Miyuki Miyabe

• Born: December 23, 1960
• Place of Birth: Tokyo, Japan

TYPES OF PLOT: Psychological; inverted

PRINCIPAL SERIES: Detective Chikako Ishizu, 1998-

Contribution

Award-winning Japanese crime author Miyuki Miyabe is known to the English-speaking world primarily through her intense crime novels available in translation. Miyabe’s translated work is distinguished by imaginative plots at the cutting edge of contemporary society, featuring identity theft, the dark playing fields of the Internet, and extrajudicial vengeance in the face of a justice system apparently failing to react effectively to ultra-vicious crimes. Her focus is on young Japanese women whose violent reaction against the vicissitudes of a rigid, hostile society turns them into explosively charged perpetrators.

The outstanding popular literary success of Miyabe in Japan resulted in one of her prize-winning crime novels, Kasha (1992), being translated into English as All She Was Worth in 1996. Miyabe’s English-language publisher then decided to translate R.P.G. (2001) as Shadow Family in 2004, even though it was not the first novel in the detective Chikako Ishizu series, partly because the novel corresponds tightly to the conventions of the police procedural. Kurosufaia (1998), translated the following year as Crossfire, introduced Miyabe’s detective, Chikako Ishizu. Ishizu’s first case in the series involves arson caused by supernatural abilities. In spite of the occurrence of pyrokinesis, the paranormal ability to start fires by willpower alone, the crimes and conflicts featured in Crossfire are realistic and psychologically grounded.

In Japan, Miyabe’s crime fiction has won a huge following, with several of her novels made into films. For the English reader, her well-crafted focus on violent women not only offers psychologically intense portraits but also a close view at the pitfalls and problems of contemporary Japanese society. Ultimately, through her female and male detectives, Miyabe gives voice to those who do not believe that the end justifies the means.

Biography

Miyuki Miyabe was born in the downtown Kōtō Ward of Tokyo on December 23, 1960. She graduated from the Sumigadawa High School and started to write fiction in 1983 while working for a law office. In 1984, Miyabe took creative writing courses offered by the Japanese publishing house Kodansha, whose subsidiary, Kodansha International, publishes much of Japanese literature in English translation and is committed to disseminating Japanese culture in the English-speaking world. Her breakthrough was the short story “Warera ga rinjin no hanzai” (1987; we are the crimes of a neighbor). Soon after, she quit her job at the law office to focus on her writing.

In 1992, Miyabe published the acclaimed crime novel Kasha, which won her the prestigious Yamamoto Shūgorō Prize. This success persuaded Kodansha International to commission an English translation that was published as Miyabe’s first work in English, All She Was Worth, in 1996. Her story of two different women running afoul of Japanese loan sharks fascinated English readers and established her name among foreign crime writers in the United States.

In Japan in the 1990s, Miyabe became widely popular for not only her crime fiction but also her many novels in genres as varied as historical fiction, science fiction, young-adult fiction, and social realism. Her novel Riyū (1998; the reason) won the Naoki Prize in 1998, considered the top prize for Japanese popular fiction.

Miyabe’s 1998 mystery-cum-science fiction novel Crossfire introduced Detective Chikako Ishizu of the Tokyo Metropolitan Police arson squad. Choosing an English title for her work underlined Miyabe’s belief in America’s vast influence on contemporary Japanese popular culture and imagination. Crossfire was the first of Miyabe’s novels to be turned into a motion picture; the 2000 film Kurosufaia (Pyrokinesis) by director Shusuke Kaneko emphasized the science-fiction elements of the novel.

Preferring to establish Miyabe as a crime writer for her English audience and wary of the cross-genre elements of Crossfire, Kodansha decided to translate first the sequel, R.P.G. written in 2001, as Shadow Family in 2004. By this time in Japan, another of Miyabe’s crime novels, Mohōhan (2001; copycat killer), had been made into a film, underlining her mass-culture appeal.

When Crossfire was translated in 2005, English readers could trace the first case of Detective Ishizu, which ultimately led to her demotion, alluded to at the beginning of Shadow Family. Occasionally likened to a novel because of its juxtaposition of the everyday world with the supernatural, Crossfire nevertheless emphasizes sound police work and modern crime fighting.

In Japan, Miyabe’s fiction successfully spans many genres, mysteries being one of them. Her translated crime novels have established a loyal readership fascinated by her illumination of the dark side of modern Japanese society from the point of view of fiercely independent women who often transgress into crime when faced with obstacles and apparent injustice.

The fourth work of Miyabe to be published in English is a fantasy novel, Bureibu sutōrī (2003; Brave Story, 2007), indicating her publisher’s trust in her cross-genre appeal. A fifth novel, Majutsu wa sasayaku (1989), a mystery dealing with an orphaned teenager, was published as The Devil’s Whisper in 2007. Another work, Mohōhan (2014-2016; Puppet Master), translated by Ginny Tapley Takemori, was released in five digital volumes just before the mystery novel Hikan no mon (2016; The Gate of Sorrows). Several of her short stories are included in Hajimete no (2022; The First Time Of), a short story collaboration with authors Rio Shimamoto, Mizuki Tsujimura, and Eto Mori, as well as the musical group Yoasobi, which sings a song for each story in the collection. Miyabe has written many works in Japanese that have yet to be translated.

In the early twenty-first century, Miyabe's work increasingly inspired television and film. Netflix based its Copycat Killer (2023) series on her 2001 novel Mohōhan (The Copycat), the TV miniseries Namonaki Doku (2013) is based on the novels Dare ka Somebody (2003) and Na mo Naki Doku (2006), and the TV series Kogure shashinkan (2013) is based on the novel Kogure Shashinkan (2010). Additionally, she wrote Helpless (2012) and Brave Story (2007), as well as the thriller film Solomon's Perjury (2015), which won several Winner Hochi Film Awards and Japanese Academy Awards.

Analysis

The translated mysteries of Miyuki Miyabe share a strong emphasis on the workings of the inner minds of the women perpetrators and the psychological and social factors that push them into crime. From the beginning, Miyabe is interested in the characteristics of modern Japanese society that may propel a woman beyond socially acceptable behavior.

Perhaps because ordinary, mundane crime is still relatively rare in Japan compared with the United States, the crimes that tend to stand out and shock the nation are often of an especially heinous and imaginative character. For a mystery writer like Miyabe, the challenge arises to offer her reader fictional villains with a special modus operandi that reveals a criminal energy rivaling that of the most outlandish real crime figures. At the same time, Miyabe juxtaposes the criminal with detective figures who, even though damaged by everyday life, nevertheless commit to upholding decency, morality, and human kindness.

In her greatly successful All She Was Worth, Miyabe combines elements of good sleuthing, echoes of hard-boiled detective fiction, and concise social observation and criticism. The fortunate combination of these elements in this novel may be what solidified her popular fame in Japan and made it the first of her books to be translated into English.

All She Was Worth showcases Miyabe’s keen interest in the intricacies of actual police work. The author has stated how she peruses publicly available materials on forensics and scientific approaches to criminal investigations and keeps in close contact with the public relations offices of the Tokyo Metropolitan Police. Thus, she is able to build a realistic background for her detectives’ quests. At the same time, Miyabe is intensely interested in the psychological, social, and economic factors that may drive a nondescript young person, generally a woman, into a life of crime. Her analysis of the lures of consumer culture, which may trap a soul on a trajectory of no return, fascinated readers of All She Was Worth.

In Crossfire, Miyabe uses the supernatural as a metaphor for an individual’s desperate attempt to strike back at a society seen as severely out of kilter. Punishing criminals by willing fires to engulf them at first may liken the novel’s young Junko Aoki to a kind of supercharged Japanese Batman meting out justice on her own. However, in Miyabe’s world, this approach backfires. Here, the powers of society prove far more intolerant of a solitary vigilante than the fictional denizens of Gotham City. Reinforcing the message in Shadow Family, Miyabe is at considerable pains to show that extrajudicial violence cannot be the correct way to end injustice.

Equally as convincing as her highly imaginative perpetrators are Miyabe’s detective protagonists. From Shunsuke Honma in All She Was Worth to the disillusioned Detective Chikako Ishizu in Crossfire and Shadow Family, Miyabe’s fictional counterparts to the world of crime are ordinary citizens who possess a strict, functioning moral guidance compass. Faced with the outlandish imagination of the criminal mind, these down-to-earth, middle-aged detectives reassert moral order and human decency even in a world that poses a threat to these values.

Japanese culture has always valued the poetic, the imaginative, and the beautiful tinged with a strong flavor of death. Samurai took pains to groom well before battle so their severed heads would make proper trophies if they lost in combat. Drawing on this tradition, Miyabe’s villains exude creativity, criminal energy, and imagination. However, when they are brought down, social order is reestablished for everyday people. In addition, Miyabe avoids a Western tendency to excuse her villains’ behavior through their victimization by society. In her mysteries, criminals become bad because of their own free will and must suffer the consequences.

All She Was Worth

Miyabe’s first award-winning novel, All She Was Worth, opens inconspicuously enough as a missing-person case. On sick leave recovering from a gunshot wound to his leg, forty-three-year-old Tokyo police detective Shunsuke Honma is visited by his arrogant young cousin, who implores him to search for his fiancé, Shoko Sekine. The woman dropped out of sight when the cousin found out she had once filed for personal bankruptcy. Soon, however, the reader, following the creative sleuthing of Honma, learns that his cousin’s fiancé stole the identity of another woman. Even though the cousin angrily dismisses Honma’s findings, the police officer does not give up his quest to find the impostor.

In the course of Honma’s inquiries, Miyabe treats the reader to a haunting portrayal of the pitfalls of modern Japanese consumer credit society. Whereas the real Shoko is able to discharge her accumulated debt legally through new bankruptcy regulations, her impostor is not so lucky. As her spendthrift father ruined the family and got involved with Yakuza loan sharks, his daughter is made to pay a terrible price that destroys her first marriage. Driven to despair, the imposter, Kyoko Shinjo, stops at nothing, even murder, to acquire a new identity. At the dramatic showdown of Miyabe’s novel, Honma and his friends ready themselves to confront Kyoko with their knowledge of her crime.

The positive American reception of Miyabe’s novel was based on both its superb plotting and its haunting, in-depth view of characters trapped by the intricacies of modern Japanese consumer society. Miyabe’s meticulous rendition of a woman’s path to despair and her imaginative efforts to obtain a new identity against the backdrop of the Japanese public-records system fascinated her foreign readers. Even though Miyabe’s narrative is not without sympathy for the woman victim turned perpetrator, at the novel’s end, the police veteran reasserts the importance of morality and free will even in a deeply flawed social environment. This is typical of Miyabe’s crime fiction.

Crossfire

Perhaps because it features the paranormal, Miyabe’s crime novel, Crossfire, which introduced detective Chikako Ishizu, was published in English only after its sequel, Shadow Family. It is easy to see how the pyrokinetic ability of Crossfire’s antagonist, Junko Aoki, is a metaphor for a woman’s desire—and ability—to effect swift vengeance. It is the social ramifications of such individually pursued justice that stand at the philosophical core of Miyabe’s mystery.

Crossfire opens as—burdened by her ability, which she has used for vengeance once before—Junko Aoki stumbles on yet another crime-for-thrills by a juvenile gang. After she incinerates the gang but misses its leader, callous teenager Keiichi Asaba, Junko tracks him down. At the same time, Detective Chikako Ishizu of the arson squad of Tokyo’s Metropolitan Police is called on to solve this bizarre crime spree. Middle-aged, down-to-earth, and with a son in college and a husband who is generally absent and makes only one late-night drunken appearance in the novel, Ishizu is considered both a maternal presence and a jealously disliked product of the Japanese version of affirmative action. Ishizu’s sharp intellect propels her to solve the case together with male Detective Makihara, who believes in pyrokinesis for traumatic personal reasons.

Miyabe’s novel skillfully mixes the sensational with keen observations on the spiritual and emotional loneliness persuasive in contemporary Japanese society. The detectives encounter another pyrokinetic, the girl Kaori Kurata, just as Junko becomes involved in a shadowy organization of high-placed vigilantes.

For all its paranormal fireworks, Crossfire confronts the issue of taking the law into one’s own hands. Miyabe ends her novel with the moving scene of Junko’s farewell, as she dies in the snow outside a remote villa. Detective Ishizu refuses to bow to the vigilantes.

Shadow Family

Originally published as R.P.G., short for “role playing games” and showing Miyabe’s penchant for English original titles, Shadow Family revisits detective Ishizu after she runs afoul of her superiors in Crossfire. Working within a larger scheme dreamed up by a police veteran, Ishizu takes on the bizarre case of the murder of a man and his girlfriend. The man had created his own virtual family on the Internet to the detriment of his real-life teenage daughter. Again, Miyabe’s tightly constructed plot, full of twists and surprises, fascinates as much as her meticulous rendition of the mind of her teenage woman villain.

In this tightly constructed mystery, which takes place during one afternoon in a Tokyo ward police station, Ishizu and her colleagues try to force the man’s sixteen-year-old daughter, Kazumi Tokoroda, to tell the truth about the double murder by appearing to bring in the players of the virtual family of the murder victim. Again, Miyabe treats her readers to the details of Japanese police procedures as well as to a disillusioning picture of alienation, power games, and decay within a contemporary Japanese family.

The two-way mirror of the interrogation room separating the people reenacting their roles on the Internet and the observant Kazumi observed by Ishizu is an apt metaphor of Miyabe’s craft in bringing out the hidden layers of modern Japanese society through her popular crime fiction. Although there is an implication that some of the extreme violence in Japan has come from America, indicated by Miyabe’s use of English titles for many of her novels, there is also a reminder that the intricacies of indigenous Japanese society are equally responsible. The conflict between social conformity and the quest for individual expression takes center stage. The fact that it is young women who lash out is what gives Miyabe’s mysteries their special flair.

Principal Series Character:

• Chikako Ishizu is an unpretentious middle-aged Japanese police detective who has risen through the ranks until appointed detective to the Tokyo Metropolitan Police arson squad when the public demanded more women detectives. She is considered rather maternal by her male colleagues. After refusing to bend the law in the course of solving her first big case, she is demoted to work at a regular police precinct, where she is confronted with another intricate case featuring a double murder.

Bibliography

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Kite, Hanna. “A Burning Mystery.” Review of Crossfire, by Miyuki Miyabe. Time International (Asia Edition), vol. 167, no. 6, 13 Feb. 2006, p. 49.

Loughman, Celeste. "Review of Shadow Family, by Miyuki Miyabe." World Literature Today, vol. 79, nos. 3-4, Sept./Dec. 2005, p. 86. doi.org/10.2307/40158959.

McLarin, Jenny. "Review of Shadow Family, by Miyuki Miyabe." Booklist, vol. 101, nos. 9-10, 1 Jan. 2005, p. 828.

Miyabe, Miyuki. “A Japanese Crime Caper. Interview by Sally Stanton." Publishers Weekly, 17 Jan. 2005, www.publishersweekly.com/pw/by-topic/authors/interviews/article/28427-a-japanese-crime-caper.html. Accessed 25 Aug. 2024.

"Review of All She Was Worth, by Miyuki Miyabe." Publishers Weekly, 11 Nov. 1996, www.publishersweekly.com/9784770019226. Accessed 25 Aug. 2024.

Tangeman, Michael, and Charles Exley. Old Crimes New Scenes: A Century of Innovations in Japanese Mystery Fiction. MerwinAsia, 2018.

Williams, Wilda. "Review of Shadow Family, by Miyuki Miyabe." Library Journal, vol. 130, no. 3, 15 Feb. 2005, p. 124.