Body, Identity, and Social Order: Japanese Crime Fiction in Colonial Taiwan

This article investigates cultural interactions and influences between Japan and Taiwan in the realm of popular culture during the later half of the colonial period and the immediate postcolonial era (1920s to 1960s). In particular, it focuses on the genre of crime fiction, a genre that enjoyed widespread readership that cut across all spectrum of the colonial society. It examines the history and scope of crime fiction as a transnational genre fiction that first emerged in Anglo-American literary production in the mid-nineteenth century. Its rapid dissemination, first to Japan and then to its colonies, serves as an indicator for one to track the trajectory of a cultural current that emphasizes scientific methods and logical, deductive reasoning. Using close reading of several (post)colonial texts that involved ethnic body, local and cosmopolitan identities, social chaos caused by crime and the restoration of social order and colonial authority.