Reviewed by Jeanne Johnson
The Japanese have a thing about the '20s of what we must now call the last century. The decade that comprised the end of the Taishou period, in which Japan first took its place as a player in world history, and the beginning of the long Shouwa period, in which Japan took its new role in disastrous directions, is regarded with nostalgic fondness by people whose own parents may not have lived through it, let alone themselves. To the extent that I understand it, the image seems different from our own Roaring 20's. The appeal isn't the frenzied explosion of energy that our 20's had. Rather it's a vision of a sunny and easy-going golden age when there was leisure for everything and everything was beautiful. Before the repression of the militaristic 30's, before the nightmare of the war and the bleakness of the Occupation, there was one perfect moment when the old and new elements of Japan were completely in balance, when women were as comfortable in kimono as in short western skirts, when the country was for once in its life confident and cosmopolitan, and when arts and letters flourished in an open atmosphere unparalleled before or since. The 20's had style to burn, a fact which must never be underestimated in Japan where style is always tremendously important. And when the Japanese think of early Shouwa, it's the style they think of first.
Motoni Modoru, as she says in her afterword, works in a studio that looks out on the soulless ranks of a concrete 'danchi'- apartment houses built for company workers, cheap, uniform, and ugly, the sight of which can propel a sensitive soul into suicide on bad days. But in summer the cracked concrete is covered by a mass of waving green ivy "with its scent evocative of another period." To Motoni it spoke of precisely that romantic Taishou/Shouwa era, and she transferred its ambience into this series of fantastical stories set in the period, about the amateur aristocratic detective Aoneko (blue cat) Kyoujiro. (Note that ao has a range of meanings, so that the name might be green cat or even aquamarine cat, if you like.)
Aoneko is a Baron, another detail that seems terribly period. I don't know if hereditary titles got abolished after the war or if, like the English aristocracy, they just became more self-effacing in their post-war poverty, but when I read Danshaku (baron) or Shishaku (viscount), I get that true 20's thrill. The first half of the book is a series of light-hearted and bizarre
detective stories, quite as one might expect. Aoneko is an idle dilettante, charmingly self-absorbed and narcissistic as aristocrats are wont to be. This upper-class Japanese twit plays detective only when he feels like it, and he feels like it mostly when the case involves his great nemesis, Garasu no Komori, The Glass Bat. (The Japanese is way more euphonic, you must admit.) The master thief Glassbat has a suitably threatening black moustache and beard, a top hat and sweeping cape, and can switch in a moment from his disguise as clean-shaven blond to mustachio'd villain with no difficulty whatever. The two battle it out for, say, the famous ruby 'Mary's Tear', which turns transparent crystal when a virgin touches it. (We won't tell you what happens when Aoneko touches it.) Rather more comically, they battle over a pair of underpants which get surreptitiously switched so often for an identical pair that I lost track of whose they were in the end.
Glassbat has a romantic devotion to Aoneko, which the latter permits and occasionally takes advantage of. There's a past history between them that I hope to learn more about some day, along with those strange hints about Aoneko's own initiation into the world of male love. But Aoneko's passion through the first half is the upright, naïve and 'sincere' police inspector Hachiouji. (Hachiouji is a perfectly respectable place name when written Eight-King's-Son, but here it turns into Beekingson, in keeping with the unexplained, unapologetic animal motif of the series.) Hachiouji is also straight and must at one point be rescued from the clutches of a murderous femme fatale who keeps her victims' hearts in jars.
The second half of this first volume becomes much darker, not to say all-out romantic. Aoneko the casual and humourous narcissist gets himself personally and professionally in over his head in a case that involves a simple-minded boy prostitute and his murdered, mutilated clients. This single long story will probably appeal more to the serious western reader. I mean, stealing underpants may make the Japanese roar with laughter, as it does the Brits, but there are better things a yaoi hero can do with his time, like having crises of conscience and dark nights of the soul. And there's nothing like a little psychological development and exploration to keep a gaijin happy and coming back for more. The story still has the panache and theatricality of the earlier part, but with much more meat to chew on.
This is a tour-de-force of style and nostalgia, drawn in Motoni's beautiful chiaroscuro. The Japanese has these little old-fashioned touches that mark the aristocratic language of a calmer, bygone era. Aoneko even manages to sigh in kanji. Ahh, such elegance...
And one other thing... Motoni says in her afterword that she grew up in the 70's, half a century after the start of Shouwa. 'The dusty 70's, followed by the sleepy 80's', a time before the booming bubble economy, when a little girl could play in vacant lots among the assorted rubbish still to be found there. 'In 20 years, who knows but that we may feel the same nostalgia for the 70's as we do for the 20's.' Motoni already does, and has mapped her nostalgia for the now-vanished Japan of her childhood onto the cultural nostalgia everyone feels about the 20's. My kind of woman.