Seishi Yokomizo
May 24, 1902 - December 28, 1981
Born in Sanchome, Higashikawasaki-cho, Chuo-ku, Kobe City, Hyogo Prefecture, he is a japanese literary figure in the world of reasoning. He is the author of "Queen Bee", "Honjin Killing Incident" and other reasoning masterpieces, and devoted his life to promoting speculative literature. He is recognized as the founder of the speculative fiction transfiguration school, and together with Edogawa, he is known as the two great masters who pioneered the new field of Japanese speculative fiction, the former known as the "father of Japanese detective fiction" and the latter revered as "the master of contemporary Japanese thrilling speculative fiction". The series of reasoning creations of these two brothers and sisters in the literary world have shortened the distance between Japanese mystery novels lagging behind Europe and the United States, especially after World War II, they have been able to look back on them, and they have the tendency to catch up later.
In 1927, at the age of twenty-five, Masashi Yokomichi became editor-in-chief of The New Youth magazine, which at the time resembled a professional magazine for speculative literature. After he took over as editor, he accepted modernism, introduced overseas works, and injected modern literary trends into Europe and the United States, making New Youth the most avant-garde modern magazine in Japan.
After that, he successively served as the editor-in-chief of "Literary Club" and "Detective Novel", and resigned as an editor at the age of thirty to devote himself to writing. I think that the five years as the editor-in-chief have had a great positive impact on the creative career of Yokogou Masashi, and have also greatly broadened his horizons and understanding of speculative literature.
Before World War II, he had written works such as "Ghost Fire", "Warehouse", "Wax Man" and so on, which were very rich in aestheticism. Among them, "The Humanoid Sahachi Trap" is the most popular, and the male protagonist, the humanoid Sachi, is a beautiful man, who has both the size of a Japanese samurai and is personable and handsome. He took two apprentices, Tatsugoro and Douroku, and solved a series of suspicious cases. There are more than 200 stories of the humanoid Sasuke, setting off a whirlwind of "detective fiction fever" among Japanese readers. During World War II, the Japanese government banned the publication of speculative fiction until the end of World War II.
In 1946, Masashi Yokomizu took the lead in launching two pure mystery mystery novels, "Honjin Murder Incident" and "Butterfly Killing Incident", which greatly improved the standard of Japanese speculative fiction and changed the trend of taking Benge speculative fiction as the mainstream before the war. The following year, he won the first Japan Detective Writers Club Award (now the "Japan Mystery Writers Association Award") for "Honjin Murder Incident".
Due to the overwhelming success of "Honjin Murder Incident", Masashi Yokomizu wrote a series of mystery mystery novels with a total of 77 long and short stories, with a total of 77 long and short stories, with the protagonist of the novel, Kaneda Kazunosuke as the protagonist.
Under the description of Yokogou Masashi, the reader also watches Kaneda Kazunosuke grow up and grow old again from a 19-year-old boy with a disheveled bird's nest head, a soft hat, and a dirty kimono. He said, "I am nothing more than a seeker of truth. ”
Kazusuke Kaneda, along with Yasuo Uchida's journalist Mitsuhiko Asami and Edogawa's freelancer Satoshi Kogoro, are known as the three great detectives in the history of Japanese speculative fiction. And Kaneda Kazusuke is even considered to be the only famous detective who can compete with Holmes, and there are many "Kaneda Ichi Detective Research Associations" in Japan. So much so that Kane sung Yonzaburo's reasoning manga "Kaneda Ichi Shonen Incident Book" also borrowed the prestige of Kaneda Ichikura to make the male protagonist of the manga his grandson.
In 1957, with the rise of realist literature of the socialist school led by Kiyoharu Matsumoto, Yokomizu Masashi put forward the idea of "the resurrection of romance", advocated the creative line of new romanticism, and established the basis of speculative literary criticism, and also pushed the narrowly defined transgressive speculative fiction to a broad sense, covering fantasy, science fiction, horror and other themes.
He began to add perverted psychological depictions of suspects to the novel, deliberately creating secret and terrifying scenes and atmospheres, shaping some strange and bizarre characters, creating unpredictable modus operandi, and even the plot of gods and ghosts and the resurrection of the dead. Masashi Yokogou portrays some crippled strange people, not only with strange appearances and strange behaviors, but also with strange psychology of the murderer, and the way these strange people commit crimes is more unpredictable.
Since then, he has become a school of his own, pioneering the "transfiguration" in speculative literature. This genre focuses on depicting perverted psychology, and the content is mostly eerie, absurd, and exaggerated. It depicts the darkness of the human world or expresses the nightmare of the author's heart.
In 1980, Kadokawa Shoten presided over the establishment of the Long Speculative Fiction Award, which was dedicated to encouraging newcomers, and named it the Yokomichi Masashi Award. Entries are required to be long-form speculative works that have never been published, while the winning writers are mainly newcomers.
He died in his apartment on December 28, 1981, at the age of seventy-nine. Today is the 115th anniversary of his birth, and his works still influence the literary world and the vast number of readers.