Dogra Magra

"Dogura Magura" is a novel considered to be the masterpiece of mystery novelist Yumeno Kyusaku, and was published in 1935 after more than 10 years of planning and writing. It is considered one of the three great Japanese mystery novels, alongside Oguri Mushitaro's The Black Death Mansion Murders and Nakai Hideo's An Offering to Nothingness.

In the story, the original meaning of "Dogura Magura" is explained as a dialect of the Nagasaki region, referring to the magic of Christians, priests, or as a corrupted version of "confused, taken aback" or "domewari, mekurami," but the details are unclear.

Overview

Published as a newly written work by Shohakukan Shoten in January 1935 (Showa 10), with the tagline "A mysterious and mysterious detective novel." In 1926, the year he made his debut as a writer, Yumeno Kyusaku began writing a novel about the mentally ill, "Madman's Release Treatment." This would later become "Dogura Magura," and he spent nearly 10 years thoroughly revising it. Yumeno died the year after it was published.

The story (or so it seems) is about a young, amnesiac mental patient who is locked in a cell in the Department of Psychiatry at Kyushu University's School of Medicine in 1926 (Taisho 15), and is told in the first person, "I." He has some kind of connection to several incidents that occurred in the past, and as the story progresses, the true culprit, motive, and modus operandi of the mysterious series of incidents are gradually revealed.

At first glance, it appears to follow the established formula of existing detective novels, and so for convenience it is often classified as a "detective novel", but it clearly deviates from the detective novel mold and is often considered an "anti-mystery".

The murder itself is rather simple, but the structure is complex, with a nested structure of academic papers such as "The Dream of a Fetus" (based on Ernst Haeckel's theory of repetition), a grandiose treatise about the billion-year long evolutionary nightmare that a fetus experiences during the 10 months it is developing inside the womb, "The Brain Theory," which claims that "the brain is not the place for thinking," and "The Hellish Prayer of the Crazy One," which describes the horror of mental hospitals where you cannot leave until you die.

There are also metafictional elements in the work, such as the appearance of a book called "Dogura Magura," which "is so complex that the reader is forced to reread it at least twice," and the culprit and the truth are never revealed, and the logical solution that is naturally found in detective novels and mysteries is foreclosed.

It is said that it is difficult to understand the truth and content of the work in one reading, but many readers give up midway due to its complex, insane, and difficult content and structure. It is also often said that "Anyone who reads this book from start to finish will definitely become mentally unstable at least once.".

Further reading

• Yumeno, Kyūsaku. Nippon Tantei Shosetsu Zenshu (The Great Detective Stories of Japan) Vol. 4. Tokyo SogenSha (1984). ISBN 4-488-40004-3 (in Japanese)
• Bush, Laurence. Asian Horror Encyclopedia: Asian Horror Culture in Literature, Manga, and Folklore. Writer's Club Press (2001). ISBN 0-595-20181-4 (in English)
• Napier, Susan J. The Fantastic in Modern Japanese Literature. Routledge (1995). ISBN 0-415-12458-1 (in English)
• Clerici, Nathen. Dreams from Below: Yumeno Kyūsaku and Subculture Literature in Japan (2013)
• Clerici, Nathen (March 2019). "Yumeno Kyūsaku and the Spirit of the Local". Japanese Studies. 39: 75–94. doi:10.1080/10371397.2019.1576295. S2CID 151075354.