The Best-selling Novelist who had Insight into Society’s Evils and Essence of Human Being

MATSUMOTO Seicho

Famous mystery novels written by Sir Arthur Conan DOYLE and Agatha CHRISTIE are still popular, even now. In Japan, there is also a best-selling mystery writer whose books have been read continuously over time. The name of the writer is MATSUMOTO Seicho (l909 ~ l992). Many of his stories have been filmed and turned into TV dramas. Because of his great popularity, it is common in TV dramas that his name is placed before the titles of his works, as in "Matsumoto Seicho's ... "

Seicho was born in Kita-Kyuushyuu city. When he was working for the Asahi Newspaper Company in l950, he submitted a novel called "Saigo Satsu" (Saigo's Notes) to the "Shuukan Asahi (Weekly Asahi)" novel contest and won a prize for his work. In 1953, he was awarded the Akutagawa Prize, which is the most prestigious prize in the field of Japanese literature, for his work "Aru 'Kokura Nikki' Den (An "Kokura Diary" Saga)," and from that time on he devoted his life to writing novels. He was 44-years-old at the time. Although he made a late debut as a novelist, he declared that he would spend all his time writing, and he subsequently wrote 1,000 works.

EDOGAWA Rampo was the first "whodunit" story novelist in Japan. Rampo was actually his pen name, and it was taken from the name of Edgar Allan POE, the father of the mystery novel. "Rampo" was created using Japanese pronunciation. Seicho lived after Rampo, and sparked a great boom in mystery novels. He wrote many best-selling books starting with "Ten to Sen" (Points and Lines) written in 1958, and then followed that with "Zero no Shouten" (Focus Zero), "Suna no Utsuwa" (Sand containers), among others. These books led Japanese people to become wildly excited about his writing.

Seicho created drastic interpretations to spotlight unsolved cases
Seicho's style is quite different from those of the great authors. Authors used to create a well-known detective, such as Doyle's Sherlock HOLMES, Christie's Hercule POIROT and Rampo's AKECHI Kogoro, who successfully solved difficult cases. However, the characters, incidents and situations they created were usually unrealistic. On the contrary, Seicho's central character is essentially an ordinary person who you might see anywhere.

As the central character involved in the incident is coming close to discovering the solution, the unjust and absurd structure of society behind the scenes becomes clear, and people chasing lust, power and money enter the fray. He used crimes as a subject matter for the purpose of disclosing social contradictions and the true nature of human beings. Therefore, his works are called "social mystery novels."

Later, Seicho wrote "Nihon no kuroi kiri (The Black Fog of Japan)," a non-fiction series that discloses the dark sides of Japan. Seicho hypothesized about unsolved incidents from his point of view, including "Shosetsu Teigin-jiken (A story of the Teikoku Bank Incident)" modeling the story on the actual event that occurred in 1948 in which 12 bank staff were killed due to their acting on false information advising that they should have a dysentery injection. Furthermore, Seicho developed a unique view in his Ancient Japanese History series that reinterprets history. He died at the age of 82.

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