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Podcast: Arts & Ideas
Episode: Books to Make Space For on the Bookshelf: The Black Lizard
Description: Edogawa Rampo's stories give us a Japanese version of Sherlock Holmes. New Generation Thinker Christopher Harding traces the way detective fiction chimed with the modernising of Japan, when the ability to reason and think problems through logically was celebrated, when cities were changing and other arts mourned a lost rural idyll. In The Black Lizard, the hero Akechi KogorΕ plays a cat and mouse game with a female criminal who has kidnapped a businessman's daughter.Christopher Harding is the author of The Japanese: A History in Twenty Lives and Japan Story: In Search of a Nation, 1850 - t...