Han's Crime

“Han's Crime” is a story about storytelling. It examines the forces at work in relating a story to a reader or hearer and points out that the process can be arbitrary and biased. The text also warns against taking the implications of certain “facts” at face value. When placed in certain contexts, objective facts can take on specific implications, but these implications do not necessarily represent the truth. Depending on what implications are accepted as “true” and how the “facts” are presented and assembled, the resulting story can lean towards certain biases and points of view. In the case of Han's wife's death, the owner-manager of the performing troupe, a Chinese stagehand, and Han himself are called upon to provide objective and relevant bits of information. It is the job of the judge to arrange these bits to reconstruct the story of Han's wife's death. Han's guilt or innocence depends on how the judge puts these pieces of information together and what implications he consciously or subconsciously accepts as truth. The reader is put in the position of judge. Both rely on second-hand information — the testimony of the characters — to construct a logical picture of the events.

Several years after publishing the story, “Han's Crime,” Shiga Naoya became seized with the desire to “write of the wife, dead and quiet in her grave, from the wife's point of view,” according to Edward Fowler in The Rhetoric of Confession. Shiga wrote in his journal, ' I would call the story “The Murdered Wife of Han.' I never did write it, but the urge was there.” Shiga's journal entry reveals that although the character Han questioned his own motives, and the judge in the story exonerated him of any crime, Shiga himself believes his hero to be guilty of murder. Shiga's comment is especially striking given that while the death of Han's wife is clearly central to the story, as a character, she is all but absent.

Furthermore, the judge's verdict of “innocent” seems to partially rely on his implicit condemnation of Han's wife for her “scandalous” sexual behavior. Rather than asserting his innocence, Han's testimony is inordinately concerned with describing and disparaging his wife's pre-martial sexual liaison and the pregnancy that resulted. The judge's patient listening to Han's sexual defamation of his wife, which also forces the reader to hear this evidence, implies that her so-called “promiscuity” is indeed a weighty ...