By Cezary Jan Strusiewicz
Sherlock Holmes is the most filmed book character ever. Going by this specific metric, he is literally bigger than Jesus. What’s more impressive, Arthur Conan Doyle’s creation achieved this level of success in a much shorter time frame, only having been around since 1887.
But the two still have something in common: a lot of people nowadays like to pretend that both are jerks who relish in the suffering and discomfort of others. This has been a particularly thorny issue with the BBC series Sherlock (2010 to 2017). Benedict Cumberbatch plays a Sherlock Holmes who is so rude that him walking around non-face-punched feels like a clever way to let the audience know the show is fictional. This has sadly become one of the two main takes on the character in Western media. But there is one place that still knows how to have fun with bringing Sherlock Holmes to life: Japan, even if the Insensitive Jerk interpretation has also reached the island nation. Let’s examine the issue more closely.
Take the 2019 Fuji Television series Sherlock: Untold Stories for example, which is at serious risk of being sued for false advertising. For one, it doesn’t star Sherlock Holmes but rather Shishio Homare (portrayed by Dean Fujioka). Homare is a criminal investigation consultant in modern-day Tokyo—essentially a modern facsimile of Arthur Conan Doyle’s famous character sans the private detective’s name. He does have the same initials, though. Not that it matters much because the rest of the show’s title is also a bag of lies as the so-called Untold Stories seem awfully familiar in places.
Where Untold Stories feels very told is in the characters of Sherlock/Shishio. While reportedly not a remake of the BBC’s Sherlock, the Japanese show clearly takes a lot of cues from the UK series. Most noticeably, the two Sherlocks Sher-lack manners and social skills [Editor’s note: I pelted him with tomatoes for making this joke]. They also dress slovenly, in stark contrast with the Sherlock Holmes of the Conan Doyle stories who wasn’t just presentable, but immaculate. A more faithful modern retelling of the Holmes stories could cast the character in almost any city on Earth but it would then have to put the character, at a minimum, in a nice suit. Also, it would make Sherlock and Watson’s friendship reciprocal.
The original Sherlock Holmes did have the occasional mood and an unkind word towards Watson or the people closest to him, but he was, on the whole, a good friend, once showing concern about Watson’s injured leg when a case required a lot of walking (The Sign of Four). The two characters are still friend(ly) in Sherlock but it’s built on a lot of irony, sarcasm, inside jokes, contempt for the same things etc. There are many friendships like that in the real world, but in Sherlock, it feels less like a choice driven by a desire to tell the best story possible and more as the show’s creator, Steven Moffat, being uncomfortable with intimacy.
The show that captured the original dynamic between the two characters (and really all of the Conan Doyle canon) perfectly were the adaptations produced by Granada Television in the 1980s and 1990s. Starting with The Adventures of Sherlock Holmes (1984 to 1985), the show starred Jeremy Brett as Sherlock, who is often and deservedly thought of as the definitive portrayal of the detective. That being said, there is a certain disadvantage to adapting the Sherlock stories too faithfully.
After all, when A Study in Scarlet, the first appearance of the now-world-famous detective, first came out in 1887, it was a contemporary detective novel. To the original readers, Sherlock Holmes and Dr. Watson occupied a world that was just like their own. The adventures of Sherlock Holmes continue to offer insights and lessons that are applicable to real life even now nearly 150 years later, but they are undoubtedly period pieces, which they weren’t in the beginning.
CBS’ Elementary (2012 to 2019), which transplanted Sherlock (Jonny Lee Miller) to New York and gender-flipped Watson (Lucy Liu), is definitely not a perfect Sherlock Holmes adaptation. However, it does have a sort of upper hand by the sheer nature of being contemporary while showing a lot of love for the source material. On Elementary, Sherlock has little respect for incompetent police officers but still recognizes and admires the few gifted ones, just like the original. In Doyle’s The Adventure of Wisteria Lodge, it was the perceptive and studious Inspector Baynes. On Elementary, it’s Detective Marcus Bell (Jon Michael Hill). Also, a cynical mind would expect Elementary to pair up Miller and Liu and thoroughly un-plato the relationship between Sherlock and Watson in the tired old tradition of television tropes. This thankfully never happens and the two Elementary main characters remain close friends who build their relationship on trust, respect, and experience.
Somewhere between a Faithful Period Tale and a Modern Reimagining there are also a few unique ways that Western writers and directors have experimented with the character. There’s the simple yet enjoyable Unfaithful Period Tale that was Robert Downey Jr.’s portrayal, as well as Sherlock Holmes navigating a world ruled by the Great Old Ones from the Cthulhu mythos in Neil Gaiman’s A Study in Emerald (2003). If you want to get technical, even Batman counts. Although it’s easy to forget if you only go by the live-action movies, which often tend to reduce the character to an unlicensed street dentist. Batman is heavily inspired by Holmes and has long been titled The World’s Greatest Detective. It’s why the immortal Ra’s al Ghul likes to address Bruce as “Detective.” We’ve actually seen this side of the character in The Batman (2022), showcasing the incredible influence and staying power of Sherlock Holmes in fiction.
Yet for all the Sherlock variety offered by Western media, the one country that has had the most fun adapting and reimagining Sherlock has long been Japan. Sherlock: Untold Stories (or SUS, as nobody abbreviates it) was just the latest, not-particularly-innovative link in a long, twisted chain where many of the links are made from marmalade and sparrow whispers. The metaphor will start making much more sense once we talk about a few specific examples.
Sherlock Holmes arrived in Japan only seven years after his UK debut and quickly won a special place in the hearts of Japanese people. Megumi Tsutsumibayashi, research member of Keio University Graduate School of Law’s Detective Fiction Project, explains that with Holmes’ adventures being widely available as translations and originals used in English lessons, the character soon was everywhere. “As readers finally learned to enjoy as a form of entertainment the investigative process of ‘the most perfect reasoning and observing machine that the world has seen,’” she writes in “There’s a west wind coming”: Sherlock Holmes in Meiji Japan, “it became possible for them to receive the darker or more melancholic side of Holmes.” In short, Sherlock Holmes instantly became an archetype in Japanese society, a trope, a model to be reinvented, rediscovered, and revitalized… just like in the West. However, at the same time, Sherlock also remained a symbol of the West, keeping him an external presence that made it easier to experiment with the character.
That’s how we got works like the novel The Empire of Corpses by Satoshi Ito and To Enjo, released in 2012 and turned into an anime film in 2015. An alternative-history sci-fi horror, The Empire of Corpses is set in a world where cadavers can be reanimated with artificial souls known as Necroware, which can be upgraded through Charles Babbage’s Analytical Engine. As the world moves into a Zombie-punk future, we are introduced to the story’s protagonist: John Watson, a medical student who gets roped into retrieving the original corpse reanimation notes of Victor Frankenstein. What follows is a tale not unlike The League of Extraordinary Gentlemen (the comic, not the movie that made Sean Connery quit acting), with Watson running into various historical and fictional figures, and even an interesting twist on a Sherlock Canon character. Yet through all this, the spirit of Arthur Conan Doyle’s creation can still be felt deeply.
Tsutsumibayashi wrote that to the people of late 19th-century Japan, Sherlock Holmes’ stories were appealing because they were the tales of a “righteous man who fought against the ills of society.” That is very much one of the main themes of The Empire of Corpses, which has gone with war and exploitation as its societal ills of choice. The novel and the animated movie explore Watson’s character as a counterpoint to Sherlock’s analytical mind, casting him in the role of a man driven by emotions who fights for a world where “good” can be obtained without sacrificing lives. A lot of it is done on screen, without having to look for hidden subtext, making the story exciting and accessible, which are all the hallmarks of Sherlock Holmes’ original adventures.
Interestingly, the Japanese Sherlock Holmes would once again enter a world of alternative history and the undead in 2015 with the publication of the first Undead Girl Murder Farce novel by Yugo Aosaki. The novel details the journey of an immortal spirit who exists only as a head, her faithful maid, and a half-demon as they travel around Europe solving mysteries. A supporting character, Aosaki’s Holmes is a brilliant detective much closer to the ACD original, though with a bigger emphasis on his martial prowess and use of baritsu. Bartitsu (note the extra T) is a real martial art named after its creator, Edward William Barton-Wright, and “jitsu,” a common misconstruction of the Japanese “jutsu,” meaning “art,” “technique” etc. Bartitsu combines boxing, jujitsu, cane fighting, and savate, and has appeared in “The Adventure of the Empty House” under the misspelled named “baritsu,” described by Holmes as a “Japanese system of wrestling” that he used to defeat Professor Moriarty at Reichenbach Falls. Japan long felt flattered by the reference.
Baritsu has appeared in many Japanese novels, manga, and animated shows, most recently in the fighting anime Kengan Ashura where it was utilized in a life-and-death tournament by an English fighter going up against a black-eyed murder-happy assassin with the ability to crank up his physical strength by turning purple. Admittedly a long way from the original Sherlock Holmes stories but nonetheless a powerful testament to how much the character and his legacy have permeated Japanese pop culture.
Other Japanese works drawing full buckets of inspiration from the Sherlock well include Moriarty the Patriot (2016 – present), a comic starring Holmes’ famous enemy who here is actually three people involved in a thrilling tale about the evils of the UK’s class system. Pure Holmes. There is also the Miss Sherlock (2018) HBO Asia series that reimagines both Sherlock and Watson as women and, underneath the typical mystery-solving shenanigans, is a pretty decent exploration of building female friendships.
A personal favorite is the Case File nº221: Kabukicho anime (2019 – 2020) that recasts Holmes as a failed modern performer of rakugo, a centuries-old Japanese art of humorous storytelling and pantomime that the animated Holmes uses to explain the details of each case near the end. It’s the perfect amalgamation of Arthur Conan Doyle’s vision and traditional Japanese culture, with the end result working much better than you’d assume from the description of its individual elements.
But that has always been the essence of Sherlock Holmes in Japan, and it was only possible by not venerating the character too much and sometimes just having fun with him and his world. The same can very much be done in the West. It’s impossible to overstate how much Jeremy Brett nailed the “classic” Holmes. So that take is all done and dusted. It will always be there, allowing the next person to tackle Sherlock to get really, REALLY weird with it. Japan shows us the way. All that’s left is to follow it.
Cezary Jan Strusiewicz is a freelance writer living in Japan.