Manga, Murder and Mystery

The Boy Detectives of Japan's Lost Generation

Mimi Okabe

• Publisher: Bloomsbury Academic
• Year: 2023
• ISBN:
  9781350325111
• Edition: 1
• Topic: Literature
• Subtopic: Asian Literary Criticism
• Index: Literature

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.

Table of contents

• Cover
• Contents
• List of Figures and Tables
• Acknowledgments
• Notes on Text
• Introduction: The Lost Generation and the Revival of the Boy Detective
• 1 Tracking the Boy Detective from Novel to Manga: Context, Criticism, and Debates
• 2 Tracking the Boy Detective in Three Manga Traditions
• 3 The Rebel Boy Detective
• 4 The Ideal Boy Detective
• 5 The Criminal Boy Detective
• Case Closed: The Future of Boy Detectives
• Notes
• References
• Index