Supernatural monsters and neo-Victorian detectives: Capitalism, rationality and affect in Japanese girls’ comics

Abstract

Detective fiction was introduced to Japanese readers in the 19th century, together with the idea that the rationality detectives embody is an ideal for Japan to emulate. This article examines Yuki Kaori’s Count Cain series, a neo-Victorian Japanese girls’ comic (shōjo manga) that references the Sherlock Holmes stories and the wider genre of the detective mystery. The Count Cain series both supports and challenges the idealization of western rationality. It raises doubts about the ability of western rationality to resolve the social disorder engendered by the development of industrial capitalism and mass consumer culture in Japan since the early 20th century. The text thereby articulates a contradictory desire to both emulate the west and assert Japaneseness, which has characterized Japan’s encounter with the west since the 19th century.

Keywords:

• Manga
• Japan
• Yuki Kaori
• detective fiction
• rationality
• organic community

Notes

1. Some work has recently been done in re-conceptualizing postcolonial studies from a global perspective. See Spivak (2003); the introduction in Rosendahl Rosendahl Thomsen (2008, 1–4); Wilson, Sandru, and Welsh (2010); and Graham, Niblett, and Deckard (2012). For an earlier work that makes a similar claim that “postcolonialism” varies in different contexts, and cannot be limited to the former colonial possessions, see Loomba (1998, 8–19).

2. Kindai no chōkoku (Overcoming Modernity) was the title of a symposium convened in July 1942 to discuss the world-historical meaning of Japan’s recent history of capitalist modernization and its participation in the Second World War (Harootunian 2000, 34).