ギリシャ・ミステリ展望 : 「動機」と「カタルシス」の点から

Compared with the recent remarkable success of translations of Scandinavian crime fiction into Japanese, the Japanese knowledge of its Greek counterpart is deplorably limited. This paper explores two aspects of this situation. A concise description of Greek crime fiction is first provided to counterbalance the lack of information. Second, on the basis of comparative research, Greek crime fiction can be seen to have undergone drastic transformation over its more than 70-year history in terms of “motive” (which causes the criminal incidents depicted in the stories) and “catharsis” (which gives readers a feeling of ethical purification). Contemporary Greek crime fiction shows the same tendency as other foreign crime fiction, in that it incorporates wide-ranging motives, such as those concerned with political, social, or global problems. In most cases, however, the motive leads to the ending of the story having an extremely restricted ethical catharsis. Furthermore, a substantial number of stories cannot be included in the above tendency because they concentrate on the individual rather than social factors of the crime, with high-level catharsis.