The Panic of A Tomoichirou

AWASAKA Tsumao's A Aiichirou stories are among the highpoints of Japanese detective fiction. I've read two of the three collections so far; but this time I'm going to talk about a prequel. 亜智一郎の恐慌  (A Tomoichirou no kyoukou, The Panic of A Tomoichirou, 1997) features a character who seems to be a bakumatsu version of A Aiichirou. Like Aiichirou he is handsome and elegant, but sometimes clumsy and cowardly, and has a talent for observation and deduction. While Aiichirou is a photographer who specialises in cloud photography, Tomoichirou works in the shogun's "cloud watching department", in which a few samurai spend the day lazily observing the weather in Tokyo from a tower in the shogun's palace.

The first of the seven stories in the collection introduces us to Tomoichirou and other samurai who are assigned to his team, when a court official realises that he has the skills for a secret investigator. The subordinates have various characters, one is a one armed, easy going lover of theatre, one an enthusiast for the ninja skills that are no longer really needed in modern Japan, one is immensely strong. In different episodes in the first story, they show their potential usefulness as secret agents.

The stories that follow have something in common with the A Aiichirou series, but are really far enough removed from it that I don't think that I'd recommend them to fans. There is an impossible crime (of sorts) in the second story, but really most of the stories are more like spy stories with a small detective element. Also although some have a similar humour to the A Aiichirou series, others deal with horrible crimes where humour is really not wanted. Finally Tomoichirou, unlike Aiichirou, is rarely a major character in the story, although he does always make some deduction near the end. More often the mystery plays out as an adventure story with different members of his team as the main investigators (much like Van Gulik's Judge Dee series).

This is not a very enthusiastic review. Partly I may be holding Awasaka to a higher standard than other writers. Partly the historical background may have made this too difficult a book for me to enjoy it. I read a lot on the train, away from the internet or any dictionary. Mostly that works out fine; but here with a lot of vocabulary rooted in the culture of Tokyo under the shogun and a lot of references to historical events and people, I often lacked the background I needed to really appreciate the book. As historical fiction, they work much on the pattern established by Scott. The various adventures are often thrown up by the real historical events of the chaotic period that led to the rejection of the shogun for the rule of the emperor; but although the agents are successful in their own actions, they are not really changing anything in the flow of history.

Boy Science Detective: The Riddle of the Beard

[You may want to check the warning on this blog's translations.] 

Another translation: this is the third Boy Science Detective story by KOSAKAI Fuboku. Previously we had:

• Preface (and general introduction)
• 1. The Scarlet Diamond
• 2. A Fight in the Dark 

This one doesn't give away the endings to the previous stories, so you don't need to have read them to read this. The first story introduces the main character, boy genius Toshio Tsukahara and his bodyguard/assistant Ono. Toshio has a private laboratory and office a few streets away from his rich parents' house. The stories first appeared in a children's science magazine; and Toshio's investigations always involve a Dr Thorndyke style scientific element.

The puzzle in this one is quite well done, I think (although as always the culprit is fairly obvious). The story is also a spy story, and has a not very sympathetic MacGuffin in the national secret of a poison gas formula. At the time of the story, Japan had a small empire (the result of Meiji period militarism) and was a not very stable democracy, which had to struggle with the kind of militarism that would so disastrously come to dominate a few years later.

The story was first published from June to August 1925 in 子供の科学 (kodomo no kagaku, Children's Science), then collected in book form in 1926.

As always, I've put the translated story (whose Japanese original you can read online at Aozora Bunko here) after the break. Explanatory footnotes look like this[1] in the text; but you'll have to scroll to the end of the file to find them.