Laura Joh Rowland

• Born: 1953
• Place of Birth: Harper Woods, Michigan

TYPE OF PLOT: Historical

PRINCIPAL SERIES: Sano Ichirō and Lady Reiko, 1994-2014; A Victorian Mystery, 2017-2023

Contribution

In Sano Ichirō and his wife, Lady Reiko, Laura Joh Rowland has created a multidimensional detective couple who have propelled her series to a long and sustained life. Rowland attracts readers who savor both historical mysteries and good old-fashioned detective work. Her mysteries live off her meticulous historical research, which brings to life Japan’s seventeenth-century Genroku era, and her keen understanding of humanity’s weaknesses and its penchant for crime and political intrigue, which are mediated by the desire of a few good persons to see justice prevail. One of Rowland’s key achievements is making her characters, from a geographically and chronologically remote past, become so familiar and feel so real that critics enthused that Sano has more in common with Philip Marlowe or Sam Spade than with a costumed warrior of times past. 

Throughout her crime series, Rowland carefully develops her central cast of characters, beginning with Sano and Reiko. By having Sano move up the ranks, she is able to create mysteries with ever larger social and political ramifications. Similarly, the amazing development of Lady Reiko has fascinated Rowland’s appreciative and steadily growing readership.

The existence of the magical in Rowland’s world, with villains felling their opponents through arcane mystic martial arts skills, does not distract from the reality of her crime-solving characters, who are caught in the nets and restraints of a deeply stratified society where a false step may mean instant death. In each novel, the stakes are raised to the utmost for Sano and Reiko, yet they have been able to extricate themselves, often at a price, from all the traps laid for them by their nefarious adversaries.

Biography

Laura Joh Rowland was born in Michigan, the third generation of Chinese and Korean immigrants. Initially, she followed her family’s tradition of studying for a career in education or the sciences, earning a Bachelor’s in microbiology and a Master’s degree in public health from the University of Michigan and working almost twenty years in her field. When she and her husband, Marty Rowland, an environmental scientist and political activist, moved to New Orleans in 1981, she began yearning for a creative outlet while working for the city’s public health office and later for Lockheed Martin at a National Aeronautics and Space Administration (NASA) facility as a quality engineer. Her fondness for her father’s classic English and American mysteries propelled her to start writing. To make her mark in the mystery market and to realize her Asian heritage, Rowland decided to set her crime fiction in seventeenth-century Japan. The period appealed for its combination of social tension and individual aspirations, its distance from modern scientific crime solving (which would favor a classical detective approach), and its thoroughly Asian setting.

After abandoning two projects, Rowland got a break when an editor at Random House showed interest in her novel Shinjū (1994). The manuscript and its sequel were auctioned off for a hundred thousand dollars, going to Random House. Both Shinjū and its sequel, Bundori (1996), captured American readers, who took to samurai detective Sano Ichirō and his fight to defend justice within the military dictatorship of early Tokugawa Japan. This success enabled Rowland to continue her long-running series.

In The Concubine’s Tattoo (1998), Rowland decides to put a female partner at Sano’s side: his loyal wife, Lady Reiko. Earlier hints that a high-class prostitute or a mysterious female ninja might win Sano’s affection were stilled.

Rowland’s next four mysteries put the detective couple through an amazing array of complex crime situations. Her fiction explored male-female relations in Tokugawa Japan and the timeless realm of psychological realism, probing issues of trust, dependency, and mutual love. With The Samurai’s Wife (2000), Rowland proved to be at the height of her craft.

Perhaps to give Sano room for growth, Rowland decided on the historically inaccurate move of having his long-time adversary, sobayōnin (grand chancellor) Yanagisawa, exiled in 1694. Sano is appointed to the office vacated by Yanagisawa at the end of his ninth adventure, The Perfumed Sleeve (2004).

As the series progressed, Rowland’s fictional universe of Japan’s Genroku era became so familiar to her readers that she spent less time on explanatory passages. In the murder case in Red Chrysanthemum (2006), as Sano and Reiko rush to save their lives by proving their own innocence, seventeenth-century Edo (Tokyo) is described as matter-of-factly as if it were modern Washington, D.C., or Los Angeles. The focus in this novel is on the crime, not the background. Rowland’s characters ring true, and her setting adds to, rather than detracts from, the compelling crimes of passion at the heart of her mysteries. Rowland continued to publish her Sano Ichirō series throughout the early twenty-first century with titles including The Snow Empress (2007), The Fire Kimono (2008), The Cloud Pavilion (2009), The Ronin's Mistress (2011), The Incense Game (2012), The Shogun's Daughter (2013), and The Iris Fan (2014). 

In 2017, Rowland began publishing a A Victorian Mystery series. Beginning with The Ripper's Shadow: A Victorian Mystery (2017), Rowland has published seven books in the series, a departure from her Sano Ichirō series in many ways. The novels follow crime photographer and investigator Sarah Bain Barrett. These titles include A Mortal Likeness: A Victorian Mystery (2018), The Hangman's Secret: A Victorian Mystery (2019), The Woman in the Veil: A Victorian Mystery (2020), Portrait of Peril: A Victorian Mystery (2021), Garden of Sin: A Victorian Mystery (2022), and River of Fallen Angels (2023). 

Analysis

When Laura Joh Rowland decided to write mysteries, she deliberately chose a historical period. Driven to write novels in the style of classical detective stories where good sleuthing makes all the difference and looking for an exciting setting where both crime and justice could flourish, she settled on late seventeenth-century Japan. It was a time of strictly set and enforced social standards, in some ways similar to Victorian England, and gave rise to imaginative criminals and colorful renegades.

In creating her hero, Sano Ichirō, Rowland took advantage of the period’s emphasis on an active police force to ensure the peace of the Tokugawa shogunate. Rowland’s mysteries take on a unique dimension from the precarious balance between actual police work, in the modern sense of upholding order in a burgeoning metropolis where citizens of many classes compete, and private desires clash, and the political dimension of police as upholders of an authoritarian regime.

Beginning with her debut novel, Shinjū, Rowland successfully overcame key challenges of the historical mystery genre. She escaped the temptation to bog down the plot with too many historical details and created a sympathetic yet believable historical protagonist. An utterly historically correct rendering of the actual thoughts, actions, and beliefs of a bygone era in a foreign country always risks alienating, if not offending, modern American readers. Examples of historically accurate details that might offend in Rowland’s case include a samurai’s explicit permission to strike down any offending peasant and then-prevailing attitudes toward women and the less privileged.

To Rowland’s credit, she has successfully bridged the gap between the mindset of the past and the present. In her protagonists, she has developed characters who gain and maintain her readers' sympathy. In her second novel, Bundori (1996), Rowland presents readers with the samurai code, which, because of emphasis on the samurai’s absolute, unquestioning loyalty and obedience to his lord, is likely to strike modern American readers as questionable if not absurd. Still, she endows Sano with sufficient iconoclastic characteristics to gain readers’ sympathy and an understanding for his culturally prescribed position.

In The Concubine’s Tattoo (1998), Rowland took the inspired step of placing his young wife, Lady Reiko, at Sano's side. An exceptional and utterly unconventional woman who defies traditional historical restraints on a noblewoman of the Genroku era, Reiko almost steals the show from Sano in Black Lotus (2001) and The Dragon King’s Palace (2003). Readers may get the impression that Reiko’s character is the more dynamic of the two. Her independence is unusual for the period yet within the realm of the possible.

What distinguishes Rowland’s series is that the prime characters develop in time, create a family, and advance in their careers. They are not the timeless detectives of American crime classics whose lives change little from case to case. Soon after their marriage, Sano and Lady Reiko have a son.

As her series appeared to lose steam, Rowland decided to make a bold move and change history: Sano and Reiko’s longtime adversary, Grand Chamberlain Yanagisawa, is exiled, and Sano occupies his office at the end of The Perfumed Sleeve. Although this may be as odd as having Philip Marlowe replace a disgraced J. Edgar Hoover as the Federal Bureau of Investigation director, it gave Rowland’s series a fresh impetus.

Stylistically, Rowland’s Sano Ichirō and Lady Reiko mysteries follow a set pattern. All the novels open with a decisive account of the crime, setting the investigation in motion. Reiko favors investigations regarding women, and Sano pursues villains in his official position. Political ploys generally shorten the timeline for solving the crime by Sano and Reiko’s adversaries, which is intended to cause the shogun to disgrace the idiosyncratic couple, raising the personal stakes at every turn of their inquiries. Rowland’s mysteries often incorporate supernatural beliefs of the era and treat them as real, such as an acolyte’s power to kill by will alone. There is also a strong emphasis on physical combat at the end of the story when Rowland’s mysteries enter the realm of a martial arts novel. Sexuality, particularly deviant sexuality such as pederasty, forced sex, and exotic sexual predilections, feature strongly and are described in rather explicit terms.

Solving a case often brings more of an ominous foreboding to Sano and Reiko than a final resolution. This is, of course, what propels the series forward. Another trademark of Rowland is her successful creation of strong secondary characters, such as Sano’s loyal assistant, Hirata. These characters are consistently developed throughout the series and given a genuine life, for example, having a wife and children of their own. A persistent figure serving as lodestar is the historical gay shogun Tokugawa Tsunayoshi, whom Sano serves and who always rewards him in the end.

Shinjū

Rowland’s acclaimed first mystery, Shinjū, begins with the discovery of a dead couple, an apparent double love suicide, or shinjū, the subject of many Japanese plays and novels. Young Sano Ichirō, who has just been appointed a senior police commander through his family's patron, refuses to stop investigating the case as is expected of him. His dogged pursuit of the truth, which points at murder, quickly makes him run afoul of his police superiors as well as his bemused patron and father.

Indicative of his unconventional thinking and dedication to finding the truth, Sano takes recourse in the forensic wisdom of Dr. Ito Genboku, who has been demoted to work at Edo jail for taking an interest in the forbidden Western medical sciences. When Sano learns that the couple was murdered as he suspected, he launches an inquiry that points to a plot by twenty-one nobles, including the brother of the murdered woman.

Saving the shogun after a dramatic sword battle with the insurgents earns Sano his new position of sōsakan-sama, most honorable investigator of events, situations, and people.

Bundori

IIn Bundori, Sano’s case features a deranged man who kills his victims so that he can sever their skulls and nail them to a wooden board in the fashion that samurai used to prepare their war trophies. This ancient custom, described, for example, in the Japanese classic Heike monogatari (wr. thirteenth century Common Era; The Tale of the Heike, 1918-1921) and featured in Jun’ichirō Tanizaki’s novel Bushōkō hiwa (1931-1932 serial; 1935; The Secret History of the Lord of Musashi, 1982) is an odd anachronism in Sano’s seventeenth century. Great tension derives from Sano’s psychological grappling with the samurai warrior code, or Bushido. The code requires unquestioning obedience to one’s superior, even if that person is despicable. Thus, at the novel's climax, Sano saves his sworn archenemy, jealous Grand Chancellor Yanagisawa, during the climactic battle with the deranged murderer aboard a seagoing vessel.

Red Chrysanthemum

Red Chrysanthemum (2006), Rowland’s eleventh mystery, reveals her storytelling at its finest and challenges her detective duo to the utmost. After Sano’s marriage to Lady Reiko in The Concubine’s Tattoo, which delves into the realm of forbidden love and establishes Yanagisawa as a moral monster who survives by virtue of his political power, Reiko’s crime-solving skills are tested further in The Samurai’s Wife. Out of sympathy for a woman suspect, Reiko commits a serious error of judgment in Black Lotus that nearly gets her killed at the hands of a vicious cult leader. The Red Chrysanthemum places Sano and Reiko in deepest peril. At the beginning, five-months pregnant Reiko is discovered naked, atop the castrated and murdered body of Lord Mori, lying in his own blood with a blood-drenched chrysanthemum. The question as to how she got there is answered in the fashion of multiple, contradictory narratives consciously modeled after Akutagawa Ryūnosuke’s short story “Yabu no naka” (1922; “In a Grove,” 1952) that was made into Akira Kurosawa’s famous film Rashōmon (1950).

Even though the mysterious circumstances of the crime cause each character to distrust each other, in the end, Sano and Reiko’s love and dedication to justice solve the case. The case leaves Sano a much more cynical character than ever before. Rowland hints at future complications born out of political intrigues, ending this novel, as she does others, with suggestions for future adventures.

Principal Series Characters:

• Sano Ichirō began as a thirty-year-old yoriki, or senior police commander, in the service of Shogun Tokugawa Tsunayoshi in 1689. His unconventional, intelligent, and ethical approach to solving crimes earns him promotion to sōsakan-sama, the most honorable investigator of events, situations, and people. In this position, he solves eight more cases until he is promoted (ahistorically) to the position of sobayōnin, or grand chamberlain, in 1694. Operating at the highest level of government, he remains an independent-minded detective.
• Ueda Reiko marries Sano at the beginning of his fourth case. The daughter of a judge, Reiko rejects a traditional female role. Moved by a strong desire for justice, especially for women, she deeply involves herself in her husband’s cases and, in many instances, proves instrumental in solving them. Her complex character and ongoing development threaten to eclipse Sano in more than one case.
• Sarah Bain Barrett is a crime scene photographer and investigator in Victorian London, working for the Daily World newspaper. Using her photography skills and the help of a group of friends, she solves crimes and is often at odds with law enforcement. Barrett deals with personal and professional conflicts throughout the novels. 

Bibliography

Cannon, Peter. Review of The Dragon King’s Palace, by Laura Joh Rowland. Publishers Weekly, vol. 250, no. 5, 3 Feb. 2003, p. 57.

Drabelle, Dennis. “Bundori: Going Great Shoguns.” Review of Bundori, by Laura Joh Rowland. The Washington Post, 4 Mar. 1996, p. D2.

Klett, Rex. Review of Black Lotus, by Laura Joh Rowland. Library Journal, vol. 126, no. 4, 1 Mar 2001, p. 133.

“Laura Joh Rowland.” Crimereads, crimereads.com/author/laurajohrowland. Accessed 31 July 2024.

Laura Joh Rowland, www.laurajohrowland.com/bio.php. Accessed 31 July 2024.

Needham, George. Review of The Samurai’s Wife, by Laura Joh Rowland. Booklist, vol. 96, no. 13, 1 Mar. 2000, p. 1199.

Pitt, David. Review of Red Chrysanthemum, by Laura Joh Rowland. Booklist, vol. 103, no. 3, 1 Oct. 2006, p. 42.