The detective novel's novelty: native and foreign narrative forms in Kuroiwa Ruik's Kett no hate

Author: Silver M.

Source: Japan Forum, Volume 16, Number 2, July, 2004 , pp. 191-205(15)

Publisher: Routledge, part of the Taylor & Francis Group

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Abstract:

As a Meiji-period import, the detective novel makes a telling case study in the complexities of Japanese cultural borrowing. This article underlines the hybrid nature of one typical translated detective novel, Kuroiwa Ruik omacr

's Kett no hate (The consequences of a duel), which is an often loose rendering into Japanese of the French writer Fortuné Hippolyte Du Boisgobey's novel Suites d'un duel. On the one hand, the translation makes overt appeals to Meiji-period readers' hunger for the modern, the novel, and the foreign; on the other, it conspicuously recycles narrative conventions of the dokufu-mono, or 'poisonous woman story', a popular Meiji-period genre whose representations of alluring but ruthless silver-tongued female criminals had deep roots in the old, native tradition of gesaku, or 'frivolous writing'. This melding of the new and the old in Ruik omacr

's translation suggests the necessity of revising our current models for understanding cultural borrowing, which rely too heavily upon the notions of straightforward Japanese imitation or, alternatively, of Western cultural dominance.

Keywords: Kuroiwa Ruik omacr ; detective novel; gesaku; female criminals; dokufu; cross-cultural borrowing

Document Type: Research article

DOI: http://dx.doi.org/10.1080/0955580042000222691

Affiliations: 1: Connecticut College

Publication date: 2004-07-01

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