Shindenki Movement

The **Shindenki** (新伝綺(しんでんき) or 新伝奇(しんでんき), *"Neo-Biographical Fantasy"*) movement is a disputed Japanese genre of mystery. It is particularly noteworthy compared to other varieties of mystery because it is so strongly influenced by non-mystery genres. *Shindenki* storytelling is a style of low fantasy, urban mystery where the supernatural and logical form a single coherent structure. Despite many works since 1998 being labelled as *shindenki*, some critics dispute its existence as a genre. They argue that its definition is too vague, and that rather than being anything distinct the movement is simply a subset of the pre-existing *denki* genre.

## Denki

*Denki* (伝奇(でんき), *"Biographical Fantasy"*) refers to a long-lived Japanese genre of (mostly) fantasy. It is based on the Chinese genre of chuanqi. Chuanqi was a varied storytelling form, however it did have some concrete distinguishing characteristics which carried over into the Japanese denki style. Chuanqi stories were always narrated by a first-hand witness to some dramatic events, and told in the style of a legitimate historical recount of events. In other words, chuanqi came to hold the connotation of being stories with strange content, but told in the style of a credible rumor. Despite the many variations on this style throughout both classical Chinese and classical Japanese literature, *denki* continued to carry this connotation in the modern era.

A modern *denki* style story in Japan came to mean literature which adapted these connotations for modern sensibilities. Or, in summary, a story which showed implausible events in a style that makes them feel plausible. Care is often taken to make sure the setting of a denki style is compatible with reality, such that even if supernatural events are portrayed it remains compatible with the audience's understanding of history. For example, magical elements may be presented as being literally real in history, but just ignored by historians who misinterpret them as myths and legends.

## Shindenki Style

When the term *shindenki* was coined by editor Katsushi Outa, he posited that the fusion of the "everyday" and "extraordinary" is an essential ingredient of its style. This is entirely congruent with the conventional understanding of *denki* written above, which existed prior to the notion of a *shindenki* style. However, there are certain features which separate a *shindenki* work from a *denki* work.

A distinguishing characteristic of *shindenki* compared to regular *denki* is that shindenki stories were written after the maturation of the *shinhonkaku* detective fiction movement. As a result, the *shindenki* style borrows from the same sense of modernity as *shinhonkaku* writers. Outa himself described this process as the "literary" nature of *denki* from the 1980s being taken into the anime-inspired pop culture of the 1990s, and then returning back into the literary world at the end of that decade in the form of *shindenki*. From this description, three basic traits emerge which can be used to roughly categorize *shindenki* fiction.

1. The story must combine the "everyday" and "extraordinary" in a plausible fashion, as was the case in *denki* fiction.
2. The story must take place in or around modernity, in contrast to the historical settings of *denki* fiction.
3. The story must be informed by the themes of modern pop culture, rather than being a work about the past.

As a consequence of adhering to these three traits, a *shindenki* work meets the definition of several other genres in addition to itself. In other words, one could think of *shindenki* as the result of a combination of several different genres rather than a singular new genre. Ensuring that the co-existence of the "everyday" and "extraordinary" of such a story feels plausible and in line with the nuance of the genre necessitates that low fantasy or hard sci-fi settings form the backbone of a *shindenki* work. The mixing of the extraordinary with themes of modernity naturally pushes *shindenki* towards the realm of urban fantasy. As a result, one could accurately claim that the *shindenki* movement is at its core a style of telling mystery stories in urban, low fantasy settings.

While *shindenki* is a genre of mystery, it is also a genre of fantasy and sci-fi. Unlike other movements in mystery fiction, such as the *honkaku* or *shakai* schools, *shindenki* stories do not intend to closely replicate the style of Western detective fiction. Instead, they completely defy the logic of *honkaku* stories as well as the realism of *shakai* stories. While *shindenki* fiction may include crime solving and detective work, the bulk of their mystery comes in the form of both characters and the audience struggling to navigate the extraordinary underbelly of the setting from the "everyday" perspective of a normal person. Often, the process of solving logical mysteries is closely tied to the process of unravelling the hidden mysteries of the world.

## History

The history of the *denki* portion of the word *shindenki* is literally ancient, and covered in brief in the *denki* section of this page. The history of *shindenki* as a distinct entity begun in the late 1990s. The originator of the term, Katsushi Ohta, coined the term itself to describe Kinoko Nasu's self-published Kara no Kyoukai Series, which started syndication in late 1998. However, one could reasonably date the beginning of the movement to Kouhei Kadono's widely successful Boogiepop Series, which launched several months earlier in that same year. Indeed, the combination of *denki*-like tropes and modern mystery storytelling sensibilities had already been established before either of these two authors made their debuts. Kiyoshi Kasai's contribution of the Vampire Wars Series since 1982 had already built that connection, even if it was too far removed from the themes of modernity to be considered *shindenki*. Natsuhiko Kyougoku also took a similar step in 1994 by building a modern-style mystery series around the premise of supernatural rumours with his Hyakki Yagyou Series.

Regardless of which author one credits with being "first" to complete the formula, by the year 1998 the genre had taken shape. In the year 2000, Kinoko Nasu published another contribution to the genre, this time in the form of a graphical adventure game otherwise known as a "visual novel" titled Tsukihime. Also in the form of a visual novel, Ryukishi07 contributed the episodic Higurashi When They Cry Series in semi-annual serialization from 2002 onwards, and then published the paperback *shindenki* novel *Our Haunted Dance on the Stairs* in 2005.

In 2002, Nisio Isin's Zaregoto Series took the additional step of building a *shinhonkaku* narrative structure on top of *shindenki* style characterization and worldbuilding. As a result, the style expanded beyond being a collection of stylistic descendants of the Kara no Kyoukai Series, and became a more varied mix of mystery and non-mystery conventions. Otsuichi made the bold move of stripping *shindenki* of its tendency for the supernatural while still strictly following its style with the Goth Series, also in 2002. This boom in bizarre and often supernatural mysteries also started to leave its impact on mystery fiction that was not *shindenki* at all. In 2003, Nagaru Tanigawa's massively popular Haruhi Suzumiya Series combined both *honkaku* and *henkaku* mystery plots with characterization that was stylistically inspired by the *shindenki* movement.

## Further Reading

Morino, Hikuma. *Introduction: "Shindenki Fiction" (In Japanese)*: Retrieved 2021-01-16.