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Paper short abstract

This paper examines the Hungarian translation and reception of Japanese detective fiction, focusing on works by Edogawa Ranpo, often called the father of the genre, and Matsumoto Seichō, associated with its reform. It also addresses the transmedial nature of these works.

Paper long abstract

Japanese detective fiction was underrepresented in Hungary during the Cold War period. In the large-scale scholarly project of the 1970s, the Világirodalmi Lexikon (Lexicon of World Literature), among the several hundred Japanese authors listed, includes only one writer explicitly identified as a crime novelist—Yokomizo Seishi. Moreover, in the more than twenty-page section on Japanese literature, the only reference to popular fiction reads: “Lighter popular literature developed under the influence of A. C. Doyle, E. Poe, and others; a few genuinely talented writers also produced light entertainment, such as Kosakai Fuboku and Koga Saburō.”

Does this marginalization stem from the political situation of Hungary at the time—namely the view that “the crime novel is a characteristic genre of democratic and industrial societies” (Kálai 2016)—or is it simply because these works were not part of the Japanese literary canon either, and therefore reached foreign readers to a lesser extent? This paper addresses this question.

To my knowledge, only the works of two detective novelists reached the Hungarian readership during this period: Edogawa Ranpo, often called the father of the genre and a leading advocate for the canonization of detective fiction in Japan, and Matsumoto Seichō, who reformed the genre by linking detective fiction to social realism. The media in which these works appeared are also telling. Although from the 1960s onward an increasing number of Japanese short stories were published in literary journals, detective fiction tended to appear instead in daily newspapers or in general magazines devoted to crime fiction. To this day, these works have not been included in Japanese literary anthologies, nor have they been the subject of sustained literary analysis. The primary aim of this paper is to address this gap.

As is often pointed out, transmediality is an important characteristic of detective and crime fiction (Kálai 2014; Deczki 2023). This is demonstrated by the fact that the works of both Ranpo and Matsumoto Seichō were adapted into radio plays in Hungary. This paper also addresses the film adaptation of one of Seichō’s works, which received far greater attention in Hungary than his literary works.