Hanshichi Torimonochō Word Lists Home Page
Hanshichi Torimonochō, or The Casebook of (Inspector) Hanshichi, is a collection of stories published between 1917 and 1937 by kidō okamoto. [Actually this is the period during which all of the hanshichi stories were first published. I'm not certain when the last of the stories in this particular 6-volume set were originally published. When I find out I'll update this text.] They are very interesting on many fronts, as well as entertaining in their own right as detective stories.
This web site contains word lists, or vocabulary lists, for these stories. I'm (very) slowly working my way through these stories in the original Japanese and as I go I make notes of any unknown words and phrases and other interesting items. At some point I decided to share these notes with anyone who might be interested in seeing them.
At first I thought I would just clean these notes up a bit and put them online. But getting them ready for public viewing turned out to be more work than I had at first thought. But again it is a good learning experience, or a large percentage of this work is--some is just drudge work. But since the original purpose of the notes was as a source for reviewing the material this is in a way consistent with that purpose.
My hope is that others who are also learning Japanese and are reading these stories and trying to puzzle out this somewhat old-fashioned language will find some help in these notes and benefit from the work I've done. If someone also wants to provide feedback on what I've put here that is also good. But please try not to be too harsh in your criticism. I make no guarantees as to the correctness of any of these notes although I've tried to scrub these to the best of my ability and will continue to refine them as I learn more about the language and also the historical and cultural background of the stories.
In the wordlists I have generally copied exactly from the original the text in the "original" column, although in some cases this is changed slightly, for example verbs generally being given in their dictionary form whatever the form in the story. I have tried to the best of my ability to determine the correct pronounciation for the original text and shown this in the phonetic and romanized columns. But if there is furigana in the original text then this overrides all other considerations. When there is furigana in the original this is indicated by bold red text in the phonetic column.
There are 6 volumes in this series, with between 7 and 14 stories per volume. I know that the first volume is available in English translation as this was my first exposure to this series of stories. I then picked up the series in Japanese, in paperback (bunko) edition. That is what my notes are based on as far as page and line number are concerned. This is all detailed in the bibliography (References page).