Distinguished Visitors Talk by Tsugumi (Mimi) Okabe, Assistant Professor of Japanese language, literature and culture, Baruch College

Talk on Thursday, October 24 at 4:30pm in LUT 200 (tea at 4:15pm) 

“Manga, Murder and Mystery: The Boy Detectives of Japan's Lost Generation”

Tsugumi (Mimi) Okabe is Assistant Professor of Japanese language, literature and culture in the Department of Modern Languages and Comparative Literature at Baruch College. Mimi is the author of Manga, Murder and Mystery: The Boy Detectives of Japan’s Lost Generation (Bloomsbury, 2023) and has published several articles in international journals such as Mechademia: Second Arc, Jane Austen Society of North America, Japanese Association for Digital Humanities (2019) as well as book chapters on Japanese popular culture.

Abstract:

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 society? Manga, Murder and Mystery provides answers to these questions in its exploration of the literary construction of the shōnen (boy) detective in three commercially successful manga series published between the 1990s and early 2000s—Kanari Yōzaburō and Seimaru Amagi’s Kindaichi Shōnen no Jikenbo (1992-1997), Aoyama Gōshō’s Meitantei Konan (1994- ), and Ohba Tsugumi’s Death Note (2003-06)—to address the crisis of young adult culture within the socioeconomic climate of Japan in the Lost Decade (1990-2000). It discusses how Japan’s economic recession throughout the 90s created the conditions for neoliberal reforms that led to deep changes, particularly in Japan’s educational systems, altering the conventional life path for youth that had defined Japanese society for so long. The Lost Decade, which was marked by economic malaise, social crisis, and moral panic, saw the deterioration of the bedrock of Japanese social order and stability, raising concerns about the moral depravity of Japan’s youth. In this book, I show 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. As the first book-length study of boy detectives in Japanese manga, Manga, Murder and Mystery foregrounds themes and critical discourses of identity, nation and youth culture, advancing new insights in Japanese Studies and Detective fiction criticism as it explores children’s mystery stories appearing in Japanese manga, re-centering discourses of the nation towards youth itself in speaking their own truths about the school, home and social expectations.