抄録
This paper is a minute study about Majutsu wa sasayaku written by Japan’s most popular mystery novelist Miyuki Miyabe, and its 1980s’ background. The novel was published in 1989, at the peak of the “bubble” economy in which the nation flourished more than ever, and many girls enjoyed luxurious lifestyles dating handsome boyfriends and sometimes some of them met other men for money or fun without conscience, more freely than ever. A keen observer, Ms. Miyabe critically described such tendency, focusing on the loneliness and suffering of the unfortunate who were not popular with girls; the serious but ignored problem was to be at last dealt with in 1999 by the male literary critic Atsushi Koyano in his bestseller Motenai otoko (A Man Unpopular with Girls). Therefore, Majutsu wa sasayaku deserves a wider recognition that it is not so much an interesting mystery novel of a hypnotist-killer as a precious document about Japan in the 1980s.
The English translation of Majutsu wa sasayaku came out under the title of The Devil’s Whisper in 2007. Considering the fact that it was 18 years after the publication of the original, the release seems a bit too late. Maybe that was the reason that "198X," the very first word of the Japanese text in Prologue, was intentionally eliminated. Unless the readers of this English version know that it is the translation of the old book, they will tend to start reading it as a story of Japan in this 21st century. But of course, they will notice sooner or later that the scenes are those of the 1980s because there are neither cell phones, not to mention smartphones, nor the Internet, and the 1987 movie The Last Emperor (directed by Bernardo Bertolucci) and American actresses such as Brooke Shields and Phoebe Cates are mentioned in the novel.
In conclusion, The Devil’s Whisper would have been a much better book if it had included "198X," actually, either 1988 or 1989 according to the conversation about The Last Emperor, which was released in Japan in January, 1988. The English translator should have made it clear with both exact translations of proper nouns (like Almond Roppongi) and their explanatory notes that the novel vividly describes the so-called bubble period of Japan.
