Overview

Little is known about the boy detective in Japanese detective fiction despite his popularity. Who is he, and what mysteries does he unveil about cultural understandings of youth in Japanese society? Manga, Murder and Mystery answers these questions by exploring the figure of the shonen (boy) detective in commercially successful manga series such as Detective Conan, The Case Files of Young Kindaichi, Death Note and Moriarty the Patriot. The book explores how these popular works tackle the crisis of young adult culture within the socioeconomic climate of Japan's 'lost decade' and Heisei era, broadly speaking. Mimi Okabe shows how detective manga materialized in a nation undergoing a state of crisis and how the boy detective emerged as a site of national trauma to address perceived youth problems but in thematically different ways.

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9781350325098

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With a keen eye for details, Dr. Okabe expertly investigates iconic boy sleuths of manga, revealing how they entertain and inspire us and teach us about storytelling techniques and social issues. * Alisa Freedman, Professor, University of Oregon, USA *

With a keen eye for details, Dr. Okabe expertly investigates iconic boy sleuths of manga, revealing how they entertain and inspire us and teach us about storytelling techniques and social issues. * Alisa Freedman, Professor, University of Oregon, USA * Set in the era of the “wild child of the 1990s” that gripped the Japanese imagination, Mimi Okabe’s well-researched and engaging book Manga, Murder and Mystery weaves together cultural and social theory to explore the phenomenon of boy detectives in the manga Kindaichi Shonen no Jikenbo and Meitantei Konan. Building on scholarship of the history of Japanese detective fiction in both English and Japanese, the book focuses on the history and development of the boy detective created by Edogawa Rampo and Tezuka Osamu and others before focusing on the 1990s manga series. These boy detectives model good behavior and a love of justice that stands in contrast to the image of wild and lawless youth of the lost generation characterized by its antithesis the manga Death Note. Okabe’s book is a welcome and significant contribution to the scholarship on Japanese youth culture and particularly of boy’s culture of the Heisei Era. * Amanda C. Seaman, Professor, University of Massachusetts Amherst, USA *

Author Information

Mimi Okabe is an award-winning instructor and is currently a clinical assistant professor in the Asian Studies program at SUNY Buffalo, USA. She has published several papers in international journals as well as book chapters on Japanese media and culture.

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