Strangely enough, the title of Kido's series, Hanshichi torimono-cho, also possibly owes a debt to Sherlock Holmes' adventures. An Edo term no longer in use in Kido's day, torimonocho is a combination of the words torimono, meaning “an arrest” or “one who commits a crime,” and cho, a notebook or log. While its very antiquatedness could not have failed to conjure up images of feudal law enforcement in the minds of Kido's readers, the word's exact meaning was evidently obscure enough that his editor at Literature Club felt compelled to append an explanatory subtitle: “Great Detective Stories from the Edo Period” (Edo jidai no tantei meiwa).
For his part, Kido, foreseeing the need to educate his readers, defined the term at the beginning of Hanshichi's second adventure, “The Stone Lantern”:
“What's a torimonocho, you ask?” said Hanshichi by way of introduction. “Well, after hearing a report from one of us detectives, the chief inspector or assistant magistrate in charge of the case would relay the information to the City Magistrate's Office, where a secretary wrote it all down in a ledger. That's what we called a torimonocho — a casebook.”
Yet the origins of this unusual word and its true defi nition have aroused some debate among Hanshichi afi cionados. The renowned Edo scholar Mitamura Engyo, for one, points out that a torimonocho was not in fact a detailed police report like those familiar to readers of modern detective fiction, but rather a dispatch log indicating where and when officers had been sent out to apprehend suspects.10 Kido may well have been aware of this discrepancy but chose to exercise poetic license in creating his own defi nition.
Remarkably, according to Imai Kingo, the term is never mentioned again anywhere else in the series. Instead, in a later story, “Three Cheers for Mikawa” (published in January 1919), Kido made reference to one or more “bound books” (yokotoji no cho), unfortunately destroyed in a fire, that Hanshichi's predecessor, Kichigoro, had kept to record his past cases. And in “The Case of the Fox Spirit” (published in 1926), Hanshichi is depicted following his former boss' example in keeping a “notebook” (hikaecho) of his own cases. The two Japanese detectives' unoffi cial case notes seem analogous to what in Sherlock Holmes' adventures are referred to variously as his “records of crime,” “case-books,” and “commonplace books,” volumes that hold notes, newspaper clippings, and documents pertaining to past cases. In “The Musgrave Ritual” Watson writes of these, “it was only in every year or two that [Holmes] would muster energy to docket and arrange them.” But it is Watson's own meticulous notebooks that provide the fictional basis for Conan Doyle's narrative, and to these the good doctor is constantly referring and selecting interesting cases to “set before the public.” Likewise, Kido's counterpart to Watson, his young unnamed narrator, states at the end of “The Ghost of Ofumi”: “I have managed to fill an entire notebook (techo) with these detective stories of Hanshichi's. I have chosen those I find most compelling, and I hereby put them before my readers, though not necessarily in chronological order.”
The ambiguity between the torimonocho and Hanshichi's “notebook” also has an analogy in the Sherlock Holmes series: what starts out in The Adventures and The Memoirs as being Watson's “notebooks” eventually merges with Holmes' “casebooks” and by the end of the series becomes an encyclopedic, alphabetical compendium running into many dozens of volumes, created jointly by the two men, which Watson describes as the record of “our” cases. While it has been suggested by some Hanshichi scholars that Conan Doyle's “case-books” are the direct precursor of Kido's torimonocho, it should be noted that the former did not appear as a title for Holmes' adventures until 1927, when The Case-Book of Sherlock Holmes was published.
Strictly speaking, Hanshichi's adventures are not a true tori-monocho at all, even according to Kido's own defi nition. Rather, they represent oral accounts of the detective's cases transmitted long after the fact by “old Hanshichi” to his young companion, who has transcribed them onto paper. In 1920, three years after Hanshichi's debut, Kido tried to correct the misnomer by renaming his series Hanshichi kikigakicho (The Hanshichi notebooks) — the word kikigaki signifying “dictation” — and publishing a collection of the first six stories under this title in 1921.
But by then it was already too late; the label torimonocho had stuck, and that is how the series has been known ever since. Despite its uncertain origins and dubious defi nition, torimonocho was taken up by later writers of historical detective fi ction who sought to imitate Kido's success.
Notes
The Japanese practice of referring to the author by his pen name, Kido, rather than by his family name, Okamoto, has been followed here.
John Berendt, “Introduction,” in The Adventures and Memoirs of Sherlock Holmes (New York: Modern Library, 2001).
The present work is a translation of fourteen stories published in Japanese, Hanshichi torimonocho, vol. one.
One story, “Hakuchokai” (The white butterfly), was serialized in Nichyo hochi (The daily news) in fi fteen installments from December 1931 through July 1932.
Mark Silver, “Purloined Letters: Cultural Borrowing and Japanese Crime Literature, 1868 — 1941 (Ph.D. diss., Yale University, 1999), 153.
One story, “Yasha jindo” (The Yasha shrine), was published in the magazine ingu (King).
Imai Kingo, Hanshichi torimonocho Edo meguri — Hanshichi wa jitsuzai shita (Tokyo: Chikuma Shobo, 1999), 268.
Interestingly, in the later Kabuki version two new twists were added to the plot that involve Sankatsu giving birth to an illegitimate daughter and Hanshichi being falsely accused of murdering a man in a brawl, becoming a fugitive, and being disowned by his father — developments that trigger the couple's inevitable suicide.
Kazuo Yoshida, “Japanese Mystery Literature” in Handbook of Japanese Popular Culture, ed. Richard Gid Powers and Hidetoshi Kato (New York: Greenwood Press, 1989), 276.
Ibid., 64.
Bibliography
Doyle, Sir Arthur Conan. The Adventures and Memoirs of Sherlock Holmes. New York: Modern Library, 2001. Imai Kingo. Hanshichi torimonocho Edo meguri — Hanshichi wa jitsuzai shita. Tokyo: Chikuma Shobo, 1999.
Nishiyama Matsunosuke. Edo Culture: Daily Life and Diversions in Urban Japan, 1600 — 1868. Honolulu: University of Hawaii Press, 1997.
Okamoto Kido. Kido zuihitsu — Edo no kotoba. Tokyo: Kawade Shobo Shinsha, 2003.
Seidensticker, Edward. Low City, High City: Tokyo from Edo to the Earthquake. New York: Alfred A. Knopf, 1983.
Silver, Mark. Purloined Letters: Cultural Borrowing and Japanese Crime Literature, 1868 — 1941. Ph.D. diss., Yale University, 1999.
—— . “Putting the Court on Trial: Cultural Borrowing and the Translated Crime Novel in Nineteenth-Century Japan.” Journal of Popular Culture 36.4 (Spring 2003): 853 — 885.
Yoshida Kazuo. “Japanese Mystery Literature.” In Handbook of Japanese Popular Culture, ed. Richard Gid Powers and Hidetoshi Kato, 275 — 299. New York: Greenwood Press, 1989.
