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The first fictional serial detective hero made his debut in Japan in 1917, three-quarters of a century after his foreign counterpart, C. Auguste Dupin. Dupin was the creation of American author and poet Edgar Allan Poe (1809-1849), and was featured in the 1841 short story "The Murders in the Rue Morgue." Hanshichi, the first great detective character in Japan, was not an investigator for hire such as Sherlock Holmes, the creation of Sir Arthur Conan Doyle (1859-1930), but was instead a meakashi police agent, a commoner employed to help investigations by the police in the latter years of the Edo period (1603-1867). Hanshichi appeared in numerous stories over the years.
During Japan's feudal times, people apart from the ruling samurai class could not have family names, so he was known simply as Mikawacho no Hanshichi, his given name plus his home base, the town of Mikawa in Edo, now Tokyo.
Okamoto Kido (1872-1939), Hanshichi's creator, was familiar with the English language and had read Sherlock Holmes stories. He was inspired to develop a series of his own, setting detective stories in late Edo times. Hanshichi was a character in about 68 of these short stories. In structure, the stories follow the modern mystery narrative, from the hero's initial confrontation with a puzzling incident to his application of logic to arrive at a solution.
The Edo period detective novels originated by Okamoto Kido, referred to collectively as torimonocbo (case book or police blotter), spurred many imitators. One was Nomura Kodo (1882-1963), whose Zenigata Heiji series of nearly 400 novels, published between 1931 and 1957, were the source for successful film and television series, making his name better known than Hanshichi.
Zenigata is a nickname that refers to zeni, a heavy coin that the protagonist specializes in flinging at fleeing criminals to knock them down and thwart their getaway. A character with this distinctive skill appears in the Chinese adventure classic Suikoden (Shuibuzhuan, known in the West as Water Margin or All Men Are Brothers). Zenigata Heiji, like Hanshichi, was also a meakashi; but while thwarting crimes, he also felt some compassion for the criminals and their motives, and occasionally revealed his soft side by overlooking their peccadilloes-a common touch that endeared him to many Japanese. The...