‘Bookfluencer’ Jack Edwards with a copy of Asako Yuzuki’s ‘Butter’. (Jack Edwards/Youtube)
Thirty years ago, if you asked someone British to name their favourite Japanese author, most people would say Haruki Murakami. One of Japan’s best-known postwar novelists, he has been divisive at home but lauded around the world for works like Norwegian Wood (1987) and The Wind-Up Bird Chronicle (1995), which blend history, nostalgia and magical realism. If you asked that same person for their second favourite Japanese author, you’d probably get Banana Yoshimoto or — just as likely — a blank stare.
Today, however, nearly half of the UK’s top-40 translated fiction titles come from Japan. The most popular of them, Asako Yuzuki’s Butter, sold more copies in the UK — exceeding 400,000 — than it had done back home, where it was nevertheless still a success. Alongside the cosy and the comfortable — including a strange fixation with cats — runs the darkly criminal. The thrill of this latter genre is surely similar for both Japanese and British audiences. Members of two relatively low-crime, high-trust societies find it bracing to witness, at a safe remove, the temporary and localised breakdown of law and order. What makes stories like these plausible in both places is a long-standing sense, running from detective fiction’s Golden Age a century ago through to the present day, that beneath the public civility on which both cultures pride themselves lies misery and even horror.
Britain’s detective fiction bond with Japan goes back to the arrival on Japanese shores in the late 19th century of Sherlock Holmes in translation. Japan’s leaders at this point saw themselves playing an urgent game of Great Power catch-up. They developed modern armed forces, opened factories and began trading in the international economy. But they soon realised material progress alone was not enough. The physical and intellectual quality of the population mattered too, in an age of fierce, zero-sum global competition.
Literature had a role to play here, as the country set about weeding out the remnants of “superstition” and other unwanted relics of the past. Whereas the popular new “I-novel” genre delivered an unhelpfully mixed verdict on Japanese modernisation — its first-person narrators were often bewildered by the present and yearned for the past — the translated adventures of Arsène Lupin and Sherlock Holmes performed a more useful service. Sales of both men’s adventures were modest at first, and yet the criminal mastermind and the bohemian sleuth both, in their differing ways, served as compelling adverts for the logical, deductive mind. The exposure and punishment of wrongdoing was already a thread in Japanese storytelling, from tales of civic and samurai justice to Buddhist warnings of karmic comeuppance. But reading about someone perpetrating or reverse-engineering a fiendishly clever crime, against the backdrop of the complexities of modern life, was a fresh and salutary exercise for what Agatha Christie’s Poirot liked to call the “little grey cells”.
The so-called “fair-play” crime thriller, unfolding in a closed setting with a finite list of suspects, ended up becoming a staple of crime writing in Japan. It weathered suppression during the Second World War — for its Western origins and focus on individual brilliance over collective effort — before rising again with Seishi Yokomizo’s The Honjin Murders (1946). The novel was published in English in 2019 — to rave reviews — by the Pushkin Vertigo imprint. The Honjin Murders centres around an apparently impossible crime. A newly-wed couple is found murdered in their detached annex, which is locked from inside. The snow all around it meanwhile remains entirely undisturbed.
Fun though puzzles are, however, there were those in Japan as far back as the Twenties who wanted the genre to do more. They included the godfather of mystery writing, Edogawa Ranpo, whose pen name was a not-so-subtle phonetic clue to the debt he owed to America’s Edgar Allan Poe. The kanji used meant something like “staggering along the Edo River”.
Ranpo’s fictional detective Kogorō Akechi was a dark twist on Sherlock Holmes, augmenting the latter’s powers of observation and deduction with an intuitive grasp of human psychology — especially that of abnormal or unstable minds. The satirical intent seems clear: you can know a society by the sorts of crimes and crime-fighters it throws up. The Victorian world of Sherlock Holmes was ordered and contained. Akechi, on the other hand, succeeded only by becoming attuned to perversity and dysfunction. Ranpo, as his creator, became a master not of the “whodunit” genre, but the whydunit.
It was hardly the case, of course, that Japan was falling apart in the Twenties, when the first Akechi mystery was published. But there were seeds of uncertainty and discontent with which Ranpo could work. Until relatively recently, most Japanese had lived and died in or around the village where they were born, knowing almost everything about everyone in the community. Now, in a rapidly-urbanising country, plenty knew what it felt like to move to a new town or city and suddenly have complete strangers for neighbours. The new and unnerving forms of intimacy that resulted — physical closeness without real knowledge or sympathy — power some of Ranpo’s best-known stories. In The Human Chair (1925), a voyeuristic furniture maker conceals himself inside an armchair so that he can enjoy the experience of having people sit, entirely unsuspecting, on his lap.
Sharing Ranpo’s love of using crime to probe dysfunction was Seichō Matsumoto, creator of Inspector Imanishi. He was less interested than Ranpo in an “erotic and grotesque” (eroguro) sensibility, preferring to focus on Japan as a whole during its postwar return to prosperity from the Fifties to the Seventies.
The crime, for example, in Inspector Imanishi Investigates (first published in Japan in 1960-1), is quite humdrum when set alongside the derangement of Ranpo’s villains. An unremarkable man is found beaten to death by a railway line. And yet this is precisely what gives Matsumoto’s detective fiction its bite. A vividly eccentric crime tells you about a single person; a “conventional” one implicates a whole society. An activist as well as a bestselling author, Matsumoto used Inspector Imanishi to explore the discrimination and class prejudice which he regarded as underpinning Japan’s respectability — ugly realities from which his killers drew their motivation.
Matsumoto is often billed in the UK as “Japan’s Agatha Christie”, and he’s now popular enough here to command inclusion in the Penguin Modern Classics label. And yet the Christie comparison is not quite right. Her villains tend briefly to upset a privileged, if rarely very happy, gathering. Their arrest and removal is a reset. So full and compelling is Matsumoto’s portrait of postwar Japan, by contrast, that the reader ends up sympathising with some of his perpetrators, as more-or-less powerless products of their time and place.
British readers coming to Matsumoto in the 2010s and 2020s no doubt recognise his villainous societies in part from those found in crime writers like Ruth Rendell and Ian Rankin. The former took aim at the obliviousness of the privileged and the murderous frustration and shame that it could inspire in society’s have-nots. Rankin’s Edinburgh, meanwhile, was split between a genteel New Town and the deprivation and decline that characterised less well-known parts of the city. Both are themes for Matsumoto: the festering of social and psychological wounds, and the corruption that outwardly respectable societies like the UK and Japan become adept at concealing.
All this makes it easier for Japan to become part of our cultural subconscious, as it surely is, bit by bit. The heyday of Haruki Murakami, back in the Nineties and 2000s, was also the era of the Palin travel documentary and Jonathan Ross’s Japanorama: Japan was at once sophisticated and weird. Now, thanks in no small part to the fiction boom and a generation of talented translators — including Ginny Tapley Takemori (Convenience Store Woman) and Polly Barton (Butter) — we see Japan not so much as exotic as simply early, in arriving at some of the challenges we face: an ageing, shrinking population; the steady disappearance of stable careers; patterns of living and consumption that draw us apart from one another rather than bring us together; and attempts to fix some or all of this with technology. The gig economy and the perpetual part-timer lie at the core of Sayaka Murata’s Convenience Store Woman; low fertility and the pressure to reproduce drive Vanishing World, by the same author. Even the comfort genre — Before the Coffee Gets Cold, plus all those books about cats — gestures at a profound need for consolation, in the face of loneliness and isolation fostered by long working hours and anonymous urban living.
No doubt there’s a selection effect at play here: no publisher of translated fiction gets far without an instinct for the universal, or at least a fine-grained sense of their target audience. But whereas Western readers once enjoyed Japanese literature as anthropology — “unlocking Japan”, as the popular phrase had it — there is, more and more, a recognition effect at play. That is great for publishers seeking sales, but perhaps less so for the rest of us, when the individual struggles and social dysfunction we’re recognising seem at times so dark. Pessimists see Japan as a harbinger of the UK’s own doom: we’re headed for similar demographic decline, only without the excellent infrastructure and high levels of social trust that help make Japan liveable despite its troubles.
And yet it’s possible to find more in Japanese fiction than this. The country’s old social contract may now be disappearing. But many of Japan’s novelists offer cautious hope. Convenience Store Woman shows people trying to rethink what a successful life might look like; Before the Coffee Gets Cold is about overcoming loneliness by reconnecting with the world. The relationship between two of Butter’s main protagonists, Rika and Reiko — by turns tempestuous and tender — provides both women with liberation and comfort. Perhaps what attracts British readers to Japanese fiction is not just the thrill of a plausible dystopia, but the strength and ingenuity of the people who find themselves born into one.
drchrisharding