Castalia House has spent the last several months quietly doing something no English publisher has bothered to do in a century: translating the great works of Japanese popular literature that built the entire modern adventure and detective fiction tradition in that country. Now they’re announcing their next project, and it is worth your attention.
The new series is the Hanshichi Casebook, written by Okamoto Kidō beginning in 1917. Hanshichi is Japan’s answer to Sherlock Holmes — a street detective working in historical Edo, solving murders, hauntings, and conspiracies in the shadow world beneath the Tokugawa shogunate. The stories ran for decades and spawned stage productions, radio adaptations, films, and television series. In Japan, Okamoto is to detective fiction what Conan Doyle is to English readers. In English, almost nobody has heard of him.
One previous academic translation covered 14 of the 69 stories. The other 55 have never been translated. Castalia House is publishing all of them across seven volumes. Volume 1, The Ghost Master, goes to paid subscribers this week and will be available on Kindle and Kindle Unlimited next week.
The first volume of the translated Casebook, The Ghost Master, has already gone out to the subscribers and is now available on Amazon via Kindle, KU, and audiobook. An excerpt from the first story is now available at the Library site if you’d like to get a taste of the flavor of Japan’s greatest detective. I’ve already translated the first twenty stories, and I have to say that they are up there with the best detective fiction I’ve ever read.
It’s really a must-read if you’re a Sherlock Holmes fan, because while the stories are every bit as detailed and interesting, the atmosphere, the plots, the crimes, and most definitely the punishments are entirely different. When the guilty party isn’t just turned over to the inept policemen of Scotland Yard, but is instead paraded through the streets prior to being crucified, the solution of the case tends to hit just a little bit differently.
The Casebook of Hanshichi Vol. I: The Ghost Master consists of the following:
Preface by Okamoto Kidō
1. The Spirit of Ofumi
2. The Stone Lantern
3. The Death of Kanpei
4. Upstairs at the Bathhouse
5. The Ghost Master
6. The Mystery of the Fire Bell
7. The Lady-in-Waiting
8. The Sash-Snatching Pond
9. Spring Thaw
10. Hiroshige and the Otter