Welcome!
Volume 1 | Volume 2 | Volume 3 | Volume 4 | Volume 5 | Volume 6 | Volume 7
Volume 8 | Volume 9 | Volume 10 | Volume 11 | Volume 12 | Volume 13 | Volume 14
This archive is created by students from AS 350/DMS 394: Modern Japanese Media. As part of their summative assignments, students were asked to write reviews for The Shoso-in Bulletin, a rare collection of international Sherlockian magazines published by The Men with the Twisted Konjo from 1991 to 2004. I say rare as these magazines are no longer in press, and only a select few have been published officially on the Shoso-in Bulletin website. It was important for me for students to explore the body of work on Sherlock Holmes coming out of Japan and other countries from around the globe, as this course focused on various media adaptations of Sherlock Holmes. Moreover, I found the vision behind the creation of the magazine to be a powerful reminder of the transcultural/transnational influence of Sir Arthur Conan’s detective stories and that the English language is not the only language in which works on Sherlock Holmes thrive. As the creators of the magazine put it, “the Shoso-in Bulletin was published in English, but contributors did not need to write perfect English articles.”
While not all the selected reviews showcase the works of Sherlockians in Japan, they demonstrate the breadth of the enduring legacy of Sherlock Holmes around the world!
A very special thanks to Yuichi Hirayama from Japan’s Sherlock Holmes Club and George Vanderburgh from Battered Silicon Dispatch Press, who generously provided our class with digital copies of volumes 1- 14 of The Shoso-in Bulletin.
Click on the highlighted links below to read the student reviews! Each volume contains one or more reviews published anonymously or using the students’ preferred names.