Source: Dissertation Abstracts International, Volume: 61-01, Section: A, page: 0190.

Director: Edwin McClellan.

Early Japanese detective writers worked in a tradition of letters that was not their own. Because the detective story was imported, these writers felt with special keenness the burden of Western influence that weighed upon highbrow writers and the Japanese culture at large. The crime literature of the Meiji, Taisho, and early Showa, periods thus offers a particularly clear example of Japanese responses to Western influence. Moreover, since such literature sensitively gauges its readers' preoccupations, it also allows us to chart Japanese popular attitudes toward cultural borrowing from the West, and to the national transformations that this borrowing brought about.

Considering four authors whose careers make a sequence stretching from the era before the influx of Western translations to the eve of the Pacific War, this dissertation uses the development of Japanese crime literature to illustrate the cultural birth-pangs of modern Japan. In the crime writing of Kanagaki Robun (1829--1894), which typified the genre before the arrival of the detective story, the West remains only faintly discernible behind the turmoil following the Meiji Restoration. Robun's use of an incipient realism to meet the demands of his Takahashi Oden yasha monogatari (1879) demonstrates the hazards of insulating highbrow literary history from lowbrow developments. In the 1880s, Kuroiwa Ruiko (1862--1920) introduced the Western detective novel to Japanese readers by printing loose, serialized translations in tabloid newspapers. A contextual reading of Ruiko's Hito no un (1894) shows that disruptive potential may lurk in even the most saccharine-seeming popular literature. Ruiko's work is suffused with the spirit of the so-called Rokumeikan period, when Japan's enthusiasm for adopting Western ways overshadowed concern about creating a cultural hodge-podge. Written, in contrast, as the country's early infatuation with the West cooled, the formulaic stories of Okamoto Kido (1872--1939) yearn nostalgically for the cultural simplicity of pre-Restoration Japan. Finally, in the outlandish, often semi-pornographic stories of Edogawa Ranpo (1894--1965), written amid the accelerating xenophobia of the 1920s and 1930s, Japan's Westernization becomes a thing of outright horror.