The Essay: Books to Make Space For on the Bookshelf

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BBC Radio 3 is a radio channel that started transmitting on the 30th September 1967. It replaced Third Programme.

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The Essay: Books to Make Space For on the Bookshelf: The Black Lizard

The Black Lizard

Books to Make Space For on the Bookshelf

BBC Radio 3 - The Essay, Books to Make Space For on the Bookshelf, The Black Lizard

New Generation Thinker Christopher Harding reads the Japanese equivalent of Conan Doyle.

Hirai Tarō (1894-1965) wrote under the name Edogawa Rampo.  Having translated Conan Doyle and Edgar Allen Poe he came up with a hero, Akechi Kogorō, fit for a modernising country.

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 Kogorō 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 - the Present  (published in the US as A History of Modern Japan: In Search of a Nation, 1850 – the Present). He teaches at the University of Edinburgh.
He is a New Generation Thinker on the scheme run by BBC Radio 3 and the Arts and Humanities Research Council to select ten academics each year who can use their research to make radio programmes. 

You can find him discussing other aspects of Japanese history in the playlist Free Thinking explores South and East Asian culture https://www.bbc.co.uk/programmes/p0657spq 
He presented an Archive on 4  https://www.bbc.co.uk/programmes/b064ww32 and a series about Depression in Japan also for Radio 4 https://www.bbc.co.uk/programmes/b07cv0y4  and a series of 5 Essays for BBC Radio 3 called Dark Blossoms about Japan's uneasy embrace of modernity https://www.bbc.co.uk/programmes/b0b01kb2 

Producer: Ruth Watts

Live music and the arts: broadcasts more live music than any other radio network. Classical music is its core. Genres include world and new music, jazz, speech and drama.

Five New Generation Thinkers each propose a novel they consider worthy of reappraisal.

Five current New Generation Thinkers, on the scheme run by BBC Radio 3 and the Arts and Humanities Research Council, each propose a novel they consider worthy of reappraisal.

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