On Kozakai Fuboku and the Detective Novel

Kunieda Shirō opens by imagining Nero brought to Japan to set the world of thought on fire, counts on his fingers how many people it would be a pity to lose, gets as far as three, and concludes there are not even ten. Then he walks up the stone steps to a two-storey house behind Tsuruma Park in Nagoya, is shown into a six-mat Western study with two stoves in it, and turns into a mild middle-aged gentleman straightening his cuffs. The man in the study is Kosakai Fuboku — forensic scientist, doctor at twenty-eight, and by then the most prominent writer and critic of detective fiction in Japan.

Four of these six pieces are about him, and they were written across four years. The first, from 1926, is a portrait of a living friend: his refusal to speak ill of anyone's work, his poses at wickedness, his natural epigrams, his habit of flinging the window open in midwinter because his guest is sweating. The last three were written within weeks of his death in April 1929, and they set down what a friend actually knows — that he answered a postcard with a postcard and a sealed letter with a sealed letter; that he drafted, corrected in every direction, then copied fair, because a detective story must have no flaws; that he bought a dying young man's manuscripts, which went into the wastepaper basket, to keep him alive; that he made Kunieda give up drink and stood as his guarantor while saying he would leave the world first; that at the wake a death mask was taken and the coffin was buried in flowers.

The other two pieces are trade criticism, and they are the reason the book matters beyond the friendship. Brief Notices on the Japanese Detective Fiction World (1925) and A Bird's-Eye View of the Detective-Fiction World (1926) survey the field magazine by magazine and writer by writer — Edogawa Ranpo's The Two-Sen Copper Coin, The Psychological Test and The Hell of Mirrors, Kōga Saburō's The Amber Pipe, Yokomizo Seishi, Matsumoto Tai, Hirabayashi Hatsunosuke, Maki Itsuma and dozens more, with prices, page counts and scores attached. Kunieda tells the critics urging Kosakai out of the laboratory that he should shut himself up in it further; he marks the round-robin serial The Fifth-Floor Window at sixty-five points out of a hundred; and he complains that Japan has only two magazines for the whole trade.

First English translation, complete and unabridged, of all six pieces, with the author's judgements and his errors left as he made them and the writers, magazines and books he names identified in footnotes.

English-language digital edition. Translated by Valentin Sarić.

You receive: a 59-page PDF and an EPUB edition.

Digital download only. No physical book is shipped.