Unlike Scandinavia, where the police procedural form has been wedded to socio-political activism and pessimism since at least the 1960s, and unlike the United States, where different variations of the native hardboiled school continues to sell, the traditional mystery story is still alive and well in Japan. And thankfully, given a recent push to translate such mystery classics as Yukito Ayatsuji’s The Decagon House Murders into English, some of these more orthodox works may be hitting our shores very soon.
Before proceeding deeply into the honkaku, a word that can either be translated as “authentic” or “orthodox,” school of mystery writing, let’s briefly lay out what traditional detective fiction is more broadly. In the early 1930s, a group of successful British detective fiction writers created a literary society with strict rules that came to be known as the Detection Club. Besides the group’s consitution, which was finalized in March 1932 and included such dictates as “The Committee shall be bound upon the requisition of ten Members to call an Extraordinary General Meeting, and shall be at liberty to do so of its own authority, specifying the object, and giving 14 days’ notice of such meeting,” the Detection Club included a set of rules that were meant to give the popular art form not only the appearance of logical conformity, but also a new sense of legitimacy during an age when detective novels had to compete with seedy pulp magazines for working and middle class readers. Appropriately assembled by Ronald Knox, a Catholic priest who also wrote detective fiction, the 10 Commandments of Detective Fiction touched on everything from the supernatural (which was forbidden) to the physcial (“Not more than one secret room or passage is allowable”). And while trying to reign in the excesses of certain strands of mystery fiction (“No Chinaman must figure into the story”), Knox’s Ten Commandments created an essentially reactionary blueprint that had developed over time as a reponse to the genre’s success during the years between World Wars I and II.
Although they may sound confining, the commandments of the Detection Club helped to produce the Golden Age of Detection Fiction, when Agatha Christie (who frequently cheated or at least bent the rules), Dorothy Sayers, and the much underrated John Dickson Carr created immensley popular works of cerebral and puzzle-centric detectives stories. In these novels, locked rooms, highly suspicious partygoers, and foreboding country mansions matched wits with eccentric detectives, who spent the majority of their time chasing one elaborate clue after another. It was always about murder, too, for only that crime was deemed worthy enough for the brilliant detective’s attention.
But like all things golden, the Golden Age faded and soon became the subject of ridicule. No critic was as biting or as eloquent Raymond Chandler, who lampooned the genre’s “handwrought duelling pistols, curare, and tropical fish” as unrealistic depictions of crime and criminality. Chandler’s The Simple Art of Murder, which was published in The Atlantic Monthly in 1944, pronounced dead an already dying genre, which has never fully recovered or been rehabilitated in North America.
One place where the Golden Age style remains strong is Japan, where the Honkaku Mystery Writers Club of Japan carries on the traditions of the Detection Club and Edogawa Rampo, the legendary Japanese author who first incorporated the themes, tropes, and expectations of Western mystery fiction into his Japanese language detective tales. Beginning with his 1923 short story The Two-Sen Copper Coin, Rampo, whose psuedonym is meant to invoke not only the Edo River, but also his literary idol Edgar Allan Poe, Rampo was reponsible for creating the first era of Japanese mystery writing, which according to Murder Most Modern: Detective Fiction and Japanese Culture author Sari Kawana, overturned “some of the central conventions” of Golden Age detective fiction without fully denouncing the genre a la Chandler. In particular, Rampo followed a “unorthodox” model, peppering his stories with elements taken from horror and the grotesque, while remaining faithful to most of the conventions we associate with characters like Sherlock Holmes and Hercule Poirot.
In Rampo’s wake came numerous imitators and followers, some of whom belonged to Rampo’s own society—the Mystery Writers of Japan. Then, in the 1950s, Japanese detective fiction, led by Matsumoto Seicho, began to shed Rampo’s influence in favor of noir and gritty realism. Seicho, a radical leftist who traveled to Cuba and North Vietnam during the ‘60s and ‘70s, imbued the Japanese detective fiction brand with nihilism and a caustic eye that was more in line with the highly political mystery writing tradition of France than either the cozy sentimentalities of the British Golden Age or the more familiar taste of Rampo’s strange brew.
But as is usually the case with fiction and sometimes with politics, tradition and the classical style of detective fiction writing could not be held down or sneered away by pundits. In 1981, a single novel—Soji Shimada’s excellent The Tokyo Zodiac Murders—helped to renew a popular interest in the old manners of one of the world’s most popular literary genres. But what is key about Shimada and other honkaku authors is that they do not write historical fiction. Rather, honkaku novels combine intellectual challenges to the reader and all the trappings of the best whodunits with a modern setting. For example, The Tokyo Zodiac Murders concerns the forty-year-old crimes of a deranged murderer and the lengths to which the private detective/astrologer Kiyoshi Mitarai goes in order to not only crack the case, but also uncover the reasons behind the murder’s otherworldly motivation. Similarly, Ayatusji’s The Decagon House Murders (1987), which was recently translated into English by the Dutch-Chinese scholar Ho-Ling Wong, details a series of And Then There Were None-like murders that occur at an isolated Japanese island where members of the collegiate Mystery Club have gathered to investigate older series of murders that previously occurred on the island. To further drive home the traditional elements of the story, Ayatusji gave his characters names like Poe, Orczy, and Agatha.
The lifesblood of honkaku in Japan remains the various clubs of writers, such as the Kyoto University Mystery Club and the Honkaku Mystery Writers of Japan, who encourage not only the creation of new honkaku works, but also the study of older Western and Japanese mystery novels. In the English-speaking world, honkaku receives most its support from small genre presses like Looked Room International and Pushkin Vertigo, the latter of which will be releasing a new English translation of The Tokyo Zodiac Murders on September 15th. While it’s unlikely that honkaku’s popularity in the U.S. will spread beyond the our Japanophiles, these novels, from the slightly ghastly and complex murders cases of Shimada to the fun and Ellery Queen-influenced works of Rintaro Norizuki, deserve a chance to be savored by Golden Age afficiandos and everyday readers alike.
Benjamin Welton is a writer in Boston.
