Master of Suspense
- One of "UNKNOWN WRITERS" -
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According to JAPAN'S 'UNKNOWN WRITERS', Newsweek Oct/17/1977, SEISHI YOKOMIZO had been introduced as a "Master of Suspense", but had never been translated in any other languages. This Newsweek's article said about him as the following; Master of Suspense: SEISHI YOKOMIZO Much of Seishi Yokomizo's childhood was spent turning the pages of the great old whodunits, from Sherlock Holmes to Charlie Chan, and in 1921, when he was only 19 years old, he produced his own romantic thriller, "Terrible April Fool," a book that has come to be considered a modern Japanese classic. Except for a brief hiatus during World War II when "unpatriotic" works were banned, Yokomizo's popularity has grown steadily ever since. Today, most Japanese bookstores even set aside special "Yokomizo corners" stocked with the master's black-bound novels. Though Yokomizo has been influenced by Western detective fiction, his plots and characters are purely Japanese. Yokomizo's murderers, for example, are motivated not by greed or jealousy but by honorable intentions such as a desire to protect the family name. His victims are more often done in with a sword than by arsenic or a slug from a .38. And it is the breakdown of the traditional Japanese family that contributes most to the disintegration of morality in his stories. For this reason, Yokomizo's work has not been and, according to him, should not be translated. "Foreign readers would have a hard time understanding my meaning," he says. Yokomizo adds, however, that his novels are becoming more difficult for him to write because "values in Japan are changing." There is hardly ever any sex in a Yokomizo story. Instead, he rivets his readers' attention with atmosphere, sound deductive reasoning and the expectation of a surprise ending. His work is based purely on his own imagination and he takes little interest in actual crimes. (He once slept through a burglary of his own house and afterward made no attempt to catch the thief.) Yokomizo lives modestly despite the fact that his writing has made him a very wealthy man: he earned $1.2 million last year alone. "I am an honest and devoted taxpayer," he says, adding that Japanese readers expect their novelists to be non-materialistic. He wears a kimono most of the time and works on the tatami-covered floor of his writing den, beginning "in the afternoons, having got up in the morning - and then gone back to sleep." We hope that most of all Yokomizo's works will be translated and published abroad, because Yokomizo is the greatest detective storyteller in Japan. |
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Could you please inform if you know anything about SEISHI YOKOMIZO. |
｜Master of Suspense｜サスペンスの巨匠｜
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