The Imagination of Heterogeneous Space and Implicit Transformations of Identity

Abstract

Shackled by contemporary consumer culture and official dictates, a number of writers in Manchukuo created detective novels based on Chinese and Japanese examples. This chapter analyses how detective novelists depicted their imagined Manchurias. Their fiction not only reveals the mindsets of Manchukuo’s writers or those depicting it later, but also evinces their devotion to literature, experiences, and impressions. Japanese writers were arguably both colonizers and colonized, with some expressing this mentality deep into the post-war era, while Chinese writers maintained dual identities of colonized peoples also conciliatory to the colonizing state.