Narrating the detective: nansensu, silent film benshi performances and Tokugawa Musei's absurdist detective fiction

Abstract

To better convey the effects of rapid modernization, interwar Japanese authors adopted techniques that went beyond conventional literary realism. Nonsense was integral to this exploration. Uchida Hyakken of the elite bundan circle reacted to the inexplicable aspects of everyday life in his absurdist works, while Yokomitsu Riichi created new narrative structures. Popular authors also investigated the quotidian unknown through formal experimentation. In particular, some writers subverted aspects of the flourishing detective and science fiction genres. This paper discusses how Tokugawa Musei, arguably the most famous benshi or silent film narrator/commentator, undermined conventions of detective fiction by adding aspects of benshi narration to the typical formulae of detective novels. By doing so, Musei supplemented the main narrative with a perspective external to the diegetic narrative. This supplementation resulted in a nonsensical story that overwhelmed the reader with too much contradictory information and overturned the premises of logic integral to detective fiction. To illustrate Musei's techniques, I analyze his 1927 ‘The case of obetai buruburu’, published in the magazine Shinseinen (New youth). Musei's absurdity and humor reveal the potentially deadening effects of literary formulae and show how rationalist epistemological assumptions of realist narrative fiction were too limited to depict the contradictions of urban life.