the consequences of existing—or rather, failing to exist—within it. Seiryouin’s work is a game, built on an original ruleset that deconstructs the mechanics of mystery fiction. Tsukumojuuku is a character study of a player in Seiryouin’s game, who struggles to define themselves in a world where authorship loses its traditional meaning. While there is a continuity between Outarou Maijou and other writers with a sense of game-like realism in terms of their lineage and sense of the world, there is a fundamental difference in how Outarou Maijou uses the character of Tsukumojuuku Katou to interface with that world.
This difference comes down to the concept of character. Tsukumojuuku depicts various metafictional concepts as though they were obvious and immutable realities facing the author, who is confessing their inner psychology through the characters in the novel. In contemporary literature of the database-like type, these symbolic concepts of character, setting, and genre are all agreed upon by consensus and are played with in an atmosphere of game-like triviality. But for Maijou, he depicts a world with complex intertextual symbols that are treated with serious meaning for the persona of the author apart from any need for communal consensus. In Tsukumojuuku, the world is game-like, but every player is just the fictional depiction of Tsukumojuuku Katou.
Throughout the novel, a constant theme is the inability of Tsukumojuuku Katou to use Divine Connection to finalise the nature of the world. With each Episode, the world is redefined by the rules of Ryuusui Seiryouin, altering the backstory and therefore the interior development of Tsukumojuuku Katou. As we discussed previously, the purpose of this role of finalisation is to define the boundaries of each story within the game-like realism of Seiryouin’s JDC.
In the finale of Episode 6, Tsukumojuuku Katou, after overcoming many intersecting manifestations of himself, finally gains the ability to control the world and define the story in a literal sense, such that he can finally fulfill the role of Juuku Tsukumo and define the boundaries of the story. With this power, he slows time to a nonexistent crawl and turns his momentary reality into an immutable eternity that cannot be overridden by Ryuusui Seiryouin’s Episode 7:
So for now, I would transform this instant into an eternity. I would use God’s concentration to fractionate the duration left. During this instantaneous eternity, I would be Achilles unable to overtake the tortoise.
In this moment, for the first time, Tsukumojuuku Katou sets the boundaries of his own story. In doing so, he fundamentally surrenders in the attempt to depict a changing, developing interior character study under the rules of Ryuusui Seiryouin’s game. Instead, Tsukumojuuku Katou, having finally defined himself as separate from Juuku Tsukumo and as his own person, becomes an eternal symbol of himself. He cannot be defined by Outarou Maijou within the game of Ryuusui Seiryouin. Instead, Maijou takes ownership of the character insomuch as he can now appear as an established symbol equivalent to Maijou’s own original characters who operate intertextuality. Tsukumojuuku Katou cannot finalise Seiryouin’s JDC, but he can use his Divine Connection to cement himself within the literature of Outarou Maijou, and is subsequently able to appear in later works.
This is not the only meaning contained within this ending, or the work in general. But within the context of this post, it succinctly summarises exactly what distinguishes Outarou Maijou’s literature, and Tsukumojuuku, in its use of character to develop an entirely fictional reality that is nonetheless an authentic perspective from the (fictional) author’s own mind.
Hey mate, did you have any thoughts regarding Otaro’s use of violence? This novel starts immediately with child endangerment and abuse, before moving on to mutilation and sexual assault.
Looking at Otaro’s work as a whole, their novels feature some incredibly gruesome scenes. In your opinion, does that use of violence hold some greater meaning?