Hanzai Japan: Fantastical, Futuristic Stories of Crime From and About Japan
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Authors: Unknown
HANZAI Japan
© 2015 VIZ Media
See Copyright Acknowledgements for individual story copyrights.
Cover art by Yuko Shimizu
Design by Fawn Lau
No portion of this book may be reproduced or transmitted in any form or by any means without written permission from the copyright holders.
HAIKASORU
Published by
VIZ Media, LLC
P.O. Box 77010
San Francisco, CA
94103
www.haikasoru.com
Library of Congress Cataloging-in-Publication Data
Hanzai Japan : fantastical, futuristic stories of crime from and about Japan / edited by Nick Mamatas and Masumi Washington.
pages cm
ISBN 978-1-4215-8025-8 (paperback)
1. Japan—Fiction. 2. Detective and mystery stories, American. 3. Detective and mystery stories, Japanese. 4. Paranormal fiction, American. 5. Paranormal fiction, Japanese. I. Mamatas, Nick, editor. II. Washington, Masumi, editor.
PS648.J29H36 2015
813'.0108952—dc23
2015028564
First printing, October 2015
Haikasoru eBook edition
ISBN: 978-1-4215-8694-6
Introduction: My Magical Girlfriend Has Vanished, Mr. Charlie Parker
Nick Mamatas
Rough Night in Little Toke
Libby Cudmore
Monologue of a Universal Transverse Mercator Projection
Yumeaki Hirayama
Vampiric Crime Investigative Unit: Tokyo Metropolitan Police Department
Jyouji Hayashi
The Girl Who Loved Shonen Knife
Carrie Vaughn
The Electric Palace
Violet LeVoit
During the “Golden Age” of detective fiction, writer and critic Ronald Knox laid down ten commandments to make the “game” of writing mystery stories a fair one for the reader. Clues were keys to unlock the mystery, and thus were sacrosanct. The commandments keep writers from cheating with the clues: no secret twins; no undetectable and previously unknown poisons or other scientific explanations; a maximum of one secret passageway per story; no clues known to the detective, but not to the reader; and no reader access to the interior thoughts of the criminal—which would either spoil the plot or lead to the writer “cheating” by having the criminal think about everything other than the crime.
In Japan, just as in the West, Knox’s commandments did not always apply. The core of the genre plays fair, but many early Japanese crime writers were pleased to deliberately subvert the rules of the game. Early Edogawa Rampo’s “The Twins”—in which a man is found guilty of a capital crime and confesses to another crime: killing his own twin brother and taking his place, and committing further crimes by planting that deceased brother’s fingerprints at crime scenes, except … well, read it. Anyway, had Rampo been explicitly going for the record in number of Knox commandments to break in one story, he could have done no better. More recently, the work of Otsuichi—some of which has won the Honkaku Mystery Award though he is not regarded as a mystery writer—often involve linguistic and narrative play: two narrators telling their stories with a significant, and obscured, gap in time; sleuths who don’t even care about stopping crimes; solutions that depend on massive coincidences.
But there’s a method to this madness. Ranpo’s guiding star was Edgar Allan Poe, as is obvious from the author’s pseudonym. Poe believed in ratiocination, but the logical processes of his detectives were themselves almost supernatural, dependent on intuition, nonrational leaps of logic, and the poetics of parallel worlds. In
The
Mystery of Marie Rog
ê
t,
Poe’s sleuth nearly solves a real crime that took place in New York by solving a fictionalized version of the crime in Paris. In his afterword to the novel
Goth,
Otsuichi admits that he saw his dark sleuth characters as
yokai,
or spirits, even though in the text they are presented as ordinary, if not exactly normal, human beings.
Two other of Knox’s commandments come into play:
All supernatural or preternatural agencies are ruled out as a matter of course.
No Chinaman must figure in the story.
In Knox’s vision, the supernatural can only be a cheat—a way to make a crime unsolvable by the reader. The writer wins the “game” too easily by hiding keys in places nobody else will ever find. Knox’s reference to “Chinaman” characters, itself reeking of Orientalism, was meant to be a warning against the cliché of casual racism and exoticism common among writers of the era, for whom the villainous Fu Manchu loomed large.
In speculative stories, the supernatural and super-scientific play complicating roles, not mitigating ones. More keys, stranger locks. Perhaps the most famous Japanese writer in the West, Haruki Murakami, frequently uses elements of mystery: hardboiled characters, women who inexplicably vanish (and even a missing sheep!), murders in the opening pages, and men awakening covered in blood not their own. The preternatural agencies present in Murakami’s work aren’t just an easy way to get someone inexplicably murdered, they’re an excellent way to explore the very nature of crime, power, social trespass, and reality.
Exoticism is also huge in Japanese mystery fiction, from the very beginning of Ranpo’s fetishization of Poe, to Murakami’s protagonists’ interest in jazz. (“No Yankee must figure in the story” would be a terrible commandment.) The privileged West, long used to writing its own stories, could use a look in the funhouse mirror of exoticism.
Hanzai Japan
brings together West and East, SF/F and crime writers, to tell stories of crime with supernatural or science fictional elements. We’re breaking Golden Age commandments faster than our antagonists—which range from vampires to GPS systems—break laws. We live in a science fictional world; Holmes and his magnifying glass won’t do in a society with DNA tests and mathematical profiling of serial killers. And the root of our interest in crime is fear of the dark, fear of the end of life, and fear of what lies beyond. Far from marring mysteries, supernatural agencies can deepen the psychological reality of the mystery, even as the physical world dissolves into high strangeness. A mystery is about finding the key that unlocks a door. A mystery with fantasy or science fictional elements is about finding the key that unlocks the door, and transforms the room as the reader enters it.
Following
The Future Is Japanese and Phantasm Japan
,
we started talking about a third anthology. We decided on the theme quickly enough: “Crime is next!” Yes, we are a science fiction and fantasy imprint, but why not? We like crime and mystery stories a lot, as we do science fiction and fantasy, just as you do.
But finalizing the book’s title was not that easy.
Hanzai Japan
?
犯罪？ はんざい？
Seriously, for a book title? That sounded odd in my Japanese ears, as all Japanese pals here will agree. And our sales folks weren’t happy with the word
Hanzai,
which is meaningless to most monolingual English speakers. We spent a few weeks trying to come up with alternatives, to no avail. (Want an example? Several VIZ employees liked
Japan After Midnight—
but, hey, this is not that kind of anthology.)
So, after going round and round, we came back to the first idea. By that time, I actually began liking this title. Peering at the word spelled out in the letters of the alphabet, it felt different from what I knew of it in Japanese. Maybe it was because Nick said “han-zai” sounded cool to western ears; or maybe it was fit nicely into Yuko’s cover art; or maybe it was because, no matter what book title we ended up deciding upon, we were actually getting interesting stories from our contributors by that time and the stories were simply bringing this anthology to life already.
One simple word, operating beyond its language of origin, inspiring new stories: that was our goal. Now I can say this title
is
a good fit. (We will see if
Merriam-Webster
picks up “hanzai” in the future—just like how “emoji” made it!)
We violated at least two of Knox’s mystery fiction commandments, though—these “hanzai” stories cross genres and the borders where we ourselves are living. I am really grateful to all our contributors and translators for their fantastic work. I hope you also enjoy it.