The Devotion of Suspect X

Japanese literary culture has been influenced by Western literature since the 1880s. Mystery fiction, particularly detective stories, became popular quickly. However, the detective genre truly became part of Japanese literary culture in the 1920s and 1930s, with the increased spread of translated Western fiction following World War I. During this time, novelist Tarō Hirai, who took the pseudonym Edogawa Rampo (a rough approximation of “Edgar Allan Poe”), received acclaim for his unique style of detective novels, which occasionally merged horror and fantastical elements with the traditional structures of the classic “whodunit” mystery format. Rampo started the Detective Story Club in Japan in 1947, and this organization eventually became the Mystery Writers of Japan, which now awards a respected annual mystery fiction prize.

From the 1930s through the 1950s, Rampo and other early writers wrote primarily “honkaku” mysteries, meaning “authentic” or “orthodox.” This sub-genre of mystery fiction aligns with the western “Golden Age” of mystery fiction in the 1920s-1940s, which was typified by the Ellery Queen detective stories. Honkaku mysteries follow the conventional rules of mystery and the principle of “fair play,” which requires that the story presents all the facts and clues necessary to solve the crime. Honkaku mysteries are structured like puzzles, sometimes even including lists of characters, floorplans, and diagrams to assist the reader. These mysteries generally include seemingly impossible scenarios and grow in complexity, often reaching “Rube Goldbergian levels” (“Honkaku: Japanese Mysteries.” Seattle Public Library, 3 Nov. 2025).

During the 1950s through ’80s, Japanese mystery fiction shifted to a “social school” of thought, in which crimes were contextualized through the lens of social realism and were designed to examine wider issues of social injustice and political corruption. However, by the mid-1980s, honkaku mysteries experienced a resurgence as writers returned to the conventional rules and structures originally inspired by Ellery Queen and other early detective fiction authors; however, these works simultaneously explored complex social issues. Among Western writers, this style of detective fiction also includes the ever-popular work of Agatha Christie (who wrote a series of mystery stories featuring the detective Hercule Poirot). Additional writers in this genre include Josephine Tey and G.K. Chesterton, the latter of whom penned the Father Brown mysteries. The style has reached new heights of popularity in Japan, offering many exemplary writers such as Kaoru Kitamura and Soji Shimada.