The following was written by me as a capstone as a graduation requirement for a Japanese degree from Marshall University. Page and word limits applied; much essential information that I would’ve included without these limits was pruned.
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The purpose of this project is to explore the 1920s development of the “orthodox mystery” genre in Japan, its waning popularity in the 1950s and 1960s, the subsequent growth of the more politically-driven “social mystery”, and the orthodox mystery’s rebirth as “neo-orthodox mystery” in the 1980s. It examines the causes of the orthodox mystery’s revival through the debut work of Ayatsuji Yukito, The Decagon House Murders (1987), and Soji Shimada, The Tokyo Zodiac Murders (1981), and their influence on the history of the mystery genre in Japan.
本研究の目的は、パズル要素を重視した「本格ミステリ」というジャンルの１９２０年代の発展、１９５０年代から１９６０年代にかけての人気低迷、それに続く政治色の強い「社会派ミステリ」の台頭、そして１９８０年代に「新本格ミステリ」として本格ミステリが復活した経緯を掘り下げることである。
The orthodox mystery, known in Japan as honkaku mystery, was Japan’s answer to the English-speaking world’s “Golden Age of Detective Fiction” – an era in which the mystery genre was defined by a spirit of fairplay and sportsmanship. As Western interest in intricate plots set in old English manors waned in favor of gritty noir dramas exploring corruption in everyday life, Japan’s orthodox mystery genre underwent a similar shift, being replaced by the shakaiha (or “social”) mystery. However, while the western “Golden Age mystery” never fully recovered its footing, often criticized as trite, repetitive, and unrealistic, Japan’s orthodox mystery quickly rebounded. Less than two decades after its presumed end, the orthodox mystery re-emerged as the neo-orthodox (shin-honkaku) mystery and did so with such force that it remains the dominant approach in Japanese mystery fiction today.
This massive resurgence is due primarily to the work of Ayatsuji Yukito and Shimada Soji, which appeared in an era of stagnancy in the mystery genre and reignited interest in orthodox mysteries in a time when “social mysteries” were the prevailing genre of crime writing. This paper will be exploring the cultural conditions that allowed the orthodox mystery to flourish in Japan while it faded into obscurity in the western world, as well as its continued development into the modern day. However, in order to discuss the development of the Japanese mystery genre, we first need to understand the genre’s English-speaking roots.
What is the Orthodox Mystery Genre?
The term honkaku, or “orthodox,” codifies a standard of mystery writing that, in the West, was more loosely referred to as the “Golden Age mystery.” Among enthusiasts, it is also known as the “fairplay mystery” or “puzzle plot mystery.” Although the term honkaku as used in Japanese retroactively encompasses works from the English Golden Age, unless otherwise stated for the sake of this project we will be using “orthodox mystery” to refer to qualifying Japanese-language works, and “fairplay mystery” to refer to qualifying English-language works as well as the genre as a whole.
Foreshadowing is a staple of storytelling, especially in crime and mystery fiction, but “orthodox mysteries” were unique in that foreshadowing alone was not enough. “Orthodox mysteries” as a genre were written with a deep sense of sportsmanship, as noted by famous American detective novelist John Dickson Carr who, in his essay “The Grandest Game in the World”, a term with which he christened the genre. A mystery author was expected to provide the audience with every piece of information available to the detective, and this information had to be sufficient for the reader to reach the same correct conclusion as the detective—without guesswork, intuition, leaps of logic, or specialized knowledge (such as detailed scientific information or obscure historical facts). As a consequence, where the “orthodox mystery” deviates from its more well-known cousins in the crime fiction genre is that the audience is not merely invited to be swept away by intrigue, but rather explicitly or implicitly challenged to treat the story as a puzzle to solve. The goal was not just to surprise the reader, but to outwit them, ensuring they felt bested in a fair contest of wits in which the reader challenges the author to produce a solution they cannot anticipate, and the author in turn challenges the reader to anticipate the ending. (1963)
To supplement this “game-playing” as it was perceived, orthodox mystery novels became defined by narratives that were increasingly complicated compared to other mystery genres: the culprits began to employ increasingly involved methods to commit the crimes and avoid detection; clues became more subtle; and the logic required to bring those clues home to the culprit became more precise and complex. Much like a video game has a so-called “meta” – a constantly evolving set of dominant strategies in competitive play – the orthodox mystery genre also developed a “meta” that mutated with every new story that was written. What solutions did readers anticipate from a given set-up? How are readers conditioned to think about certain clues (Carr, 1963)?
To adapt to this “meta”, further enhance and deepen the mystery plots, and more adeptly fool readers, the fairplay mystery also developed its last defining characteristics: “tricks” and misdirection. “Tricks”, often used interchangeably with the term “misdirection”, are anything employed by the culprit to mislead other characters, or by the author to mislead the reader about the nature of the crime. For instance, one of the archetypal tropes of the mystery genre is a dead body being found without a head, only for it to turn out that the victim was someone entirely different from whom we initially thought. The act of cutting off the victim’s head to disguise their identity is a classic example of a “trick”. Tricks will often be used to do things that seem impossible, weaponize assumptions in order to confuse the nature of the crime, or hide or disguise essential information to prevent the reader from realizing they’re missing critical clues (Carr, 1963).
The nature of treating fairplay mysteries as “games of wit between writer and reader” led to a highly dynamic genre that inordinately valued originality and cleverness. As the “meta” quickly evolved, fairplay mysteries changed dramatically in short periods of time, adopting and then moving on from trends and adjusting to reader expectations at speeds unprecedented among other literary genres.
This dynamic quality is what contributed to the genre’s rapid growth, but is also in part responsible for its equally sudden decline in the west and in Japan.
Pre-War History of Orthodox Mysteries
Although what the first detective story was is disputed, the first detective story which is universally agreed to be a detective story is Edgar Allen Poe’s “The Murders in the Rue Morgue” (1841), published in Graham’s Magazine (Silverman, 1992). It starred an unnamed narrator chronicling the exploits of C. Auguste Dupin as he investigates the mysterious murders of two women on Rue Morgue, a fictional street in Paris.
This story contained the DNA of what would go on to become evergreen tropes of the detective fiction genre. The narrator acting as a chronicler to the detective protagonist would be mirrored in, to name a few, Arthur Conan Doyle’s Sherlock Holmes and Dr. Watson, and Agatha Christie’s Hercule Poirot and Lieutenant Hastings, and later in Japanese mysteries like Arisu Arisugawa’s Hideo Himura and the self-named Arisu Arisugawa and Soji Shimada’s Mitarai Kiyoshi and Kazumi Ishioka. The murders of the women were also an archetypal locked-room mystery – the victims were killed within a room in which every possible exit was sealed, with the only key to the doors inside of the room. In other words, the crime appeared impossible, making the central mystery a question of “how could someone commit the crime in a location they couldn’t possibly access?”. This premise, as well as a larger variety of so-called impossible crimes focusing on how a human could commit seemingly-illogical crimes, would go on to be a major sub-genre in orthodox mysteries.
This story as well as its two sequels – “The Mystery of Marie Rogêt” (1842) and “The Purloined Letter” (1844) – sparked two parallel paths of evolution in the pre-orthodox mystery genres of England and Japan, as essential to one as the other.
In the west, the C. Auguste Dupin stories would go on to influence the French author Émile Gaboriau in his creation of Monsieur Lecoq in the 1866 novel The Lerouge Case, a novel credited as creating the first dedicated armchair detective – detective characters who solve crimes through second-hand accounts without doing proactive investigation – in Lecoq’s mentor Tabaret following Dupin’s example in “The Purloined Letter” (Murch, 1958; Schutt, 1998). Gaboriau’s stories would in turn compel Arthur Conan Doyle to write the stories of Sherlock Holmes, starting with A Study in Scarlet (1887), who remains to this day one of the, if not the single most recognizable fictional character of all time (Bonnoit, 1985).
Meanwhile, “The Murders in the Rue Morgue” being translated into Japanese in 1887, many of the stories of Sherlock Holmes from 1894 to 1905, as well as G. K. Chesterton in the 1920s, would similarly inspire the works that would go on to form the basis of early Japanese mystery fiction (Queen, 1978). Edogawa Ranpo, whose pseudonym is a Japanese transliteration of Edgar Allan Poe, is credited as being the father of modern Japanese detective fiction. Inspired by the works of Edgar Allan Poe and Arthur Conan Doyle, Edogawa Ranpo would write his first mystery short story “The Two-Sen Copper Coin”, which was published in the Shin Seinen magazine in 1923. Although before him authors took elements of detective fiction in what were otherwise horror or so-called “weird fiction” stories, “The Two-Sen Copper Coin” was considered by critics noteworthy for its relatively unique focus on logic and ratiocination to solve a puzzling crime (Angles, 2011; Saito, 2012). Following the publication of this story was a long series of stories by Edogawa following Akechi Kogoro, a Sherlock Holmes-like figure who is one of Japan’s two most noteworthy detective characters. The series began in 1925 with “The Case of the Murder on D. Hill”, an early example of a true early Japanese locked-room mystery, and would in the same year go on to release the culturally significant “The Stalker in the Attic”, credited the earliest example of a locked-room mystery incorporating aspects of Japanese culture into the story, and “The Psychological Test”, although not the first certainly an early pioneer of Japan’s “inverted mystery” genre – mysteries where we see the crime committed from the culprit’s perspective, and the bulk of the story focuses on seeing how the detective reaches a conclusion we already know, much in the vein of the American television show Columbo.
Following Edogawa’s footsteps was Koga Saburo, a preeminent Japanese critic of mystery fiction who also wrote his own work combining detective fiction and elements of macabre “weird fiction”.
Although Ranpo and Saburo hadn’t themselves adopted the fairplay approach of orthodox mysteries, by this point in time the seeds of what would go on to become the English Golden Age mystery had already been planted and sprouted, marking an important stepping stone in the history of Japanese mysteries.
Formation of the Orthodox Mystery Genre
Although the idea of following rules and playing fair with the audience wasn’t a standard in the genre until much later, there were early works which preempted the growth of the “puzzle plot” mystery story.
Israel Zangwill wrote his 1892 book The Big Bow Mystery, an early flagship locked-room mystery novel. In its introduction, he included the following argument about mystery fiction:
“The indispensable condition of a good mystery is that it should be able and unable to be solved by the reader […] Many a mystery runs on breathlessly enough till the dénouement is reached, only to leave the reader with the sense of having been robbed of his breath under false pretenses […] all [of the solution’s] data must be given in the body of the story. The author must not suddenly spring a new person or a new circumstance upon his reader at the end. Thus, if a friend were to ask me to guess who dined with him yesterday, it would be fatuous if he had in mind somebody of whom he knew I had never heard” (1892).
This is possibly the earliest known example of an author proclaiming their dedication to the concept of “fairplay” (Edwards, 2015). However, it wouldn’t be until nearly 20 years later the movement was set in motion to turn this into the prevailing standard of the genre with the beginning of a series of mystery stories from Gilbert Keith (G. K.) Chesterton.
In 1910, Chesterton wrote “Valentin Follows a Curious Trail”, the first in a series of 53 short stories featuring his parish priest sleuth Father Brown. The crimes featured in these stories would abandon the more mechanical nature common among pre-Golden Age mystery fiction and replace them with more cerebral solutions preying on reader assumptions. In other words, these stories would go on to serve as models for future authors of the genre, and for this reason, G.K. Chesterton is sometimes credited as “the father of detective fiction” as it would go on to be known during the Golden Age, with it being claimed that “under the influence of Chesterton’s Father Brown, the mystery story became less a portrait of the detective’s personality, and more a puzzle that the detective and the reader could both solve” (“G. K. Chesterton”, Poetry Foundation, n.d.). These stories feature perhaps the earliest versions of many of the tricks that would go on to become mainstays of the orthodox mystery genre. Such tropes as manually attacking the victim with a projectile to make it appear as if they were shot from afar, and hiding something conspicuous by surrounding it with like things (e.g., a forest is the best place to hide a leaf) find themselves often sourced back in the Father Brown stories and would in time become mainstays of the orthodox mystery genre both in the east and the west.
In concert with this was the 1913 publishing of Trent’s Last Case by E.C. Bentley, which was, as Bentley put it, a “a detective story of a new sort” (Edwards, 2017). Trent’s Last Case famously deconstructs the then-omnipresent trope of the faultless, all-knowing detective by featuring an ending in which the detective’s seemingly perfect, airtight solution was entirely incorrect. However, despite the work being a scathing rebuke of a genre trope, what the work would go on to remain in the public consciousness for was not its metatextual commentary on the genre, but rather its clever, surprising solution (Edwards, 2017). For this reason, Trent’s Last Case can be considered the novel that fully inaugurates the Golden Age, being the work to pave the way for future authors to write “ingenious detective puzzles” (Edwards, 2017) with a focus on clever tricks and misdirection.
Lord Gorell’s In the Night, written in 1917, is one of the earliest novels to show that, following Trent’s Last Case, the idea of “fairplay” was here to stay (Edwards, 2015). In the introduction, Gorell proclaims that “every essential fact is related as it is discovered and readers are, as far as possible, given the eyes of the investigators and equal opportunities with them of arriving at the truth” (1917). This quote is one of the earliest examples of the trope of the “challenge to the reader”, in which the author breaks the fourth wall to assure the reader that the game is being played fairly. Similarly the novel contains a very early appearance of the trope of including a floorplan, allowing readers to grasp the geography of the crime scene, making In The Night, despite being forgotten by even the most diehard historians of the genre, a perfect microcosm of what would go on to follow in the Golden Age of Detective Fiction (Edwards, 2017).
In the coming years, and particularly beginning in the 1920s, Golden Age mystery novels exploded in popularity. Agatha Christie, to this day the best-selling novelist in the world, wrote her debut The Mysterious Affair of Styles, which featured Belgian sleuth Hercule Poirot, in 1920, and many of the other representative Golden Age mystery authors such as Dorothy L. Sayers, John Dickson Carr, Erle Stanley Gardner, Ngaio Marsh, and Ellery Queen also got their start in the 1920s and 1930s. Along with them came less universally recognized but certainly not less important or less worthy Golden Age mystery authors such as Christopher Bush, Stuart Palmer, Christianna Brand, Molly Thynne, and Baynard Kendrick. Suffice it to say that the genre was in full swing, written by all manner of people all over America and English.
The growing sentiment that detective novels must be fair and engaging as experiments in “gameplaying” with the reader, the quality that defined the Golden Age now running at full-steam was crystallized with the many attempts to design sets of “rules” by which the genre must play. Such authors as A. A. Milne, the creator of Winnie the Pooh and writer of a single detective novel The Red House Mystery, and poet T. S. Eliot all made varying attempts to create a list of rules that, if followed, would supposedly distinguish a “good” mystery novel from the bad (Edwards, 2015). However, the attempt that would go on to be the most well-remembered, widely-regarded, frequently-referenced of this trend is that of Father Ronald Knox. In editing the 1928 anthology Best Detective Stories of the Year, writer Father Ronald Knox laid out 10 mystery-writing “Commandments”, as they were called, in what would be known as “Knox’s Decalogue”. Although many of the rules were conceived in jest, such as one disallowing making a “Chinaman” character simply to turn him into a killer in a tongue-in-cheek rebuke of the racist tendencies of contemporary thriller authors, to this day Knox’s Decalogue is frequently turned to by writers of classically-styled mystery fiction, either as guidelines to follow or to break (Edwards, 2015). Many of the rules, even if the Decalogue isn’t intended to be as serious as it seems, are still to this day considered important guidelines for writing mystery fiction, such as disallowing excessive secret passages, requiring the mystery give the reader all of the information given to the detective, and disallowing fictional or unknown poisons being brought up at the end of the story.
As the Golden Age and its standards began to become more and more defined, and translations of these stories began to make their way to Japan, there developed an increasing necessity to separate the complex, puzzle-oriented mysteries from their predecessors that often incorporated elements of horror and the supernatural or adventure stories (Taku, 2020). In 1926, the aforementioned critic Saburo Koga coined the term honkaku, a classification that would go on to be spearheaded by Edgoawa Ranpo as the new mainstream of the mystery genre (Taku, 2020). However, these two authors have up to this point developed their own writing styles, and despite their fervent campaigning for the orthodox mystery’s merits were unable to take the leap as the first Japanese writers to adopt it in their writing (Taku, 2020). What finally took the honkaku mystery from a foreign novelty to something fully embraced by Japanese authors was the American “Van Dine Boom” reaching Japan with the 1929, 1930 translations of the detective novels of S. S. Van Dine (Taku, 2020).
S. S. Van Dine was a preeminent figure of American detective fiction whose works discarded nearly every literary pretension not relevant to the core mystery plot. His undistracted focus on a mystery for mystery’s sake was considered by the Japanese reading public to be refreshing and his works boomed in popularity, paving the way for a wave of translations of other influential authors like the aforementioned Christie, Queen, and Carr (Taku, 2020). This influx of English detective novels generated enough interest in the genre for the first generation of Japanese orthodox mystery writers to be born (Taku, 2020). The genre was headed by Keikichi Osaka, who debuted with “The Hangman of the Department Store” in 1932 and is known to have set the foundation for Japan’s impossible crime scene, and Yu Aoi, whose 1936 novel The Tragedy of the Funatomi Family is credited as the first Japanese novel to adopt Freeman Wills Crofts’s style of mysteries focusing on alibis and railway tables. (Taku, 2020).
Although wartime bans on writing detective novels during World War II prevented these early adopters from truly ushering in the honkaku era, soon after the war’s end the genre finally flourished as a book-starved Japanese public took to writing with abandon, leading to the appearance of such authors as Seishi Yokomizo, whose debut in 1946 with The Honjin Murders also created Kindaichi Kosuke, one of the most iconic Japanese detective characters of all time. Other authors whose appearances in the post-war honkaku age led to great developments in the genre were Tetsuya Ayukawa, whose 1956 debut work Black Trunk was another entry in the Crofts-like railway mystery, and Akimitsu Takagi, whose 1948 debut The Tattoo Murder Case was an early pioneer of the trope of Japanese mysteries focusing on “corpse puzzles” that utilize the victim’s dead body itself for tricks. (Taku, 2020).
However, the rapid changes in post-war society, alongside shifting literary trends, soon pushed orthodox mysteries into decline both in the English-speaking world and Japan.
Post-War Decline of the Genre
While the end of the second World War gave Japanese orthodox detective fiction a second wind, it is often considered to be the end of the English Golden Age. At this time a number of works were published specifically oriented around criticism of the Golden Age mystery novel.
Edmund Wilson in “Who Cares Who Killed Roger Ackroyd?”, the title of which recalls Agatha Christie’s famous novel The Murder of Roger Ackroyd, wrote that when reading mystery novels he “ought not to be expecting good writing, characterization, human interest or even atmosphere”, complaining that due to wooden writing and flat characters “I understood that a true connoisseur of this fiction must be able to suspend the demands of his imagination and literary taste and take the thing as an intellectual problem. But how you arrive at that state of mind is what I do not understand”, ultimately dismissing the genre as inherently less-than-literature (1945). In addition to aping Edmund Wilson’s complaints of a lack of characterization and style, Raymond Chandler, a forefront author of the hardboiled school of detective writing, also wrote in The Simple Art of Murder that “fiction in any form has always intended to be realistic”, and that if fiction fails to meet this standard “you cannot even accept it as a light novel, for there is no story for the light novel to be about”, which he claims is a fault true of nearly all British detective fiction (1950). However, the one prevailing criticism universal among all major critics of the genre is that the Golden Age detective novel eventually became too formulaic due to its rigid adherence to rules, with Chandler writing of the genre that “[it] has learned nothing and forgotten nothing” (1950).
These criticisms, which reflected what had slowly become the prevailing attitude of the times, became a death knell for the Golden Age mystery genre as a preoccupation with realism and character-driven stories took hold, leading to the growth of the hardboiled detective story in the 1950s. That being said, to claim that the Golden Age mystery novel had died in its entirely is not true; even when it had fallen out of favor as the prevailing school of thought in mystery writing, many authors appeared during the second half of the 20th century to stubbornly adhere to the standard of the fairplay, puzzle-minded mystery, such as Roger Ormerod, Norman Berrow, and Douglas Clark to name a few. That being said, it is nonetheless safe to say that the 1940s and 1950s spelled the end of the heyday of Golden Age mysteries.
Japan saw a similar decline of orthodox mysteries in favor of realistic crime stories focusing on everyday people and exploring themes of injustice and corruption. However, the reasons this happened are fundamentally different from what caused the decline of English orthodox mysteries.
Starting in the 1950s, Japan entered a period of heightened economic prosperity due to American assistance recovering from World War II (Saito, 1978). Towards the end of the 1950s, it was officially declared that Japan was no longer in a state of postwar, and stability became the new norm (Saito, 1978). This era of peace is credited as the primary cause of the decline of the orthodox mystery. The Japanese public, accustomed to the monotony of a safe everyday life, would develop a macabre fascination with the idea that the spirit of crime may hide deep within salarymen and could flip everything they know entirely on its head (Saito, 1978). As a result, when Matsumoto Seicho in 1958 published Points and Lines and Walls of Eyes, early pioneering novels of the shakaiha (or, “social”) mystery that focused on such everyday crimes, a so-called “Seicho Boom” began in Japan (Saito, 1978).
During this time, many of the tropes characteristic of the honkaku mystery was slowly phased out as “[the shakaiha] style gradually began to reject elaborate tricks and locked-room concepts [and] ridicule great detectives as something childish” (Shimada, 2013). Discussions about the honkaku mystery were treated as dangerous to the status quo of shakaiha to such a degree that those who deviated from the shakaiha style faced potential expulsion from the literary scene (Shimada, 2013).
In short, the end of the English Golden Age and the end of the era of honkaku were two sides of the same coin, the same events playing out in inverse of one another. In America, England, growing resentments towards the genre as a result of a perceived lack of innovation or originality were the catalyst for the shift away from the Golden Age. However, Japanese mystery fiction didn’t pivot away from orthodox mysteries necessarily because of a growing resentment towards the genre, but rather a new economic reality simply caused people to develop a new kind of interest in a new kind of crime story; the resentment came later as a byproduct of the shift. It’s this fundamental difference that allowed Shimada Soji and Ayatsuji Yukito to pave the way for the revival of the honkaku school of mystery writing while the genre remained dormant in the English-speaking world.
Revival
Not long after the social school of mystery-writing took hold, the loosening of the rules of the fairplay orthodox mystery began (Saito, 1978). With it also went the boundaries between detective fiction and other literary genres, returning the genre to its amorphous ambiguity that defined its early years in Japan, allowing it to manifest as everything from romance to adventure stories to horror (Saito, 1978). By the middle of the 1960s, even Matsumoto Seicho, the very man whose works ushered in this era of socially-conscious mystery stories, was calling for authors to begin to incorporate aspects of the honkaku genre into their writing (Saito, 1978). To this end, he edited and published a 10-volume collection of mystery stories called Collection of Neo-Orthodox Detective Stories – the Japanese title of which contained the first instance of the term shin-honkaku, neo-orthodox (Saito, 1978). The result of this endeavor was a return-to-print of many pre-war and early post-war honkaku mystery authors. In particular was Seishi Yokomizo, whose popularity exploded to such a degree that his novel The Village of Eight Graves was adopted into a comic book (Saito, 1978). However, although the social school’s influence began to wane nearly as quickly as it was established, the time was not ripe yet for a full-fledged neo-orthodox revivalist moment to begin, as many works in the social mystery genre, albeit with some influence from the orthodox genre, continued to thrive.
The true end of the social mystery genre’s reign was in the late 1960s and early 1970s, when Japan’s peace and prosperity was toppled (Saito, 1978). Malpractice among academic institutions sparked wide-reaching student protests, and America, now viewing Japan as enemies in the battlefield of the international economy, withdrew much of its financial support and heavily taxed exported goods from America to Japan (Saito, 1978). Suddenly, the stability that inspired the reading public’s interest in the social school disappeared (Saito, 1978). The very appeal of these stories was the encroaching of criminality upon the everyday, with the implicit assumption that peace was normalcy. As peace began to vanish, so too did the public interest in social mysteries.
With this the stage was set for the 1981 release of The Tokyo Zodiac Murders by Shimada Soji. The Tokyo Zodiac Murders was the first truly and entirely orthodox mystery novel to be released in this time which Shimada called “the winter of honkaku” (2015). The work contained very little literary pretensions, telling its story entirely through the main character reciting newspaper articles, police records, and second- and third-hand accounts about a crime that happened many years in the past. The characters, their personalities, their behavior, were all abstracted and reduced to a complex logical puzzling. Due to the publishing world’s inertia to catch up with the declining interest of social mysteries, at this period in history honkaku mysteries were still seen by publishers as unworthy of publication, and Shimada claims many authors who tried to advocate for the revival of the genre or who tried to publish orthodox mystery works were summarily banished from the industry entirely (2015). Thus, the fact that a work like The Tokyo Zodiac Murders not only made it to publication but was also greatly popular among readers came as a huge shock to the publishing world which started, as Shimada called it, the thawing of “the thick ice conjured by Seicho (Matusmoto)’s spell” (2015).
The Tokyo Zodiac Murders’s impact was not immediately felt, however. Rather than converting current writers of social mysteries into writers of classic, puzzle-driven orthodox mystery, The Tokyo Zodiac Murders instead inspired young would-be writers, particularly those involved with the recent creation of the Kyoto University Mystery Club (Shimada, 2015). This organization fostered many young minds who, spurred into action by Shimada’s work, would write their own complex crime puzzles, sharing them with the rest of the club members and challenging them to solve them (Shimada, 2015). This created a whole generation of writers that wouldn’t fully manifest until over half a decade later in 1987 with the publication of The Decagon House Murders by Kyoto University Mystery Club member Ayatsuji Yukito (Shimada, 2015).
Shimada notes that “people who were used to American and English novels were shocked” by the novel’s perfunctory characterization, with characters who deliberately lacked expressive personality and behaved in predictable ways “like NPCs from a video game” (2015). This choice led to many people assuming that the then-newcomer Ayatsuji lacked writing skill (Shimada, 2015). However, this was a deliberate decision by Ayatsuji to maximize his novel’s emphasis on the mystery novel as a “game” – an intellectual challenge, in which the reader is challenged to attempt to solve the crime before the end of the story – that he valued so heavily in English-language “Golden Age” mystery novels (Shimada, 2015). Like Shimada’s own work, Ayatsuji’s debut novel was met with intense surprise and incredulity from the publishing world (Shimada, 2015). Nonetheless, as a generation of young people who, growing up in a new world of tumult, desired fantasies of crime and intellectual puzzles and found the corruption and dreariness of social mysteries too oppressive, depressing, and unpleasant, began to enter adulthood, Ayatsuji’s novel came to be seen as a flagship work that heralded a new era of acceptance for the genre. Other members of the Kyoto University Mystery Club would go on to become published mystery authors as well, such as Rintaro Norizuki and Yutaka Maya, and as these young enthusiasts began to take over the mystery writing scene with complex, orthodox, puzzle-driven novels, more writers totally unattached to the Kyoto University Mystery Club would appear. With this, the pendulum would fully swing back in favor of shin-honkaku mysteries and the movement would begin in earnest…
Shin-Honkaku Movement
To this day, shin-honkaku mysteries remain one of the primary schools of thought in mystery writing. The genre has extended from literary works to manga (Japanese comic books) and anime (Japanese animation) like Detective Conan and The Casebook of Young Kindaichi, or video games like Ace Attorney and Danganronpa, or TV dramas like Furuhata Ninzaburou and Nemesis. A massive fandom has developed around the genre extending all the way from young children to fully-grown adults past the age of retirement.
However, although the genre continues to thrive to this day, milestones and development did not end in 1981. Much like happened in the 1940s with English-speaking mysteries, the Japanese reading public began to bore of shin-honkaku for its lack of innovation, and fans of the genre yearned for something to come along that had the same earth-shattering impact as The Decagon House Murders had back in 1987 (Shimada, 2021). It was during this dry spell that Imamura Masahiro published Death Among the Undead, a 2017 locked-room mystery set amidst a localized zombie apocalypse, with zombies seemingly committing murders no zombie could ever commit. With this novel’s breakout publication in which it won first place in every major annual Japanese mystery ranking, the floodgates were opened to a new wave of mystery writers to write mysteries influenced by the supernatural, fusing elements with other literary genres in a way that respects and retains the heavy emphasis on puzzle-oriented plotting in honkaku fiction, or otherwise experiment with theme and style at a scale unprecedented before Death Among the Undead’s release. (Shimada, 2021). Aoyagi Aito’s Once Upon a Time, There Was a Corpse features mystery stories all adapted from famous Japanese fairytales in which the rules of the fairytale magic are incorporated into the murders; Kobayashi Yasumi’s Murder of Alice features a murder mystery set within a dream that resembles Lewis Caroll’s Alice’s Adventures in Wonderland; and Atsukawa Tatsumi’s An Invisible Person Lurks Within the Locked-Room features a murder mystery in a world where people can contract a disease that turns them invisible. Beyond incorporating elements of the supernatural, though, there were also a number of works which began to experiment with incorporating all of the appeal and plot-beats of the shin-honkaku genre into stories featuring non-criminal situations. For instance, Asakura Akinari’s “Looking for the Person of My Thread” features a story in which the protagonist must deduce which of three women is his secret admirer. However, no matter how far the genre strayed from murders as a focus or even from being set in the real world, this experimentation always, universally maintains all of the tenets of orthodox mysteries: playing fair; giving the audience all the information they need to understand the crime and deduce the solution; featuring complex tricks and misdirection. Death Among The Undead’s massive revitalization of the genre as recently as 2017 proves to us that the shin-honkaku movement isn’t a mere revival of a dead, washed-up genre; it is an era of renewed creativity in which the genre can be injected with a newfound imagination and experimentation that would bring it to new heights. While Western fairplay mysteries remain a niche interest, in Japan they stand at the heart of a genre that continues to evolve, proving that what some critics dismissed as outdated could, in the right hands, become timeless.
This would not have been possible if not for Shimada Souji and Yukito Ayatsuji who, stuck in a time when the orthodox mystery was believed to be dead, decided to nonetheless take up the mantle to write stories which may very well have resulted in their banishment from the literary world forever. Well into 2025 the orthodox mystery genre continues to stand not as a relic of the past, but as a thriving creative force, inspiring new generations of writers, readers, and mystery lovers alike—proof that the game between author and reader never truly ends.
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