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.
