Inhae's blog

2024 has been such a bad year in terms of reading, that I gave up on the idea to do a wrap up for the year.

I have two main projects at the moment, but I am mainly focusing on one of them, though they do overlap a little.

Mystery Writers of Japan Award project

📚 Read all the novels that won the Mystery Writers of Japan Award and explore their author’s bibliography.

This project is still on-going, but I’m taking a long break in order to focus on the second project.

I have more or less read all the available novels that won the Award up until 1989, and I have selected my favourite ones in order to read other books by their authors. To be honest, the selection was limited, because I did not enjoy reading all the prize winners, especially because there were several hardboiled novels in the list. All in all, I like honkaku or more classic detective fiction, and they were not the focus of the 60s and 70s. Social detective novels first, then hardboiled and police procedural (which I love) were more trendy it feels like. Given that there’s a resurgence of the honkaku genre towards the end of the 80s and the 90s, I think it’s a good time to pause the project and instead go back to the sources and read the authors who made Japanese crime fiction flourish.

2- 日本探偵小説全集 project

📚 Read the 12 volumes of the anthology and explore the whole bibliography of the authors featured.

The anthology mainly features authors of detective fiction born at the turn of the 20th century who wrote before and after WWII. I am more or less reading them in order, and so far Saburo Koga (甲賀三郎), Udaru Oshita (大下宇陀児) and Kikuo Tsunoda (角田喜久雄) are my favourite authors. I have enjoyed reading them more than the winners of the Mystery Writers of Japan Award, so I will focus on continuing this project in 2025.

If I follow the anthology, the next volume is devoted to Kyusaku Yumeno (夢野久作), and I think I will skip this one for now. I feel like it’s going to be challenging to read, and I’m not sure I’m ready to start ドグラ・マグラ yet.

So I’ll go directly to volume 5 which features Shiro Hamao (濱尾四郎) and I’ll probably also read volume 6 which is Mushitaro Oguri’s (小栗虫太郎) volume. Next one is going to be Takataro Kigi (木々高太郎), but I don’t know if I’ll have time to start it. If my reading is as chaotic as it was this year, probably not. I also want to read more of these authors’ writings, because the anthology only features a handful of their works. Unfortunately though, there’s not a lot of things available, so I’ll just read what I can find.

I still have short stories and a couple of noves by Udaru Oshita (大下宇陀児) on my reading list, so I’ll start the new year with that.

I will also order some physical books. This is the list so far, but I might add some titles later!

Happy New Year everyone, wishing you all the best!

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 with natives, etc. and for a long time, I thought it was weird to learn languages just to read books, with zero interest in communication.

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.