Bodies of evidence: Women, society, and detective fiction in contemporary Japan

This dissertation focuses upon the recent "boom" in women's detective fiction in Japan, and in particular upon how female writers have used the narrative and conceptual resources of the detective genre to depict and critique contemporary Japanese society. Literary scholars have debated whether women's detective fiction is merely a parody of the male voice, or in fact represents the possibility of creating a new voice for women within a genre which ostensibly supports modern patriarchal liberal democracies. I address this argument and its applicability to the Japanese case in the course of a detailed examination of five contemporary authors, all of whom draw to varying degrees upon the Euro-American tradition of "hard-boiled" detective and police fiction. I examine how each writer transcends the normal parameters of the genre, and how detective fiction allows these authors to treat social problems in greater detail than do other literary genres.; I begin with an analysis of Miyabe Miyuki, who identifies her detective with the space of the home and the old neighborhood, and her criminal with the "no-place" of late capitalist Tokyo, in order to critique contemporary attempts at self-definition through consumption. I then discuss Shibata Yoshiki and Nonami Asa, who provide a distinctive perspective upon the problems faced by women in the Japanese workplace by depicting women trying to make their mark in a male-dominated profession in the face of deprecation and harassment from their colleagues. Next I consider how Shibata's works, together with those of Kirino Natsuo, use hard-boiled detective fiction to explore the problematic relationship between sex, gender, and violence in modern Japanese culture. Finally, I turn to Matsuo Yumi's parodic science-fiction detective thriller Murder in Balloon Town, which explores the complex world of modern pregnancy and motherhood in the context of a future Tokyo divided by social and economic functions.