Science Fiction as Subversive Hypothesis: henkaku tantei shōsetsu between Entertainment and Enlightenment

Abstract

The article considers the literary sub-genre of henkaku tantei shōsetsu, detective fiction that included supernatural or pseudo-scientific elements. Such stories were published regularly in the interwar entertainment magazine Shinseinen, but this was also a journal with an intellectually sophisticated and politically engaged side, regularly publishing essays on the relationship between science and literature, and reflecting the fluidity and constant change of the period in which it flourished. I look at henkaku tantei shōsetsu's combination of rationalism and fantasy, and its oscillation between enthusiasm and anxiety towards modern science, in order to reflect more broadly on Shinseinen's position between ideas of literature as pure diversion and arguments defending its social and educational function. To investigate the specific articulation of these dynamics, I then offer a close reading of one representative work published in the magazine in 1931, ‘Robotto to beddo no jūryō’, [The Robot and the Weight of the Bed], by Naoki Sanjūgo, one of the founding fathers of modern Japanese popular literature.

Notes

¹McHale, Postmodernist Fiction, 16.

²The first scholar to address the question was William V. Spanos in his famous 1972 essay ‘The Detective and the Boundary: Some Notes on the Postmodern Literary Imagination’; see also Tani, The Doomed Detective.

³See Suter, The Japanization of Modernity, esp. 86, 142, 187.

⁴See Napier, The Fantastic in Modern Japanese Literature, esp. Introduction, 4–5.

⁵Kozakai, ‘Kagakuteki kenkyū to tantei shōsetsu’, 37.

⁶観察力 and 想像力, respectively. I am purposely translating these two terms using the word ‘power’ rather than simply ‘capability’ (another possible translation for the ‘chikara’ at the end of both words) to highlight Kozakai's perception and representation of both science and detective fiction within a rationalist framework, that leads him to portray them as both powerful and empowering tools.

⁷Kozakai, ‘Kagakuteki kenkyū to tantei shōsetsu’, 42.

⁸Oyama, ‘Tantei to kindai kagaku’, 52.

⁹Ibid., 38.

¹⁰Ibid., 39.

¹¹Kawana, Murder Most Modern, 112–113, 145.

¹²Abe, ‘SF no ryūkō ni tsuite'.

¹³It is interesting to note here that Hayakawa Shobō's other main journal of popular fiction, published to this day, was Mystery Magazine, underscoring once again the close connection and constant cross-fertilisation between the two genres.

¹⁴As quoted in Bolton, Two Essays on Science Fiction, 25.

¹⁵Ibid.

¹⁶For an analysis of the modernist/Marxist debate between Taishō literati see, among others, Mizuta Lippit, Reality and Fiction, and Lippit, Topographies of Japanese Modernism.

¹⁷Edogawa, ‘Tantei shōsetsu ni tsuite’.

¹⁸Naoki, ‘Robotto to beddo no jūryō’, 137.

¹⁹Ibid., 132.

²⁰Ibid., 133.

²¹Ibid., 135.

²²Ibid., 137.

²³Ibid., 138.

²⁴Ibid., 140.

²⁵Ibid., 143.

²⁶Ibid., 131.

²⁷Nakamura, ‘Horror and Machines in Prewar Japan’, 6.

²⁸Ibid., 6–8.

²⁹Wu, ‘Transcending the Boundaries of the “isms”’. My thanks to the author for providing me with a copy of her unpublished paper and giving me permission to quote from it, as well as for stimulating insight into the articulation of representations of the machine across different genres and media in Japanese modernism.

³⁰Kanbara, ‘Kikai wa naniga yueni’; Murayama, ‘Saikin no geijutsu’; Itagaki, Kikai to geijutsu to; all quoted in Wu, ‘Transcending the Boundaries of the “isms”’.

³¹Interestingly, both are Western-style ‘beddo’, another foreign element; in a way, the story reads as a modernist counterpart to the most classic of shishōsetsu, Tayama Katai's Futon.

³²Naoki, ‘Robotto to beddo no jūryō’, 130.

³³DiNitto, Uchida Hyakken, 79.

³⁴Yoshida, Ninshin suru robotto, 16–20.

³⁵Braidotti, Nomadic Subjects, 88.