While I am aware that there are many other projects that I should maybe finish first, the critical necessity of this post has also become obvious to me. And besides, it should be pretty quick and it should save me time in the long run.
With the help of many admirable translation efforts, English speakers are now becoming aware of the many great contributions of Japanese authors to the world of mystery fiction. This is not just in the sense of the more approachable variety, such as Yukito Ayatsuji’s The Decagon House Murders. Even radical works such as Outarou Maijou’s Tsukumojuuku are available for the English-speaking imagination. However, for thoroughly justified reasons, this English language interest is likely to pass over the abundance of non-fiction criticism and analysis that was produced in response to the mystery fiction boom that Japan experienced from 1987 onwards.
As an egghead myself, I find the whole field worthy of interest. But very few readers, even among the mystery-obsessed in Japan, are eccentric enough to agree with that position. And so, translators and readers have a mountain of other content to worry about first. Yet, in Japan itself, even many pure fiction readers in this particular subculture are likely to be aware of the two crowning conceptual achievements of the sub-field of contemporary Japanese mystery criticism: These being Rintarou Norizuki’s theory of the late Queen problems and Kiyoshi Kasai’s mass death theory.
With the help of Umineko: When They Cry, some people in the West may have heard of Norizuki’s late Queen problems. But Kasai’s mass death theory is really at the bottom of the ‘Japanese mystery fiction iceberg’ (no one make one of those stupid memes, please). Perhaps the only reasons anyone would know of it is a brief reference in Maijou’s Tsukumojuuku and the incessant yammering of my own blog. My end goal is that each of these theories will have a link somewhere where one can go for a complete explanation. As the more conceptually complex of the two, my plan to present a complete study of the late Queen problems would only be possible with quite a bit of work (and probably a pretty sizable translation effort) at a later date. But I feel like the mass death theory should be easy enough to explain, so it is time to strike while the iron is still hot.
Mass theory
While the name late Queen problems might be challenging to parse literally, Kiyoshi Kasai’s mass death theory has the benefit of being exactly what is written on the tin: it is a theory of mass death as it relates to mystery fiction. However, the phrase ‘mass death’ requires some additional clarification before it will be obvious just how literally named this theory is. The word mass seems to simply suggest a large scale of death, but its meaning is a touch more comprehensive than that. The ‘mass’ in mass death also refers to the socio-philosophical concept of massification. This might seem a tad backwards, but we will cover the intellectual history of this concept before we properly define and explain it.
Massification is an obscure but not unknown concept in English language philosophy. It was introduced to English speakers by Hannah Arendt in her 1950 work The Origins of Totalitarianism and then generalised in her 1958 The Human Condition. But she based her ideas on the work of her deceased close friend Walter Benjamin (whose work had yet to be translated from German to English). Benjamin was a Jewish philosopher and media theorist, and a tragic casualty of the Nazi occupation of Europe during the Second World War. It is worth noting that it is Benjamin’s formulation, not Arendt’s sequel, that informs Kasai’s use of the phrase mass death.
Thanks to Benjamin, the West already had a ‘mass theory’ of mystery fiction: Benjamin established a general social theory of massification in his On Some Motifs in Baudelaire. And this was further extended in The Arcades Project—including a treatment of mystery fiction. When Kasai explains his theory of mass death, he attributes the foundations of the theory to three theorists: Firstly, Benjamin, who is cited as the most important, and then José Ortega y Gasset and Siegfried Kracauer. Indeed, Benjamin’s approach to mystery fiction owed a great deal to Kracauer, whose earlier works should be considered the lineal starting point of the mass death theory. But that is enough drudgery through this family tree for turbonerds. With the lineage of ideas fully laid out for those that want to do their own research, we can go about explaining the ‘mass theory of detective fiction’ that Benjamin reached, as that will get us halfway to a mass death theory.
Massification has many particular varieties, but in general it refers to any social theory that emphasises a lack of differentiation and stratification in modern capitalist society. In pre-modern society, a layered hierarchy of people was taken for granted. The rule of aristocracy was premised on inheritable social standing. And the value of individuals was always conditioned by their relative place in this hierarchy of nobility. In 1789, the full force of modernity arrived in Europe with the French Revolution. Throughout the subsequent 19th century, the long-standing rule of the aristocracy was crushed by the successive bourgeois revolutions across Europe. While the French Revolution was characterised by a frenzy of utopianism that quickly imploded, these bourgeois revolutions affected long-lived enough change to present practical questions: Once the old hierarchy based on nobility was smashed, and a new social order instituted, the utopia of ‘liberté, égalité, fraternité’ would still be far away. Therefore, it became necessary to explain the presence of social hierarchies with a general model beyond the traditional rule of the aristocracy. Socialism and Marxism explained this with the framework of class conflict, and the domination of the proletariat by the bourgeoisie. Social Darwinism and scientific racism explained it by references to a hierarchy of races and civilisations.
It is not too difficult to see the importance of both of these narratives throughout modern history. To massively simplify, Soviet communism seemed to embody an extreme manifestation of the narrative of class conflict, and fascism looked to be an extreme manifestation of the narrative of racial and civilisational hierarchy. This was exactly why Hannah Arendt’s interest in the idea of massification was crystalised in a book about both of these systems—that is, The Origins of Totalitarianism. Massification is something of a rejection of the applicability of both of these narratives. It is a perspective that argues that modern society is characterised by non-differentiation, and that no central hierarchy has instituted itself in place of the old system of aristocracy.
This argument has obvious utility within a certain brand of Enlightenment conservatism. If we view the narratives of class conflict and racial conflict as challenges to the validity of the revolutionary order established in the 19th century, that revolutionary order could in turn be defended by rejecting those conflicts and insisting on the actual non-differentiation and equality of people. Arendt summarises this position like so:
The Declaration of the Rights of Man at the end of the eighteenth century was a turning point in history. It meant nothing more nor less than that from then on Man, and not God’s command or the customs of history, should be the source of Law. Independent of the privileges which history had bestowed upon certain strata of society or certain nations, the declaration indicated man’s emancipation from all tutelage and announced that he had now come of age.
Of course, Arendt’s appropriation of massification is more equivocal than this naked liberal-conservatism. A truly conservative vision was one that saw the revolutions in America, France, and across Europe as a fundamental End of History (Francis Fukuyama jump scare). This perspective was most clearly articulated by Calvin Coolidge during his time as the president of the United States:
About the Declaration there is a finality that is exceedingly restful. It is often asserted that the world has made a great deal of progress since 1776, that we have had new thoughts and new experiences which have given us a great advance over the people of that day, and that we may therefore very well discard their conclusions for something more modern. But that reasoning can not be applied to this great charter. If all men are created equal, that is final. If they are endowed with inalienable rights, that is final. If governments derive their just powers from the consent of the governed, that is final. No advance, no progress can be made beyond these propositions. If anyone wishes to deny their truth or their soundness, the only direction in which he can proceed historically is not forward, but backward toward the time when there was no equality, no rights of the individual, no rule of the people. Those who wish to proceed in that direction can not lay claim to progress. They are reactionary. Their ideas are not more modern, but more ancient, than those of the Revolutionary fathers.
Of course, such liberalism would have never referred to its position as one of massification. Massification was a term generally deployed disparagingly against the naïveté of this kind of liberal conservatism. For example, it was argued by elitists such as H.L. Mencken that a society governed by these principles would devolve into a society of non-differentiated masses: That mob rule was ineffectual and utopian. Therefore, we could summarise this liberal vision of massification as being a conservative strain. But Walter Benjamin used the word ‘mass’ in a slightly different sense.
As a Marxist, Benjamin believed in the final analytical validity of class conflict as the organising principle of bourgeois society. Insomuch as Benjamin analysed the cultural elimination of social differentiation, he saw it as a phantasm of the superstructure that disguised the concrete relations of exploitation present in the economic base. More particularly, he related massification to the erasure of the lower middle classes, saying:
The growing proletarianization of modern man and the increasing formation of masses are two aspects of the same process.
Therefore, when Benjamin, Arendt, and later Kasai discuss the massification of society, their perspective on the phenomenon is of a left-wing variety, as contrasted to the conservative strain.
But whichever viewpoint one chooses to emphasise, massification refers to the idea that liberal democratic capitalism since the revolutionary era has produced a society that lacks concrete social hierarchies. That is, that society is now composed of anonymous masses who lack the sense of differentiation imposed by pre-modern society. Therefore, when Kasai refers to a mass death theory of mystery fiction, this massness is rooted not just in scale, but in anonymisation and lack of differentiation. Kasai’s theory does not conceive of the possibility of modern mystery fiction arising in response to a large-scale dying within the strictly hierarchical character of pre-modern society. For example, Kasai sees no reason to imagine the possibility of mystery fiction in the context of the Black Death of the 14th century. Walter Benjamin describes this peculiar massification of modern society like so:
For another, it tells us what is really meant by these masses. They do not stand for classes or any sort of collective; rather, they are nothing but the amorphous crowd of passers-by, the people in the street … Fear, revulsion, and horror were the emotions which the big-city crowd aroused in those who first observed it. For Poe it has something barbaric; discipline just barely manages to tame it. Later, James Ensor tirelessly confronted its discipline with its wildness; he liked to put military groups in his carnival mobs, and both got along splendidly—as the prototype of totalitarian states, in which the police make common cause with the looters. Valéry, who had a fine eye for the cluster of symptoms called ‘civilization,’ has characterized one of the pertinent facts. ‘The inhabitant of the great urban centres,’ he writes, ‘reverts to a state of savagery—that is, of isolation. The feeling of being dependent on others, which used to be kept alive by need, is gradually blunted in the smooth functioning of the social mechanism.
The allusion to Poe by Benjamin is not a coincidence. Poe was of course the father of mystery fiction. Poe’s construction of the genre is generally attributed to the combination of both horror and adventure fiction with the modern interest in science and rationality. But for Benjamin, Poe was also one of the most important writers on the anonymisation and massification of modern urban life. When it comes to this motif, Benjamin does not just emphasise Poe’s mystery fiction, but also the mundane horror short story The Man of the Crowd. Benjamin summarised the mood of this text in the following manner:
Poe’s manner of presentation cannot be called realism. It shows a purposely distorting imagination at work, one that removes the text far from what is commonly advocated as the model of social realism. Barbier, perhaps one of the best examples of this type of realism that come to mind, describes things in a less eccentric way. Moreover, he chose a more transparent subject: the oppressed masses. Poe is not concerned with these; he deals with ‘people,’ pure and simple. For him, as for Engels, there was something menacing in the spectacle they presented.
For Benajmin, the fear that motivates mystery fiction begins with this crowd of masses. In pre-modern society, murder and death could always be framed as being systematically related to natural hierarchies that governed the social order. When people were killed, they were always killed in recognition of their place above or below someone else. For example, when a peasant’s land was looted by a neighbouring noble, it was given an inherent rationale as the theft of one noble’s property by another. When one’s standing in society was so obvious, death was also given an obvious meaning in relation to that standing. That is, when the role and purpose of each individual was imposed by society, the motive of the culprit and identity of the victim was always self-evident. The horror of the masses was precisely that, since they had all attained the status of individual citizens in the bourgeois revolutions, their reasons and identity had become unknowable. They were all simply ‘people’ whose reasons for murder could become a mystery.
With this way of thinking, the arrival of the masses of individuals and the recognition of the sacred internal nature of these individuals are one and the same. A person who is just an individual, and afforded equality by liberal society, can think or believe anything. Their deaths can no longer be understood in the purely social terms of hierarchical society. Benjamin describes this new society of individuals in terms of the metaphor of architecture:
For the private individual, the place of dwelling is for the first time opposed to the place of work. The former constitutes itself as the interior. Its complement is the office. The private individual, who in the office has to deal with reality, needs the domestic interior to sustain him in his illusions. This necessity is all the more pressing since he has no intention of allowing his commercial considerations to impinge on social ones. In the formation of his private environment, both are kept out. From this arise the phantasmagorias of the interior—which, for the private man, represents the universe. In the interior, he brings together the far away and the long ago. His living room is a box in the theater of the world.
This perspective leads naturally to Benjamin’s history of mystery fiction:
The interior is not just the universe but also the etui of the private individual. To dwell means to leave traces. In the interior, these are accentuated. Coverlets and antimacassars, cases and containers are devised in abundance; in these, the traces of the most ordinary objects of use are imprinted. In just the same way, the traces of the inhabitant are imprinted in the interior. Enter the detective story, which pursues these traces. Poe, in his “Philosophy of Furniture” as well as in his detective fiction, shows himself to be the first physiognomist of the domestic interior. The criminals in early detective novels are neither gentlemen nor apaches, but private citizens of the middle class.
For Benjamin, the detective is a priest with the power to see into the interior lives of the individuals of mass society and thereby sort these individuals apart from one another. That is, to understand the reason behind deaths that have been stripped of their meaning by the anonymisation of mass society. This more or less completes the summary of the mass theory of mystery fiction which serves as the foundation of Kasai’s mass death theory.
Death theory
While the mass theory of mystery fiction already explained the particular importance of modernity to the existence of the genre, the Japanese author and thinker Kiyoshi Kasai extended this theory to more thoroughly explain its particular importance and popularity in the interwar period known as the Golden Age. Kasai summarised his mass death theory like so:
During the interwar period, a new literary form called the detective novel was enthusiastically embraced by intellectuals and the general public. This was because it was seen as an escape, albeit fictional, from the 20th-century inevitabilities of mass death, anonymisation, and senselessness that characterised the Great War. The fictional deaths in detective novels stood in stark contrast to the reality of soldiers being massacred by machine guns and poison gas; they represented privileged deaths, chosen to bring death upon a single victim. The culprits would employ all their cunning, while the detectives would devote their utmost wisdom to uncovering the truth behind the crimes. The image of a brilliantly staged death artificially created in detective novels undoubtedly brought overwhelming excitement and fascination to the readers of the interwar period, who were helplessly adrift in reverberating waves of mass death and mass life.
This quote makes it clear exactly why the effects of massification on death in society go far beyond just a question of scale. Kasai does not attribute the dominance of mystery fiction after the First World War to the number killed in the war. Rather, it is that the deaths in this war replicated the opaque nature of life in an anonymised liberal mass society. This new war was stripped of the sense of adventure and purpose that history attached to pre-modern conflict. In this society where individuals were just individuals, corpses were just corpses. As Kasai explains it:
In other words, the 19th century was yet to discover the hell of the endless everyday. Even the mundane everyday life of bourgeois culture was thought to harmoniously develop towards an extraordinary everyday of revolution, war, love, and art. However, the last generation of the 19th century found an endless everyday with no exit in the trenches. Their endless everyday was filled with sludge and surrounded by the mass death of poison gas and machine gun fire; their life was thoroughly cleansed of the ideals of an extraordinary everyday. War, which was the very essence of the 19th century spirit of adventure and the extraordinary everyday as embodied by Fabrice del Dongo, had been unmasked as the source of a hellish endless everyday.
This was exactly why the concept of the ‘privileged death’ of mystery fiction that Kasai references is so crucial. Were it as simple as desiring literature that contradicted the mass scale of death unleashed by the First World War and the subsequent influenza pandemic, the writers of the interwar period might have focused their attention on deathless stories of romance or the like. Instead, mystery fiction is oftentimes rooted in the motif of death—it charges towards the issue head-on. However, the deaths in mystery fiction are directly opposed to the values of massification: The interior motives of the culprits are revealed, giving the death of the victim a clear reason. The detective confronts the meaninglessness of death, and by giving the death the privilege of rational investigation, ritually transforms an anonymous corpse into a human person whose death deserves dignity. This matches with how Outarou Maijou summarised Kasai’s theory in Tsukumojuuku, saying that:
There is this school of thought which suggests that mystery novels soared in popularity as devices promoting a privileged death due to a general revolt against the mass deaths which flourished during the world wars.
The development of a mass society that went along with the promises of equality that corresponded to liberal modernity was enough to explain the existence of mystery fiction. But Kasai’s theory on the importance of death in this equation is crucial if one wants to discuss the particular developments of the genre in the 20th century. Of course, this is not to say that the scale of death has no impact. Without large-scale dying, there would not be the awareness of death necessary to give mystery fiction its appropriate historical impact. Kasai explains this like so:
The casualties of the First World War were unprecedented compared to earlier conflicts. The trench warfare that spread across both the French and Russian fronts left behind a mountain of seven million dead in four quick years. More precisely, the young men who were forced to live through this trench warfare did not experience the adventure of an extraordinary everyday … They lived within a mechanical slaughter where the future was bleak and inescapable.
Of course, this is not to say that the greater the number of the deaths the greater the importance of mystery fiction. Kasai views the mass death theory as part of a wider philosophical system that informed the cultural shifts that resulted from the First World War. For Kasai, mystery fiction is a restrained reaction to mass death, one that channels the social impacts of those mass death when those impacts fail to find their more total political manifestation:
Most of the major movements associated with modernism—for example, formalism, surrealism, dadaism, and expressionism—originated in countries like Russia, Germany, and France, where battles had actually taken place in front of their very eyes. Whereas, you don’t find these sorts of drastic artistic movements occurring in countries like America and England, which didn’t experience the war firsthand. Then what did happen in America and England? The fad of serious mystery novels! Let’s take a serial story in a magazine or newspaper. Before the war, at least one person per day or per week or per month was killed in those stories. The way death is presented in those works reflected the way people thought about death before the war—it was routine, very easy: people simply died, very quickly, with almost no fuss at all. But in a serious postwar mystery novel, death doesn’t happen so easily: the murderer scrupulously plans the killing in detail and carries out the crime with every due respect to the victim. Even after the murder, the detective works very hard to find out who had done it. This is almost like a double-authorization of the victim. The death of the individual is made very meaningful—perhaps in order to give it meaning in art that’s no longer possible in real life.
As Kasai explains it, those countries on the continent most involved in the war were those that experienced radical artistic movements in response. It is no coincidence that these countries also saw radical political reformulations under communism and fascism in the interwar period. In those countries where the war totally destroyed the existing order established by the bourgeois revolutions, mass death led to the resuscitation of the 19th century antitheses to massification: More specifically, the Marxist belief in class conflict and the nationalist belief in racial conflict. In those countries whose bourgeois order remained after the war, there was no escape from massification and mass death possible in the systems of politics and ideology. Therefore, popular fiction offered this escape in the form of mystery fiction.
To summarise this position in total: Kiyoshi Kasai contends that the mass scale of death in the First World War reacted dialectically with the massification of life present through the post-revolutionary order of the 19th century. This order was summarised by Walter Benjamin’s understanding of massification, and laid sufficient foundations for the birth of mystery fiction as a genre. But it was only after the First World War, where the importance of death was added to the understanding of mass society, that mystery fiction could be completed as a historically important genre. This transformation of mystery fiction by the First World War into something that responded to both the mass life of the 19th century and the mass death of the First World War is known as Kasai’s mass death theory of mystery fiction. For those that want a further explanation of Kasai’s full theory of the ideological history of the 20th century, I would recommend his essay Mass Death=Mass Life and the “Endless Everyday”.
