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Paper short abstract

Analyzing Kishi Yusuke’s fiction, this paper traces the psychopath's genealogy from "deviant" to "high-achiever." The shift from the excluded monster in The Black House to the successful leader in Lesson of the Evil reflects Japan's changing moral landscape since the 1990s.

Paper long abstract

This study elucidates how the shifting social discourse surrounding "psychopathy" since the 1990s is represented in the works of Yusuke Kishi, with a primary focus on The Black House (1997) and Lesson of the Evil (2010).

In the mid-1990s, the dominant clinical and social narrative of psychopathy shifted from Kurt Schneider’s definition of a "suffering" deviant to Robert Hare’s concept of the "incurable predator." Accelerated by the importation of FBI profiling narratives and the social trauma of the Aum Shinrikyo affair and the Kobe child murders, this discourse established the psychopath as a label for explaining incomprehensible evil. Kishi’s The Black House serves as a literary embodiment of this specific 1990s discourse. While it reflects the tendency to view the psychopath as a terrifying "other" to be excluded, the narrative simultaneously exposes and critiques the discriminatory nature inherent in such criminal psychological frameworks.

However, the 2000s marked a paradigm shift in this social écriture. Coinciding with the spread of neoliberalism and theories positing the "wisdom" of psychopaths (e.g., Kevin Dutton), psychopathic traits—such as ruthlessness, lack of empathy, and superficial charm—began to be reevaluated as advantageous skills for corporate and social survival. Kishi’s Lesson of the Evil manifests this discursive shift by depicting a protagonist who functions as a "successful psychopath" or a charismatic leader within a competitive system, eliciting complex reactions of fear and exhilaration from the reader.

Ultimately, this paper argues that Kishi’s works do not merely trace a literary lineage, but rather serve as a site where the changing social discourse—from the exclusion of the "deviant" to the valuation of "psychopathic utility"—is vividly projected. This transformation mirrors a fundamental fluctuation in Japanese societal values regarding morality and success in the post-growth era.