“Pleasures of Permutation: Detective Fiction and

Cultural Globalization”

Sari Kawana

Proceedings of the Association for Japanese

Literary Studies 5 (2004): 386–398.

PAJLS 5:
Hermeneutical Strategies: Methods of Interpretation in the
Study of Japanese Literature.
Ed. Michael F. Marra.
 PLEASURES OF PERMUTATION:
DETECTIVE FICTION AND CULTURAL GLOBALIZATION

Sari Kawana

As the popularity of Michael Hardt and Antonio Negri's book

Empire attests, the question of"globalization" is becoming one of the most
eagerly explored areas of scholarly inquiry today. In light of this general
trend, the field of literary studies has been charged to find models that can
cogently discuss what is involved in the process of literaty globalization
and the dynamics of intemational gemes or schools. 1 One example of a
literaty geme suitable for such an inquhy might be detective fiction, an
intemationally oriented geme that has its origins in Anglo-American
writings from the mid-19 1h centu1y and was subsequently transplanted in
other areas of the world such as continental Europe, Latin America, and
Asia. The geme arrived in Japan during Meiji period, and has occupied a
promillent place the literaty scene ever since.
The geme's foreign bhth, however, poses a few technical difficulties
in considering it within the framework of Japanese literature. In the early
days of Westem scholarship on Japan, many cases of intercultural
influence involving Japan and the West were conceived in terms of a
unilateral relationship between pupil (invariably Japanese) and master
(Western). In this model, the master stands as an insurmountable pinnacle
of literary achievement, with the pupil always worried about originality
and independence?
This framework, however, fails to account for the self-awareness of
Japanese detective fiction authors who did not necessarily see themselves
as indebted cultural underlings. They often were proud of being under the
influence of a noted figure or renowned work, and willingly disclosed the
source of their inspiration. The numerous instances of unintentional
overlaps or confluences between Westem and Japanese detective fiction

1
See Michael Hardt and Toni Negri, Empire (Cambridge, MA: Harvard
University Press, 2000).
2
In much the same way the post-Renaissance poets are supposed to have
operated in English tradition. More recently, Miriam Sas has suggested a new
model based on the Freudian notion of"trauma" and "shock," and conceptualized
the kind of intercultural (or any kind of) influence that enters the realm of the
unconscious as the most powerful one. See Mityam Sas, Fault Lines: Cultural
JvfemolJ' and Japanese Surrealism (Stanford, CA: Stanford University Press,
1999).

PAJLS, Volume 5 (2004)

 KAWANA 387

suggest that what we may intuitively perceive as results of intercultural

influence may be mere coincidences made possible by cultural
globalization. I will discuss some examples fi·om Japanese detective
fiction that suggest notions of originality and authenticity that differ from
the conventional Romantic ideal of a unique creator and by doing so
question models of direct influence that have heretofore dominated the
interpretation of this particular genre and possibly others. I would like to
rethink the idea of originality by suggesting that in detective fiction, the
measure of originality is not how "new" the story is but rather how
existing tropes and narrative structures are reorganized and reconceived in
artful and unexpected ways (hence my title "pleasures of permutation").
What I propose here is a more formal way of looking at how works within
a very formulaic prose genre can influence one another, with relative
disregard to national boundaries and artificial intellectual hierarchy.

DIRECT INFLUENCE FALLACY

Some examples found within detective fiction, Western and
Japanese, question the myth of direct influence-in that occasionally what
appears to be the result of direct influence is in fact the consequence of the
permutation of similar generic mles. One example of this would be Nisen
doka [Two Sen Copper Coin] (1923) by Edogawa Ranpo (1894-1965) and
The Murder of Roger Acla·oyd (1926) by Agatha Christie (1890-1976).
When Nisen appeared in Shinseinen, the flagship magazine of the
publisher Hakubunkan that regularly featured foreign as well as domestic
detective fiction, the work was praised by authors such as Morishita Uson
(1890-1965) and Kozakai Fuboku (1890-1929) for both observing some of
the signature elements of detective fiction (e.g. the mystery of the missing
jewelry, the trick two-sen coin, and the mysterious code found inside)
while also overturning some of the central conventions of the genre (e.g.
through the deceitful narrator and the absence of resolution). Ranpo
completely dismantles the implicit expectation of the narrator as a sidekick
to an able detective and a faithful chronicler of his friend's triumphs (as
embodied by his Western predecessors such as the anonymous friend of C.
Auguste Dupin in Poe's Dupin trilogy and Dr. Watson in Doyle's
Sherlock Holmes series). In Nisen doka, the nameless "watashi" gets the
last laugh not only from his friend who took himself as a great detective
but also the readers who expected his narrative to be sincere and
"complete."
For today's audience, the presence of the deceitful narrator who is
not apologetic for giving the reader an incomplete account of the case and
his involvement in the central plot suggests Christie's Acla'oyd. In Acla"Oyd,
the audience accesses the stmy through the viewpoint of Dr. Shepherd, the
388 PLEASURES OF PERMUTATION

sidekick to the now retired detective Hercule Poirot. Shepherd is not only
the narrator but also the culprit who was in Ackroyd's room at the time of
his murder. However, Shepherd also happens to be the killer, and he hides
his criminality by omitting the crucial detail in his narrative. In much the
same way as in Nisen doka, the readers are set up to realize the
incompleteness and deceptiveness of a (subjective) narrative. The two
works share such similar narrative deception that many would assume
Ranpo's work to be a "copy" of Christie's.
However, the original publication dates of the two works-Nisen
doka predates Acla·oyd by a few years-exclude the possibility that Ranpo
learned the trick fi·om Christie and directly copied it. Instead, the sequence
of events suggests that Ranpo and Christie detected the same generic
convention and decided to permute it in the same way, making a conscious
choice of exploiting the naivete of such assumption and using it to
entertain readers. The speed and quantity of Japanese translations of
Western detective fiction in the interwar period was such that it was easy
for Ranpo--or any other committed aficionados-to monitor the latest
developments in the geme from afar. The facility with which the Japanese
authors could access translations seems to fuel the direct influence fallacy
and devalue their creative production.
The abundance of translations can also be understood as both proof
of the cultural globalization in progress in this era and a means through
which detective fiction authors could acquire the common cultural capital
of the geme. Ranpo and Christie arrived at the same conclusion via
different paths. This is an example of authors coincidentally coming up
with the same or similar combinations of elements as they share the same
or similar literary heritage. Both Ranpo and Christie are aware of this
generic convention of faithful and sincere sidekick narrators that has its
origins in Poe's anonymous narrator to Dupin, Doyle's Dr. Watson to
Holmes, and Christie's own Captain Hastings to Poirot, and regard it as
one of the blind spots the authors can use to outsmart (and entertain)
readers.
The example of Edogawa Ranpo's work Injii [The Devil in the
Shadow] (1928) and Dashiell Hammett's The Maltese Falcon (1930)
further disproves the direct influence fallacy. Inji7 is a stmy of a beautiful
female killer, Shizuko, who kills her husband while playing three different
characters to cover up her crime. In the process, she also starts an affair
with a young writer named Samukawa, who is also the detective on the
case. The Maltese Falcon features Brigid O'Shaunessey, one of
Hammett's most admiredfemmesfatales. Just like Shizuko, Brigid starts a
sexual relationship with Sam Spade, the private eye whose professional
partner she has killed.
 KAWANA 389

The two characters use very similar-in fact almost identical-

strategies of persuasion toward their lovers as they hide their murders. As
they are accused by their men of pulling the strings all along and being
responsible for a murder, the two women try to convince them of their
innocence that they were not responsible. In doing so, they emphasize
their physical and emotional weakness. Confronted by her lover for
deceiving him and killing her husband, Shizuko repeatedly claims that she
is scared of the way he talks and the suggestion of her as murderess:

'The way you talk gives me the creeps. Let's stop such morbid
talk. I don't want to talk about it especially in a dark place like
this. Let's talk about it some other time, and just have fun
tonight. As long as I'm with you, I don't have to think about
Hirata [the supposed prime suspect who is also her old
lover]. ' 3

When distracting him does not work, she also melodramatically

appeals through her sexual charm: "I don't want to waste our precious
time on such a scary story. Don't want these lips of fire? Can't you hear
my heartbeat? Hold me, hold me."4 She also suggests that Samukawa whip
her as before. 5 When all attempts to stop him fails and he exposes her
entire scheme, she gradually gives up swaying him with words and use her
physical charm. Samukawa describes her: "[Shizuko ], now naked, clung
onto me. She pressed her check hard against my chest, so as to make me
feel the warmth of her tears." 6 Finally, she falls completely quiet: "I
[Samukawa] picked her up by her shoulders and shook her lightly. She
couldn't raise her head, perhaps because of the shame and guilt. She
remained motionless and silent."7
In a similar vein, Sam Spade in The Maltese Falcon accuses his
lover Brigid of shooting his former pminer Miles. As her lover turns
against her, Brigid uses the strategy of persuasion through sexuality and
evocation of their sweaty lovemaking sessions similar to Shizuko's:
"But-but, Sam, you can't! Not after what we've been to each other." 8
Just like Shizuko, Brigid involves some tears:

3
Edogawa Ranpo, Edogmva Ranpo Zenslui, vol. 3 (Tokyo: Kodansha, 1970), p.
73.
4
Ranpo, p. 74
5
Ranpo, p. 74.
6
Ranpo, p. 75.
7
Ranpo, p. 78.
8
Dashiell Hammett, The Maltese Falcon (New York: First Vintage Crime, 1992),
p. 211. Originally published in 1930.
390 PLEASURES OF PERMUTATION

"This is not just." She cried. Tears came to her eyes. "It's
unfair. It's contemptible of you. You know it was not that.
You can't say that. [... ]" Brigid O'Shaunessey blinked her
tears away. She took a step towards him [Sam Spade] and
stood looking him in his eyes, straight and proud. "You called
me a liar," she said. "Now you are lying. You're lying if you
say you don't know down in your heart that, in spite of
anything I've done, I love you." 9

Despite their insistence, Brigid and Shizuko are murderous women

who have killed in the past. Yet, they demonstrate a great ability to play
weak, frail women who cannot control their emotions.
In addition to questions of gender and crime, the similar depictions
of women in Ranpo and Hammett raise some interesting issues when
considered within the framework of authenticity, artistic precedence, and
cross-cultural artistic inspiration. During the late 1920s to early 1930s,
European dominance in the field of translated detective fiction was slowly
being overtaken by its American counterpart. In the midst of this transition,
the works of Hammett, with an array of seductive femmes fatales, made
their way to Japan through both literary translations and fihn
adaptations. 10 Yet the publication of Injil predates that of The Maltese
Falcon by two years, so there could have been no imitation despite
frequent importation of Western works to Japan. Similarly, as Japanese
texts were rarely translated into Western languages (if not "never"), it is
highly unlikely that Hammett emulated a fellow detective writer in the Far
East.
If Ranpo's work had been written even a day after Hammett's the
similarity between their works would have been explained away by the
usual theory of cross-cultural influence, where Western writers invariably
influence the Eastern or Japanese writers. However, the earlier publication
date of Inji/ preempts this banal (and sometimes misleading) explanation.
Rather, the striking similarity between Hammett's and Ranpo's works
should be viewed as evidence potentially pointing to at least two theories.
From the standpoint of social histmy, it can serve as another piece of
evidence illustrating what Unno Hiroshi and other critics of interwar
culture in Japan and other places have called "sekai dojisei [global
simultaneity]," the emergence of a global culture to which America,

9
Hammett, The Jvfaltese Falcon, p. 212.
10
Hasebe Fumichika, "Obei tantei shosetsu honyaku shi: Dashiiru Hametto" in
EQ (September 1995): 206-11.
 KAWANA 391

Europe, and Japan belonged." It can also be understood as what Harry D.

Harootunian calls "an inflection of a larger global process that constituted
what might be called co-existing or co-eval modernity, inasmuch as it
shared the same historical temporality of modernity (as a form of historical
totalizing) found elsewhere in Europe and the United States." 12
Another more formalist explanation would be that Hammett and
Ranpo, both students of the formulas and techniques of detective fiction,
orchestrated these elements in similar ways. In the world of science, such
occurrences are more readily acceptable-most famously, Newton and
Leibniz developed the same model of differential and integral calculus
independently of each other in the same period, and Gauss and Bolyai
came up with identical theories of non-Euclidean geometry without ever
consulting each other. 13 In both cases, all parties were given credit for
their achievements. Perhaps the case of Ranpo and Christie calls for a new
way of looking at various formalist literatures and cross-cultural literary
inspiration and encourages the willingness to go beyond the existent
hierarchy of influence and de-emphasize originality and priority.

KUROIWA RUIKO AND THE QUESTION OF ORIGINALITY

Once we dismantle the notion that absolute value lies in absolute
originality, we can begin to appreciate different kinds of creativity that
previously escaped our critical radar. In many ways, Japanese detective
fiction writers' disinterest in originality was already apparent with
Kuroiwa Ruiko (1862-1920) while he was translating Western works of
detective fiction into Japanese during the 1880s and 1890s. During this
period, Ruiko tirelessly undertook projects of translating Western
detective fiction-mostly French and English texts by such authors as
Edgar Allan Poe (1809-1849), Emile Gaboriau (1832-1873), and Fortune
de Boigosbey (1821-1891). The key players who sustained the genre's
boom in the interwar period-such as Edogawa Ranpo (1894-1965) and
Y okomizo Seishi ( 1902-1981 )-all experienced their first thrill of mystery
with Ruiko's translations.
However, the fact that Ruiko "translated" other writers' works-
rather than "created" his own stories from scratch--often gives the
impression of Japanese detective fiction as derivative of its Western
counterpart. To those who value "originality" as the sign of a great writer,
to credit Ruiko as the "founding father" of detective fiction in Japan may
11
The idea of sekai dojisei runs through Unno Hiroshi's Madan toshi Tokyo:
Nihonno 1920 nendai (Tokyo: Chuo Koronsha, 1988).
12
Harry Harootunian, preface to Overcome by Modemity (Princeton: Princeton
University Press, 2000), p. xvi.
13
I thank Gerald Prince for bringing these examples to my attention.
392 PLEASURES OF PERMUTATION

appear questionable, as he left but one "creative" work of his own. 14 In

addition, Ruiko often emphasized in personal essays and prefaces that his
involvement in the text is limited to that of a "translator" [yakusha] and his
writing a "translation" [vaku]. 15 Because of the liberal manner in which he
translated, his works are now often called han 'an shosetsu, with han 'an
literally meaning "translating ideas." 16 His seeming disinterest in creativity
and originality may have social and commercial roots. In mid-Meiji, the
notions of "copyright" and creative licensing were vague at best: for
instance, none of the writers whose works sold millions in Japan thanks to
Ruiko's translation ever saw any of these profits. Ruiko called his own
endeavor "translation" partly because of the mask it offered him, pattly
because of the licensing system of his own time, and partly because of his
personal conception of(or indifference to) "creativity" and "originality."
Such an utter disinterest in originality and authenticity is a curious
phenomenon that needs to be examined in global context as it may be a
historical phenomenon. During the late 19th centmy to the early 20th
century, Anglo-American detective fiction from the tradition of Poe was
exported to not only Japan but also to other faraway places such as Italy,

14
The work is called "Muzan [Merciless]" (1889).
15
Ruiko's self-labeling, however, should not be taken at face value. For instance,
as Ruiko reduced his own role as the translator, he also erased the contribution of
the original author by often omitting his/ her name completely fi:om the
translation (because of this, it is often hard for today's Ruiko scholars to pinpoint
exactly the original texts). As Ruiko translates the original text, he converts it by
giving the characters and places Japanese names and infusing the story line with
his own social agenda. One example of this is Rita ka ani ka [Human or Beast?]
(1888), Ruiko's translation of Emile Gaboriau's L 'Affaire Lerouge (1867). In the
preface, Ruiko declares that he translates in order to: "inform people of the
difficulty involved in the profession of detective [tantei] and enlighten them of
the sacredness of judicial ruling and "illustrate the preciousness of human rights
[iinken] and the importance of not slighting [ke()115 subekaran] the law" (Kuroiwa
1889: Preface). This is an odd statement to make, especially because the changes
he makes to the original text suggest anything but the acceptance of the law as
just and perfect. It is his deliberate strategy to escape the censors by minimizing
his involvement in and responsibility for the final product: the importance of
realizing this goal outweighed the right to any claim of creativity and/ or
originality.
16
The commercial success of Ruiko's translations encouraged many others to
translate Westem detective fiction, especially after Ruiko slowed down his
production of translations in the mid-1890s; however, none of these translations
enjoyed the kind of wild popularity that his did. Even though Ruiko never
acknowledged his "creativity," his readers seem to have known that the
translator's choices could directly affect their enjoyment of the text.
 KAWANA 393

Latin America, and China. In China, for instance, the business of

translating Western detective fiction took off during the last days of the
Qing and early days of the Republic 17 ; a similar explosion took place in
Latin America in the early twentieth century and in Italy in the 1920s. 18 In
studying the endeavors of Chinese translators of detective fiction, Jeffrey
Kinkley too points out the existence of a different kind of "originality" in
their minds: author-translators such as Cheng Xiaoqing ( 1893-1 076) and
Sun Liaohong (1897-1958), who translated works of Conan Doyle and
Maurice Leblanc, respectively, "preferred to rationalize their imitativeness
rather than cover it up," conceiving the "modern analytical detective stoty
as an international, not just a Western form." 19 What this suggests is that
there is a willing forfeiting of any claim to originality in detective fiction
throughout the regions where it was transplanted. The effects of the
development of the notion of copyright on the genre--or the genre's
influence on the notion of copyright-certainly merit further investigation.

HAMAO SHIRO: CREATION THROUGH PERMUTATION

One literary benefit involved in forfeiting any claim of absolute
originality is to be able to use someone else's text in order to generate
suspense in your own. Hamao Shiro ( 1896-1935) takes the ideas of han 'an
and permutation a step further with his Satsujinki [The Murderous Devil]
(1931) and uses his Western model, The Greene Murder Case (1928) by S.
S. Van Dine (1887-1939) as a red herring.
Though reputed to be one of the best full-length, honkaku [authentic]
detective fictions of its time, Satsujinki is full of parody and pastiche. In
the story, a misogynist detective Fujieda Shintar6 is hired by a beautiful
young client, Akikawa Hiroko, who fears that her father is being
blackmailed and her family is in danger. The female protagonist as a
damsel in distress who is constantly watched over by the killer echoes the
image of Hiroko in Ranpo's Injii, and the serial killings in an isolated
mansion alludes to the setting of Van Dine's Greene. Hamao is aware that
his readers-and even his fictional creation Fujieda-would have read
these two works before taking this case. However, the knowledge of these
precedents only serves to deceive both Fujieda and the litermy detective.
Though everything about Hiroko describes her as a concerned filial

17
Jeffrey C. Kinkley, Chinese Justice, the Fiction: Law and Literature in Modem
China (Stanford: Stanford University Press, 2000), p. 181.
18
See Amelia S. Simpson, Detective Fiction fi·om Latin America airleigh
Dickinson Press, 1990), and Stefano Tani, The Doomed Detective: The
Contribution of the Detective Novel to Postmodem American and Italian Fiction
(Southern Illinois University Press, 1984).
19
Kinkley, p. 171.
394 PLEASURES OF PERMUTATION

daughter seeking the help of a professional, Fujieda thinks that it is all an

act, and that she is the one who is pulling the strings behind the scenes.
When Hiroko answers that she was reading none other than Van Dine's
Greene at the night of her mother's murder, Fujieda's suspicion for her
grows even stronger. As the reader will find out later, Hiroko mentions the
text only in an attempt to give Fujieda verbal clues into who she thinks is
the killer, but he is too busy suspecting her to notice, and the readers who
are familiar with Greene are likely to read it as Hiroko's challenge.
Through the tension between Fujieda and Hiroko, Hamao asks a
number of important questions about literary influence between two
sharply different traditions: Is Hiroko the killer, like Ada Greene? How
much does Hamao take from The Greene Murder Case to write Satsujinki?
The answer is not much, as the readers ultimately discover that the
solution of the case does not follow Van Dine's work at all. The answer to
whodunit depends not only on the specific clues presented within the stmy
but also on the extent to which the reader recognizes the referential play at
work between the lines.

IMAGINED GUILD
What enables this referential play-guiding those who have read
The Greene Murder Case to read Satsujinki in a certain way and confuse
them by the allusion-is the concept of genre as cross-cultural
classification tool among both readers and authors. I believe that the best
way to describe the awareness of Japanese authors vis-a-vis Western
authors and the genre might be the notion of a kind of "guild." The
proponents of Japanese detective fiction in this period shared an awareness
that they were participating in an international genre, and often took pride
in further facilitating the inflow of information from overseas. 20
This awareness of the global nature of their endeavors allowed
Japanese detective fiction writers to operate within an imagined guild of
likeminded aficionados. This community is "imagined" in the same sense
that Benedict Anderson's idea of "nationhood" is imagined; and it is
worthy of the name "guild" as it is a grouping based on professional
achievement and skill that stretches across class, race, and gender. The
way I conceive of this "imagined guild" is also close to a kind of

°
2
For instance, when Japanese translations of new Western works were slow in
coming, some writers took the initiative themselves to make them available to the
Japanese audience. Hil'abayashi Hatsunosuke translated several Van Dine works,
and Inoue Yoshio translated stories by Crofts and Ellery Queen. For more
information on the translation of Western detective texts into Japanese, see
Hasebe Fumichika, Obei suiri shosetsu hon 'yakushi (Tokyo: Hon no Zasshisha,
1992).
 KAWANA 395

"synchronic tradition." In discussing the field of English poetry, T. S.

Eliot defines "tradition" as the sum of all precedent works, accepted as
"great," against which a new work is judged. 21 However, rather than
stretching across time, detective fiction as synchronic tradition stretches
across geographical boundaries, and allows individual instances of
transnational affinities to emerge. In addition, the guild does not seek
active extermination of individual talent as Eliot and his concept of
"tradition" do; rather, it recognizes indigenous sensibility as well as the
global poetic mind and values the subjective application of taste and
judgment involved in the act of permutation. When the participants of this
guild import works from faraway places, they learn the mechanisms of the
"rules" that make possible the finished product. They take in these rules as
"tools" with which to construct their own works. These authors at the
receiving end assume that the tools come without the expensive tariffs of
intellectual indebtedness. Therefore, writers such as Hamao do not have to
shy away from disclosing the underlying texts upon which their current
murder mysteries are based: rather, they can actively use them as tools of
playful deception.
In such an imagined guild of detective fiction writers, one is a
master among other masters, and one takes and uses the tools others offer
as one sees fit. Mentioning names and plots fi·om preexistent works is not
an admission of creative piracy but a way to show one's mastery of the
genre's conventions.

CONVENTIONS OF A GENRE: YOKOMIZO SEISHI

The best example of this can be found in the works of Yokomizo
Seishi (1902-1981) from the period immediately after World War II. After
spending the war years writing torimono cho [tales of criminal
investigations set in the Edo period] in order to escape the censors,
Y okomizo Seishi created works that were inspired by classic texts of
Western detective fiction: Honjin satsujin jiken [Murders at the Main
Manor] (1946) is inspired by a series of locked room mysteries by John
Dickson Carr (1906-1977), Chacho satsujin jiken [The Butterfly Murder
Case] (1946) is a direct product of The Casket (1920) by Freeman Willis
Crofts (1879-1958).
Yokomizo shares Ruiko's disinterest in absolute originality and
willingly reveals his sources of inspiration. This is reflected in the way in
which he describes his first work in the postwar period, Honjin, via the
character of the enigmatic first person narrator:

21
T. S. Eliot, "Tradition and Individual Talent," in Selected Works ofT. S. Eliot
(New York: Harcourt, Brace, 1950), p. 4.
396 PLEASURES OF PERMUTATION

When I heard the truth of what happened in this case, I looked

for similar cases among the works of detective fiction I had
read. Gaston Leroux's The lvfysteiJi of the Yellow Chamber [Le
Mystere de la chambre jaune] immediately came to my mind,
and then Maurice Leblanc's Les dents du tigre, S. S. Van
Dine's CanGIJI Murder Case and Kennel Murder Case. I even
thought of Dickson Carr's The Plague Court Murders and
Roger Scarlet's The lvfurder Among the Angells, a pervetted
locked room mystery. 22

The narrator compares the current case with a wide range of existent
Western detective fiction, and shows his erudition of the geme in the
process. He then goes on to make a comment that neither declares nor
refute the case's uniqueness:

But the current case differed from all of these stories. However,
it did occur to me that the killer may have read
them,dissembled the elements of tricks in these stories, and
constructed the designs for his own crime using only the parts
he needed. 23

This not only describes the actions of the story's killer but also how
Yokomizo himself constructs the stmy as the author. For instance,
Yokomizo reveals in an essay that his other work from the same period
Gokumonti5 [Gokumon Island] (1946) is a montage of stories he read
during the war- such as Christie's And Then There Were None (1939) and
Arthur Conan Doyle's "The Problem of Thor Bridge" (1927).
In comparing Honjin to other known cases, the narrator discloses
that he already knows the entire account of what happened, including
whodunit. After impersonally reporting how Kindaichi (the detective on
the case) solves the locked room mystety of the main manor, the natTator
reappears at the end of the stmy to make a comment about his own
storytelling.

I feel that I have written everything there is to be known about

the murders surrounding the main manor [hmljin]. I did not
once do anything that would mislead the readers. I specified

22
Yokomizo Seishi, Honjin satsujin jiken (Tokyo: Kadokawa Shoten, 2003), p.
7.
23
Y okomizo, pp. 7-8
 KAWANA 397

the location of the water wheel. Moreover, at the beginning of

the record of this incident, I said the following. 'In that regard,
I have to express great appreciation for the cruel and violent
criminal who chopped up the man and woman. The "man and
woman" here of course refer to Shimizu Kyokichi [the man
with three fingers] and Katsuko. Katsuko was murdered but
Kyokichi was not [he died a natural death], so I intentionally
avoided writing "the criminal who killed the man and
woman." If you readers thought that the criminal killed both
Katsuko and Kyokichi, it is a hasty conclusion/ assumption on
your part. In addition, when I described the murder scene, I
did write that there were a man and a woman covered in blood
and lying dead, but not killed and covered in blood. It is
because Kenzo was not murdered. I learned from Agatha
Christie's The Murder of Roger Acla·oyd that detective fiction
writers ought to write like this. 24

In this passage, Yokomizo's nameless narrator brags about the

narrative feats he achieved and willingly discloses his creative master.
Y okomizo does not feel threatened or dwarfed by "copying" his
predecessors and colleagues in other literary traditions, as he is simply re-
using the tools, the means of creation that now exist in the public domain
(so to speak), and not duplicating their final product.

CONCLUSION: GLOBALIZATION, LOCALITY, AND THE PLEASURES OF

PERMUTATION
The examples of Japanese detective fiction mentioned in this paper
suggest that the process of literary and cultural globalization (involving
Europe, America, and Asia) was well underway in the early twentieth
century, at least in this genre. This is not to say, however, that everyone
everywhere was writing the same kind of detective fiction. As Hardt and
Negri suggest, globalization "should not be understood in terms of cultural,
political, or economic homogenization," because the end product and the
effects it creates are always different and haphazard. Globalization "should
be understood instead as a regime of the production of identity and
difference, or really of homogenization and heterogenization." 25 (Hardt
and Negri, 45) The case of detective fiction as a global phenomenon also
suppmis this idea: the same set of "standard" rules, disseminated through
translation, end up producing vety distinct works, rather than identical

24
Yokomizo, pp. 198-9
25
Hardt and Negri, p. 45
398 PLEASURES OF PERMUTATION

ones, because of different processes of permutation and subversion. Just as

it is impossible to completely duplicate a text, it is also impossible to
completely purge it of its locality, even if such a text comes into being
with the consciousness of participating in an international geme such as
detective fiction. Creation through permutation has both sociological and
aesthetic explanations, and the example of Japanese detective fiction
writers not only attests to the realization of the pleasures and values of
permutation but also its active endorsement through practice.