Category: Japanese mystery stories

Forty Years of Detective Stories (4)

World War II cut off western culture, and caused an empty time for western detective stories in Japan. Everything related to the enemy was evil!

First of all, it was very hard to get western books from 1937 to 1945. After the war, there were books left by American soldiers at used book stores in Kanda, and the American army opened a library; however, for some reason, the Kanda book stores couldn’t handle books from the Occupation forces after 1946. And it was also impossible for people to import books by themselves.

From 1946, it became difficult to translate into Japanese. Even including older work, to publish a translation without permission was no longer allowed. Even if one could get permission, there was no way to pay the royalty (because the flow of money to and from Japan was tightly controlled). At the time, Rampo was fascinated by The Phantom Lady by William Irish and he had a plan to translate it. But unfortunately, that plan disappeared. Around the end of 1949, some foreign rights agencies came into being, and after that the translation of detective stories into Japanese became active again.

On the other hand, made-in-Japan detective stories enjoyed a publishing boom. One reason was that the Occupation forces had banned the historical fiction people favoured, and detective stories became a substitute. It was a temporary boost for smaller publishers though, because the big publishers had not yet recovered from the war. Later on came the true detective story boom, led by Matsumoto Seicho and others, in the Showa thirties (1955 to 1964).

After the war, Forty Years of Detective Stories is mainly a report of major events, so it not so fun to read for me. As a reader, I find that the negative Rampo, who was always down on himself and disliked to see other people, is more interesting to read. (Sorry to say, because Rampo himself probably had a hard time.) The Rampo actively working in the public eye for the development of Japanese detective stories is completely different from the person he was before the war. Lecturing in many places, going to symposia, writing essays, starting the detective writers’ club, discovering new writers, and so on: he was like a different person. In that sense, the war made Rampo a better person. He didn’t mean to stop writing stories at all, but he believed he couldn’t write what the times required, and it seems he was never satisfied with his work. And yet, how many people nowadays who create art and literature really have something to say to society?

In a 1957 postscript to the book, he wrote about the relationship between his creative energy and chronic sinusitis. Rampo had this trouble for a long time, since he was a child, and he had surgery for it several times. So he seriously wondered whether or not it had damaged his brain. He felt that at some point his creativity, which was so important to him, had dried out. He came to the conclusion that his disease and his creativity weren’t related to each other, but he didn’t want to believe that his creative power was limited. If he thought that the sinusitis affected his creativity, it somehow made him feel better, so his thinking about it kept wavering. From a different point of view, it might seem silly, but it was very important to him.

I’m a reader, not a critic, so I don’t really need to tell you all about a book Rampo spent a long time writing. But I hope my writing encourages people who are interested in this book to read it themselves.

–YS, 28 March 2006

28 March 2006