“Affairs of a State Detective” (original: “Kokuji Tantei”) was written by Yûhô Kikuike and first appeared in Ôsaka mainichi shinbun (1888). Nothing is known about Yûhô Kikuike.

"Affairs of a State Detective” is set in Paris. Ômura is the best detective that Kawamichi Shô, the Chief of the Paris Police, has working for him. When there is a tough case, Ômura is assigned to it. Kawamichi learns that there is a threat to the French Crown Prince and assigns Ômura to the case. Nishinô Takeshi, a renegade scientist and the most dangerous of the German anarchists, has entered France with the intention of assassinating the French Crown Prince. Kawamichi’s informant is a good one, and Kawamichi knows the method by which Nishinô will attempt the assassination: Nishinô, or one of his accomplices, will disguise himself as a flower girl and will lure the Prince to a remote location, ostensibly to seduce him but actually to murder him with poison gas.

Ômura investigates and discovers that Ohana, the flower girl Takeshi is going to disguise himself as, is actually Takeshi's younger sister. Ômura further learns that Ohana is a favorite of the Prince, and that Ohana is conspiring with Takeshi to murder the Prince. Ômura has one of his men disguise himself as a thug and assault Ohana, and Ômura appears and rescues her. He then escorts Ohana back to her home and gains her trust. She lets slip that Takeshi is staying in a boarding house somewhere and that she and her husband, the owner of the flower shop, are in communication with Nishinô. Ômura later learns that Kumoi, a sumo instructor, has come to Paris to defeat the sumo champion of Paris, the “Masked Wrestler.” After Kumoi wins the sumo match he intends to go to a nearby park, where the Crown Prince likes to walk, and hide there with Takeshi. Kumoi intends to gas the Prince at that time.

But Ômura is the Masked Wrestler, and he defeats Kumoi in the sumo match. Ômura learns about Kumoi’s involvement in the murder plot and goes to the park to stop it. Ômura defeats Nishinô in a sword fight and arrests everyone except Ohana, who escapes.

Detective fiction did not become consistently popular as a genre in Japan until the 1920s, but the genre’s introduction into Japan actually took place decades earlier. Translations of sensation novels were popular in Japan beginning early in the 1880s, with the first translation of Mary Elizabeth Braddon’s Lady Audley’s Secret being published in 1882. The detective elements in sensation novels resonated with the Japanese audience, who were familiar with works like Kuei Wan-Jung’s Tang yin bi shi (1211 C.E.), “a Chinese collection of criminal cases originally meant as a training manual for legal officials,”¹and with the “elements of mystery, horror, and suspense found in Ueda Akinari’s (1734-1809) famous collection of ghost stories, Ugetsu monogatari,”² so that when translators began producing Japanese translations of mysteries, the audience was happy to read them. However, the first wave of popularity for detective fiction in Japan would begin only later in the decade, when journalist, author, and translator Kuroiwa Ruiko set to work.

Between 1888 and his death, Ruiko turned out some seventy-five translations of Western novels, including works by Victor Hugo, Alexandre Dumas père, Émile Gaboriau [see: The Lerouge Affair], Marie Corelli, and Anna Katharine Green [see: The Leavenworth Case], as well as works by lesser-known authors, such as Bertha M. Clay, Hugh Conway (the pseudonym of Frederick John Fargus), and George Manville Fenn. Most numerous of all are his translations of Fortune Hippolyte Auguste Du Boisgobey (1821-91), an imitator of Émile Gaboriau’s detective novels of upper-class Parisian society.³

In 1892 Ruiko launched the newspaper Yorozu Choho, which quickly gained popularity thanks to its serializations of Western novels, including detective novels. Ruiko was quite popular as both a translator of Western mysteries and as an author of mysteries, but he stopped translating and writing mysteries in the late 1890s. “After Ruiko left the genre in the late 1890s, the production of original as well as translated detective fiction waned during the subsequent decades.”⁴ In the early/mid-1920s detective fiction became popular again, and remained so, thanks to the efforts of Hirai Taro, a devoted fan of detective fiction and of Edgar Allan Poe. Hirai published his first detective story, “Two-Sen Copper Coin” (original: “Nisen doka”), in 1923. Taro, who published under the pen name of “Edogawa Rampo,” was immediately popular and helped establish detective fiction in the world of Japanese letters.

Interestingly, “Affairs of a State Detective” seems to have appeared contemporaneously with Ruiko’s start as a translator of mysteries, and in a mainstream newspaper—but the exact source for the story has never been located. Presumably it was a dime novel story, especially given the presence in “Affairs of a State Detective” of anarchists—who did not exist in Japan in the 1880s—as villains. But which dime novel has never been discovered, nor have the circumstances around the translation and publication of “Affairs of a State Detective” ever been explained.

Sari Kawana, Murder Most Modern: Detective Fiction & Japanese Culture. Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press, 2008.

¹ Amanda C. Seaman, Bodies of Evidence: Women, Society, and Detective Fiction in 1990s Japan (Honolulu: University of Hawai’i Press, 2004), 4.

² Seaman, Bodies of Evidence, 5.

³ Mark Silver, “The detective novel’s novelty: native and foreign narrative forms in Kuroiwa Ruikō’s Kettō no hate,” Japan Forum 16, no. 2 (2004): 191-192.

⁴ Sari Kawana, Murder Most Modern: Detective Fiction & Japanese Culture (Minneapolis: University of Minnestoa Press, 2008), 11.