There goes the neighbourhood: community and family in Miyabe Miyuki’s Riyū

Abstract

Miyabe Miyuki, one of Japan’s best-known and best-selling writers of detective fiction, has used the genre to critique contemporary Japanese society. In this paper, I examine one of Miyabe’s central concerns: the transformation of Tokyo’s urban environment and the effect that the development of luxury buildings in a blue-collar neighbourhood has on individual and community identity. In her 1992 novel Kasha, Miyabe chronicled the corrosive effects of consumerism on Japanese society, suggesting that a healthy individual existence depends on membership in close-knit familial units. Her subsequent novel, Riyū, shows how the very existence of such communities is threatened by the construction of a luxury high-rise apartment building in the Kita Senju neighbourhood of Tokyo. The family that the detective has created in Kasha stands in stark contrast to the rootless, single young victim and her killer, while in Riyū (1997), a family found murdered in a luxury high-rise turns out to comprise four individuals with little connection to one another. Ostensibly a ‘true-crime’ style of narrative about the murder of a family in the new development, Riyū is used by Miyabe to investigate and to meditate on kinship, family, and community, and therefore, serve to map the role of the identity in the formation of self and of place in the increasingly isolated and isolating world of contemporary Japan.