SHIN HONKAKU: (RE)SOLVING THE "CLASSICAL" DETECTIVE FICTION DILEMMA

Abstract

In light of the “genre bending” detective fiction that emerged in the late 20th century, the harsh critical discourse surrounding its “less sophisticated” predecessor has been retroactively awarded more weight. The detective fiction genre has moved on from its “classical” tales of ratiocination and the trajectory of its texts grow further from naively assuming the ability to comfortably present totalising narratives of truth. Yet, in the midst of this turn away from the deductive acumen from the likes of Holmes, Poirot and Van Dine, comes a seemingly anachronistic appreciation for these narratives with the 1980s Japanese literary movement, Shin Honkaku (New Orthodox). The subgenre asserts a seemingly contradictory conflation of the “classical” form with a wide range of genres with ease; this expansion of the form was precisely the impregnable limit it could never traverse. Thus, was the charge that left it limping behind while its hard-boiled and postmodernist counterparts bounded forward. If the shin honkaku camp truly seeks to innovate a form whose primary critique is that of formal arrest, the limits and allowances of this “classical” form and the discourse surrounding it must be revisited. Herein, the differences between the old “classic” and “new” one not only points to a fundamental usurping of an enduring critical denunciation, but also a reconciliation of its reductive, one-dimensional structure and its supposedly antithetical quality of “proper” literature.