Can a historian become a detective?

Since moving to Sendai, I’ve started reading detective novels on the recommendation of others. I’ve recently come to realise that my historical research has, in places, taken on the characteristics of a detective novel. In one of the detective stories by Kotaro Isaka, a novelist who graduated from Tohoku University, there is a line that reads: ‘You are a guest who has dropped in on their story.’ The mysteries surrounding the cases encountered by the detectives in the novel are, of course, no mystery at all to the perpetrator or those directly involved. It is simply that, because the perspective from which one views them differs, the picture of the incident that emerges is different, and a great mystery arises. This often happens in historical research as well. K. Hopkins, the eminent scholar of ancient Roman history, aptly remarked that the best guide when considering the question of how to write history is Akira Kurosawa’s film Rashomon (from the Japanese edition of A World Full of Gods, translated by R. Motomura et al., Iwanami Shoten, 2003, Preface). Whilst the protagonist of Rashomon sees the darkness of human nature in the parties to an incident who give completely conflicting testimonies, I believe that historians see something different.