1970-80년대 일본 추리소설 속 소년범죄의 등장에 따른 변화 고찰

Abstract

Nowadays it is not difficult to find a novel dealing with juvenile crime in Japanese mystery stories. Concerning the publication of novels featuring Japanese juvenile crimes after the post-war period, the 1970s saw a surge in juvenile crimes in mystery novels. Accordingly, this paper analyzed the social correlation between mystery novels and juvenile crimes from the 1970s to 1980s. This is part of an attempt to examine changes in Japanese mystery stories along with how the juvenile crimes were successfully established as a key component. Mystery stories in its early days were once almost exclusively confined to characters of “white”, “nobleman”, “adult”, and “male,” such as ‘Sherlock Holmes’, with boys’ presence rather sparse. Later, boys appeared in mystery stories. It can be said that it started from the 1970s as Seichi Morimura, a Japanese mystery novelist, began to use the juvenile crimes as its subject and gained popularity. Morimura’s works proved that a boy can be a ‘criminal’ with the shocking effects of a twist because the readers could hardly have thought that a young, seemingly naive boy could kill somebody on purpose. Also, by depicting boys who were socially evil in Hajime Komine’s Arukemedesuwa Tewo Yogosanai(1973), readers began to recognize boys as a group of evil and as a subject with no difference from adults. In Keigo Higashino’s Hokago(1985), a high school girl not only plans a secret scheme, but also fools the detective and emerges as an excellent criminal. Here, a juvenile crime and tricks are perfectly blended into each other. Finally, the roles of victims, perpetrators and detectives are all played by female high school students in Yukito Ayatsuji’s Hiiro no Sasayaki(1988). the mystery stories describes the images of “young” and “female” beyond the framework of “adult” and “male.” Furthermore, the motives for the murder by girls are no longer related to social phenomena, and it separates juvenile crimes in mystery novels from social issues and uses them as a means of sheer entertainment. To sum up, juvenile crime, which was then a social problem in the 1970s and 1980s, was drawn on as a subject of mystery stories, and novels dealing with juvenile crimes proved entertaining and popuplar. At the same time, mystery stories gave boys both criminal and detective roles and broke away from the stereotype of the genre, which had been symbolized as Sherlock Holmes. Since then, it has become easier to find detective stories dealing with a juvenile crime, and the share of works involving boys and especially girls began to rise. Based on these changes, the mystery stories successfully introduced various works dealing with juvenile crimes to public since 1997 when the Kobe child serial killing incident occurred and the social awareness of juvenile crime increased rapidly.