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The Case of Sheep and Popsicles: Japan as Chimera

The reader of detective fiction begins with a desire for two things: one, the desire to solve the case—whodunnit? whydunnit?; and, two, the desire to know something—usually ill-defined—of the particular time and place in which the crime is inextricably embedded. These desires are familiar ones and usually left unquestioned. However, numerous questions do naturally follow: What does the reader do with the knowledge thus gained? How accurate are authorial representations? In a genre such as detective fiction, does accuracy even matter? And, given these questions, what is the significance of the increasing popularity of detective fictions containing representations of ‘Other’ communities for Western consumption? 
This paper explores the narrativization and imagining of post-modern “Japan” as seen in two texts by contemporary writers, Murakami Haruki and Isaac Adamson. Despite similar topic and form, mysteries partially set in “remote” Hokkaido and written after the fashion of hard-boiled detective fiction, the two works in question, Murakami’s A Wild Sheep’s Chase and Adamson’s Hokkaido Popsicle, construct radically different narrative visions of an imagined Japan. Is this simply because one author is Japanese and the other American? Or, is there something else at work here? In an age where modern media form a complex prism through which notions of identity and community are refracted, often without regard to borders or nationality, it is hoped an explication of these texts will shed some light on this increasingly complex process. In so doing, this study aims to show how readerly experiences of ‘Other’ communities, while highly problematic in some regards, are potentially transformative: the reader, much like a detective sifting through clues in a case file, sorting through the global concatenation of representations in order to not only recover old (hidden) meanings but also produce new, chimerical ideations of the imagined lives of self and Other.