Which I always find ironic, considering how much western "epic literature" (especially the more fast-paced, very action-based types) was influenced by the storytelling styles of manga, anime and action/sf/fantasy cinema out of Japan (and Hong Kong, for movies).

The sort of very visual and cinematic scenes guys like Sanderson put in their novels these days, or the very codified magic systems and so on. That's all very Japanese. A lot more than what a lot of people see as "asian influences" in Fantasy, usually about philosophic concepts, convoluted politics or a more introspective angle (the religious/philosophy aspects are usually very assimilated/integrated rather than spelled out, and you don't find much of the other two in actual modern asian literature, especially in SF/Fantasy).




I always forget to look for that before suggesting anything . But yes, that's definitely the weirdest "detective novel" I've ever read. I think you'd probably like the very "retro" vibe it has too (except of course it's not retro, it was written between 1925-1935), and it's definitely a "fusion" in its influences. There's a lot of Japanese influences and themes (that you have to take in stride, it's the western stuff in it like western psychology the writer does more exposition about), but Yumeno was an avid reader of the French avant-garde (of the surrealists, notably) which shows a lot in his writing, and of popular British detective novels. It was way too ahead of its time in its form, so outside avant-garde circles it its repuatation was very confidential originally (the writer died soon after publication, that didn't help). It was brought back from oblivion in the 1960s by people from the philosophy and literature circles, and went rapidly from a cult book to a recognized and very influential masterpiece (at least in Japan where it's now the most studied and analyzed novel from the 20th century, but I had never heard of it before 2-3 years ago)

It's readily available in French, but it's a bit heavy going. Not really for the language itself, but narratively it's fairly fractured and not the easiest novel to follow (and written in the first person, with a narrator who suffers from amnesia and is possibly insane), so to read a in a second language really wouldn't help (the writer even invented a few new punctuation signs to mark stuff like continuous resonating sounds, long silences). The onomatopoeias are abundant and very unusual too (many call for footnotes to explain which traditional object does this or that sound, or to warn that the author has altered it in the original). There's a great deal of twisted ("insane" literary references, to popular plays, folklore or Nô. That's what makes the passages I'm in so long to read, I'm stopping to look at the notes at every turn.

Wikipedia calls it "avant-garde surrealist gothic literature" but I think the preface to the French edition that calls it a literary UFO sums it much better.

But if you come accross it at an used bookstore or a library, you might want to pick it up. It definitely belongs in the "historical background" of many of the literature you like.