On Detective Fiction: Essays and Notes

Why do readers love detective stories, and can the genre be art? In the late 1920s, as Edogawa Ranpo, Kosakai Fuboku and the magazine Shinseinen were creating the modern Japanese mystery, the critic Hirabayashi Hatsunosuke was reading them closely and asking hard questions.

This collection gathers eighteen of his writings on detective fiction, from 1925 to 1930: reviews of Ranpo's The Psychological Test and The Beast in the Shadows; studies of Sherlock Holmes's method, of Poe and his detective Dupin, and of S. S. Van Dine and Philo Vance; a note on Maurice Level; two pieces written on the death of Kosakai Fuboku; a comparison of a Marxist critic with Chesterton's defense of the detective story; and short replies to magazine questionnaires. A Marxist theorist with a taste for clever plots, Hirabayashi is by turns admiring, skeptical and wry.

Each piece is translated complete and unabridged from Japanese, with a translator's note, brief endnotes, and source information.