In the grand scheme of the history of media, there has never been an underdog story quite like the Japanification of global entertainment in the past fifty or so years. The English speaking and Chinese speaking media markets, who should be the presumptive leaders of the landscape, have been completely enthralled with the stories being told in a curious little island nation. According to the regular conventions of cultural hegemony, Hollywood should have dictated what consumers cared about throughout the twentieth century. At least until the rise of China was underway, and then the Chinese should have taken their place as the representative storytellers of the East in what will be the Asian century. Yet, we just can’t get enough of those Japanese cartoons.
We have all been made to understand this phenomenon, at least partially, ever since a whole generation came to be more concerned with Pokémon than they were with the entire output of the American animation industry combined. However, the exposure of the West to Japan has been remarkably uneven. While anime and manga are household terms across the English speaking world these day, other kinds of Japanese media remain mostly obscure. Indeed, from the Western perspective, one might be forgiven for assuming that every Japanese citizen is given complimentary copies of Evangelion and Naruto to accompany their birth certificate.
While it is commonplace to see Japan as an exotic land of exotic fiction featuring giant robots, magical battles and impossibly outlandish premises, Japan is actually just as partial towards kinds of fiction that we in the West are already intimately familiar with. Indeed, one of the most quintessential genres of the Japanese market is one which was once so ubiquitous in the West it might have been mistaken for the only kind we knew how to make. I am speaking of the mystery novel.
Mystery 101 in the West
All human stories have two eternal subjects: sex and violence. These, combined with the two primordial genres of Ancient Greek theatre, grant us a basic vocabulary with which we can categorise some of the “raw material” which makes up basic storytelling — all human societies create stories about romance, tragedy, war, comedy, and crime. (Though we now have many new genres which have expanded past the purview of these elemental subjects.)
This is why it is perhaps fruitless to talk about any set of ideas about stories of detectives, murders and mysteries as endemic to a particular culture or literary tradition. The genre is itself universal in some fundamental way. However, it is precisely because it concerns a subject that is so inescapable and natural that the many evolutions, revolutions, deaths, and rebirths of mystery fiction are inherently fascinating.
Firstly, some more vocabulary. A “mystery” story in English is a very broad idea indeed. And in Japan, mystery has become a loanword with precisely those same broad implications. Any piece of fiction which builds upon the unease of the unknown, and is exacting in its foreshadowing, is liable to be classified within the genre of mystery. However, for hardcore fans, these broad applications render the term mostly useless. Anyone who calls themselves a “mystery fan” is likely to be referring to one of two more narrow definitions of the genre: Detective fiction, and thrillers.
A thriller (other than a case where you are paralysed, no one is gonna save you from the beast about to strike, and you’re fighting for your life) is perhaps the most direct subgenre of mystery. This term refers to a suspense narrative where the deliberate hiding of plot elements and the deliberate revelation of others is used to build dramatic tension. The key idea here is that a thriller is all about suspense.
On account of their close relationship with the importance of mood, thrillers have been deeply tied to the medium of the feature length motion picture, and therein can be found their most emblematic examples. In a horror thriller like Psycho we fear for the prospect of our heroes being able to survive the mysterious killer at the Bates Hotel. In a spy thriller like Mission: Impossible, the secret of who killed Ethan Hunt’s team and stole the NOX List builds peril and suspense. In a psychological thriller like 10 Cloverfield Lane, the deliberate hiding of the true state of the outside world builds perpetual suspense within the self-contained world of the bunker.
While subgenres akin to thrillers can expertly tap into the aesthetic and visceral concerns of mystery, their concrete structure differs greatly from what fans mean by mystery fiction. Although there is inevitably overlap, a thriller is most concerned with the suspense created by a partial, but faulty, perception of the truth. A mystery story is instead concerned with the evolution of the audience from a state of ignorance to understanding. In other words, a thriller derives drama from having the unknown and the known coexist, while a mystery is built on the gradual discovery of the truth from a state shrouded in the unknown. This time-dependent relationship of discovery is at the core of the most quintessential representative of “pure” mystery fiction, the detective story.
Despite its name, detective fiction simply refers to a plot structure where one or more of the protagonists sets out to solve an unsolved crime in order to resolve the narrative — there need not be any detectives in the direct employ of the police involved. The genre is filled with career policemen, consulting detectives in the mould of Sherlock Holmes, amateur sleuths who solve crime as a hobby, and everything in-between. While the defining characteristics for such a character are quite broad, the uniting facet of the genre is still the presence of a “detective” character: That is, someone who attempts to solve a mysterious crime or unravel similarly unknown circumstances.
The lineage of Western detective fiction has produced two major family trees, and each illuminates an important concern of the genre as a whole, and many of the constant dichotomies within mystery more broadly. The earliest subgenre to crystalise within detective fiction was that of the whodunit. In fact, it could easily be argued that the earliest pieces of modern, Western detective fiction, such as Edgar Allan Poe’s The Murders in the Rue Morgue, were already operating within a whodunit framework.
Whodunits, also known as puzzlers, are narratives which place unique focus on the complexity of a crime, and the logical puzzles that must be overcome by the detective in order to solve such a case. In the crudest terms, they build a narrative which is reminiscent of the gameplay of Clue(do). A detective encounters an ensemble of cast members who are arranged as possible suspects, and then a seemingly impossible or unsolvable crime occurs. Over the course of the story, the detective will then uncover the secret of how the crime was committed, and the identity of the perpetrator.
Despite being predominantly in the form of novels, whodunits defy many common sense understanding of the purpose of the medium. Whodunit novels are treated as unusually interactive, and authors are expected to adhere to strict “rules”, such as those suggested by Ronald Knox or those codified by S.S. Van Dine. These odd restrictions on storytelling are a result of a commonplace view that rather than serving as just an entertaining or educational story, a whodunit must also be fair in its role as a “puzzle” or “game” that the audience can solve along with the detective.
They may rely on a simple formula, but whodunits once sat at the top of the Western genre pantheon. In the so-called Golden Age of Detective Fiction, defined most strictly as the time between the two World Wars, whodunits were outrageously successful. It was during this period that the ever-salient exemplar of the genre, Agatha Christie, became a household name. Afterwards, the genre enjoyed an afterglow of attention for much of the rest of the twentieth century as it spread to radio, television and film.
However, this afterglow could not last forever. Many literary critics saw the extremely well defined tropes of the genre as the cause of an endless stream of derivative works. Others problematised the absurd levity at the heart of the genre, especially the abstraction of serious ethical crimes like murder to a mere “puzzle” or “game” to be solved by upper class hobbyist detectives in country homes and French villas. Some writers, such as the ever underrated John Dickson Carr, answered these critics by constructing whodunits with increasingly complex solutions and metatextual depth in an attempt to keep the genre fresh. However, another of the key branches of the detective fiction family came into its own immediately after the height of the whodunit era, seemingly to answer the complaints of these critics.
Hardboiled detective fiction grew as a pulp genre during the crime wave of the Prohibition era in the United States — in contrast, whodunits were often centred on British and European lifestyles. Rather than presenting crime as a puzzle, hardboiled stories revelled in the drama and dark underbelly of more realistic crimes, especially organised crime. Often the detective in a hardboiled story was a flawed protagonist, unable to overcome a fundamental darkness of the world of crime. For those who found the Holmes, Watson and the various other clichés of whodunits nothing short of comical, Hardboiled detective fiction became their natural place of shelter. Notable authors of this movement included Raymond Chandler and Dashiell Hammett among others.
As the conventions of whodunits came to be considered increasingly antiquated, the tone and psychological drama of hardboiled stories came to be the dominant form of crime fiction in the West throughout the late twentieth century. However, both of them are quite rare in their pure forms today, instead being synthesised into more popular modern genres such as procedural crime dramas and true crime dramas — these being genres where the logical process of crime solving and the dramatic burden on the shoulders of investigators are given equal consideration.
The authentic school and the evolution of the genre
Purist mystery fans — especially of the pure form among pure forms, the classical whodunit — have doubtless been left behind in the West. The genre is not dead by any means, it still lives on in its influences, and the recent smashing success of Rian Johnson’s Knives Out has given hope for a popular revival, but its fans are always reaching for a past which can never again be the present. Rather than excitingly waited for new evolutions in the genre, these fans are eternally living in a long lost Golden Era.
This is not the case in Japan.
Japan’s initial experience with the mystery genre paralleled that of the West. Although the use of crime as a dramatic device dated back millennia, the birth of the modern conception of a detective story by writers such as Edgar Allan Poe and Arthur Conan Doyle also led to the whodunit becoming a popular genre in Japan. Translations of the Western hits gained traction, but most importantly, the Japanese mystery scene developed alongside interest in the West.
Tarou Hirai, better known as the pseudonymous Edogawa, Ranpo (a simple play on Edgar Allan Poe’s own name), is generally considered the father of this modern movement of Japanese mystery fiction whodunits. Taking direct inspiration from both the earlier birth of Western whodunits and the tropes of the Golden Age of Detective Fiction with which he was concurrently writing, he infused the premise with the distinct interests and flare of Japanese literature. This led directly to a massive infusion of interest in the genre, and the creation of the association known as the Mystery Writers of Japan, which is still a massive force in Japanese literature to this day.
Edogawa set a trend which would become an essential piece of the continued success of the genre in Japan: He did not merely import the mystery genre to the Japanese language, but built a new subgenre in its own right which combined the mechanics of the whodunit with the particular interests of Japanese culture and literature, ensuring that there was a suitable foundation for other authors to continue building upon his work. In the post-war period, Japanese mystery fiction begun to take on a unique cultural flavour rather than merely localising the trends of the West. As a result, readers developed a new vocabulary. Although “mystery” retained its usage as a loan word referring broadly to all entries within the genre, detective fiction and especially whodunits came to be known as “suiri shousetsu”, or “deduction novels”. (A more straightforward and useful name than anything used within the West, for what it is worth.)
These deduction novels remained immensely popular within Japan even as they fell out of favour in the West. Although the Japanese market was far from immune from the forces which lead to the decline of whodunits in the West, the Eastern deduction novel has remained one of the most popular elements of the Japanese literary scene. Even today, many deduction novels manage to obtain favourable sales in Japan which the genre has not enjoyed in the West for a long time. This is thanks in no small part by Japanese readers embracing the evolution of the genre to integrate critiques and the expectations of modernity without losing its core appeal.
The gradual evolution of deduction novels has led to a succession of formalised “schools”, or generations, of mystery fiction which have each allowed the genre to reach beyond the narrower conceptions of the genre in the West. In the simplest terms, Japanese mystery fiction can be categorised into four schools, all of which have retained a hold on audiences in the modern day. These are:
- The honkaku, or authentic school of mystery fiction is the oldest and most conventional style of mystery novels one can find in Japan. They are built directly on the framework of Western whodunits and the particular innovations of Edogawa, Ranpo.
- The shakai, or social school of mystery fiction refers to the trend from the 1960s onwards of including more realism and more substantive presentations of the social implications of crime within mystery novels. It is stylistically defined by its focus on including societal analysis. This school includes both deduction novels that take on a more realistic bent, and hardboiled detective fiction which deemphasises the importance of deduction in a similar manner to the Western hardboiled genre.
- The shinhonkaku, or neo-authentic school of mystery fiction is a direct response to the strengths and weaknesses of the authentic school. This style gained traction in the late 1980s. Neo-authentic mystery fiction is partly inspired by the increasing complexity and subversiveness that was already taking place in Western detective fiction after the decline of the Golden Age of Deductive Fiction.
- The shindenki, or neo-biographical fantasy school of mystery fiction was the result of another gradual shift in the genre which came into its own during the late 1990s. It sought to reconcile interest in the neo-authentic school with the rising popularity of sci-fi and fantasy. Unlike the neo-authentic school, the neo-biographical fantasy school may include truly impossible or supernatural crimes, and build into a more broad fantasy or sci-fi sense of genre.
In contrast to the implications one might draw from the separation of these schools into four separate paragraphs, these should not be understood as entirely separate categories. Instead, they are particular trends which have expanded the popular understanding of what constitutes a mystery novel. The neo-authentic school is inherently a variation of the authentic school, and could almost be defined as existing within the authentic school. Almost all neo-biographical fantasy mystery novels are inspired by the neo-authentic school, and many fall within both schools. And the social school can by definition coexist with any of the other schools, as it is merely a trend towards realism and does not place any strict structural obligations on the author.
For greater clarification on the neo-biographical fantasy school, please read this wiki page.
Some brief words on the social school
To be frank, I don’t want to spend too much time on the social school. For those interested in the unique national features of Japanese mystery fiction, this school stands the most outside of that story. It does not reflect the particular evolution of Japanese mystery writing to the same extent as the other schools, it is instead the product of the collision of general Japanese literary trends with global trends towards realistic crime writing.
This does not mean that the social school is of no interest, as its many overlapping points with the other genres is essential to understanding the unique flavour of Japanese mystery. While Japan is not as well known as it should be in the West for its mystery fiction, Japanese horror enjoys unparalleled international acclaim. And it is chiefly in its influences from this genre that distinguishes the social school of mystery fiction from the Western styles of realistic crime writing and hardboiled stories.
There is a single author that needs to be mentioned here above all others. Indeed, if it weren’t for this author there would be no reason to recommend this style to purist mystery fans: Natsuhiko Kyougoku is an absolute master of the form of the social mystery novel. I shall no doubt edit this essay to include a hyperlink to a review of one of his novels once I write it, and there I will gush about him more freely. That said, he is the premier example of the benefits of this style. Rather than dwelling on the social school, I will only say the following: Read Natsuhiko Kyougoku.
The neo-authentic school in theory and practice
The need to clarify the situation surrounding the neo-authentic school could accurately be called the raison d’être for this essay. While the authentic school of mystery fiction is still alive and kicking to a greater degree than the comparable whodunits of the West, the evolution of the neo-authentic school is what has truly separated the Japanese tradition from the West. Rather than slowly being replaced by more realistic crime fiction, the neo-authentic school has allowed Japanese writers to build a new movement out of modernising and building upon the fundamental theory of a whodunit.
Before we give too much credit to the Japanese tradition, it must be noted that the first neo-authentic mystery novelist was not from Japan after all. While the father of the Japanese neo-authentic school was Yukito Ayatsuji, the first author to adopt the philosophy which defined the neo-authentic style was the American writer John Dickson Carr — who was published almost 60 years earlier. The key difference for our purposes was that Carr failed to cause the same radical shift in the Western whodunit tradition as Ayatsuji and others did in Japan. While there were those inspired by Carr, enough that one can find a steady stream of similar whodunits from the West, the neo-authentic school of Japanese mystery fiction crystalised this style into a concrete subgenre.
Clearly defining our vocabulary: The neo-authentic school of mystery fiction is a tradition of especially complex and subversively metatextual whodunit deduction novels, predominantly from Japan. The movement is formally dated as beginning with Ayatsuji Yukito’s The Decagon House Murders, published in 1987. Other major writers who might be partially familiar to Western readers include Shimada Soji, Hiroshi Mori, Alice Arisugawa, Rintarou Norizuki, Ryuusui Seiryouin, and Nishio, Ishin among others.
The Western whodunit genre, which is most comparable to the authentic school of mystery fiction in Japan, slowly fell out of favour with mainstream critics and audiences due to an inherent tension between the expectation of plausibility and the ever increasing game of one-upmanship in regards to the complexity of the crimes that detectives were expected to solve. The neo-authentic school embraces this contradiction by making the gamification of the narratives explicit at the metatextual level. Implausibly complex crimes are openly admitted to be as such, and the audience is invited to peel back the layers of abstraction and engage with logical puzzles without any pretence of reality.
To the neo-authentic mystery writer, a narrative need not be believed to be likely to ever happen in reality. Instead, if the crime is sufficiently incontrovertibly grounded in meticulous logic, and clues that are presented in the spirit of fair play, they expect the audience to find the crime believable in the context of fiction. However, this does not mean that the neo-authentic school is by definition unrealistic, just that they are open with their audience about the games and puzzles at the heart of a whodunit narrative. By allowing the audience behind the curtain, they evade the criticism often levelled at whodunits as being inherently unconvincing representations of the nature of crime.
A guide for Weaboos and other Japanophiles: Getting into Japanese mystery through anime
I begun this essay by articulating my disappointment that even with the explosive success Japan has had in exporting its media, the rich history of Japanese mystery fiction has been largely pushed out of mainstream notice by the West. However, that does not mean that there are not various means that a Western audience has available to it to engage with this rich tradition. Indeed, even just with the most successful of these successful Japanese imports, anime, there are plenty of exciting launching points to become acquainted with the various, exciting branches of the Japanese mystery fiction family tree.
Introductory authentic (honkaku) style mystery anime
Introductory social (shakai) style mystery anime
Introductory neo-authentic (shinhonkaku) style mystery anime
Subete ga F ni naru (The Perfect Insider)
Kubikiri Cycle: Aoiro Savant to Zaregototsukai
Introductory neo-biographical fantasy (shindenki) style mystery anime
Bonus recommendations that mix multiple styles
