Inhae's blog

I have two reading projects at the moment. One is to read all the winners of the Mystery Writers of Japan Award, and the other one is to read the anthology series called 日本探偵小説全集 and published by Sogensha.

Both of these projects have developed into a much bigger enterprises. I decided to temporarily stop the Award project just before starting the 1990s in order to read each author more extensively. Looking at the novels that won the prize, I selected my favourites and started to read other works by their authors. So far, I have mostly read Jokichi Hikage, Futari Okajima, Shoji Yuki or Takao Tsuchiya. I am still in the process of reading Seicho Matsumoto.

Similarly, I now want to explore the whole repertoire of the authors featured in the anthology. My original plan was to just read the 12 volumes of the series, but I really liked some of the featured short stories and novels, and I want to read more by their authors. The focus will be writers who were active before the war, mainly in the 1920s and 1930s, but I will also include works published after the war.

I am making a list of all the titles I want to read (mostly short stories, but there are some novels too). It takes a long time to establish the list (I have 80 entries already, and I am only at the beginning!), but I’ll post it on my blog when it’s done.

This is an excerpt of the database:

Unfortunately, I cannot establish an extensive list of all the publications, because I can’t find systematic and exhaustive bibliographies for these authors. My main sources are Wikipedia and Aozora, as well as looking at older publications, and so on.

I am surprised by the lack of new publications and availability in general for these authors. I will mostly rely on the anthology, Aozora, and digital publications or older ones that are available on Booklive.

Finishing the list will be my main goal for the end of 2024, and reading everything will obviously be a long time project.

About

I’m learning Japanese, Korean and Chinese to read mystery novels and play video games in these languages.

Learning languages has always been one of my favourite hobbies, but I’m not a social person, I don’t like to meet new people and make friends, this is just not me. I keep hearing that languages are meant for communication, that we have to actively use them, talk to people, etc. and for a long time, I thought I was weird to learn languages just for me, just to enjoy media, culture and entertainment in a foreign language, with absolutely zero interest in communicating with natives.

Now I don’t really care what people think, and this blog helped me a lot to stop doubting myself and just do what I enjoy doing.