The Sociality Of Seicho Matsumoto’s Detective Novels

Seicho Matsumoto(1909-1992) is the standard-bearer of Japanese detective novels of the social school. Following Edogawa Ranpo, Seishi Yokomizo, he created a golden age of Japanese mystery novels again. In1952, he was awarded the28th Akutagawa Prize with his works The Legend of the Kokura-Diary. However, it is the two full-length mystery novels Points and Lines and Walls of Eyes, which were published almost at the same time in1957, that made him well-known. Since then, Seicho Matsumoto wrote many mystery novels which closely linked with social reality. They had a great influence and were widely loved at home and abroad by readers.Different from previous detective novels, Seicho Matsumoto’s works never used whimsical plot and gorgeous crime to attract readers’attention. His simple style of writing, often with real social background, pays great attention to social reality. Especially, he emphasized the importance of the causes of social crimes, and explored the characters’ mental activities deeply. Thus he enhanced the literary value of mystery novels greatly, and also gained widespread attention by Japanese critics. But most of the Chinese and Japanese scholars put focuses on criminal motives in the past. They hold that the sociality of mainly reflected social motives for the crime.In this regard, in order to grasp the literary value and charm of this great master of social school multi-dimensionally, the author attempts to analyze the sociality of Seicho’s detective novels in a wider view.This thesis mainly focuses on the writer’s magnum opus Zero Focus, and is divided into three chapters to elaborate and analyze the sociality of Seicho Matsumoto’s detective novels.The first chapter mainly gives a brief introduction of social detective novels, Seicho Matsumoto’s literary in particular. Combined with Koujien, Daijisen and other authoritative comprehensive dictionaries, and the explanation of sociality in Dictionary of Psychology, the author tries to interpret the concept of sociality in this thesis. In his works, Seicho Matsumoto depicts vividly the struggle of the little people at the bottom of the society, exposing individual desire and self-esteem, anxiety and overall differences in social systems and other issues of identity. And this reflects the writer’s focus on social reality. Moreover, not only his works reflect the social reality of many problems, the novel itself has a certain impact on the whole society as well. Therefore, the sociality discussed in this thesis also contains these social impacts.With Zero Focus as its center, the second chapter tries to explore the sociality in Seicho Matsumoto’s mystery novels from four aspects, i.e., the real social background, the writer’s care for individuals, especially for vulnerable groups, the exposition of social problems, and the works’social influences. In the real social background, the author examines the authenticity of the description of the background of the novel-Kanazawa, and points out that the writer skillfully integrated the scenery in Kanazawa and the characters’ mental activities, so that he was able to explore the inner world of the individuals in real environments. In Section II, the author analyzes in great depth several main characters, i.e., Itane Teiko, Murota Sachiko, Uhara Kenichi. The author believes that their desire, self-esteem and tragic fate, are the common tendency of the ordinary Japanese citizens after the war, especially vulnerable groups. Section III expands the research perspective onto the revelation of the issues of the whole social reality in this works. It is pointed out that in this novel, the writer focused on the inequality of Japanese citizens’ social status after the war, and the wound brought to ordinary Japanese people, especially Japanese women, due to the U.S. military occupation. The final section, the author tries to explore the relationship between the works and its readers from the perspective of reception aesthetics. Finally the author depicts this fiction’s effect on readers, many other mystery novel writers, and Japanese television dramas of detective themes, and explains the sociality as well.Chapter Ⅲ explores the formative reason of Seicho Matsumoto’s detective novels from both internal and external factors. Internal factors can be attributed to the writer personal experience of years at the bottom of the society. And the reality of the social unrest in postwar Japan, the decline of other mystery schools, and the impacts of many other writers in Japan and abroad can be considered as external reason.This thesis analyzes the works Zero Focus from the perspective of Jauss’s reception aesthetics, trying to grasp the sociality of Seicho Matsumoto’s works from multiple dimensions. If this thesis can compensate for the lack of the study of Seicho literary in China, and provide a reference for future researchers investigating Seicho Matsumoto literary, the author would be glorified.