Detective fiction, born out of the ferment of nineteenth-century urbanization in Europe and the United States and quickly adopted in the rapidly changing society of Meiji and Taisho Japan, has had a long and intimate relationship with city life and city space. In this paper, I examine how two Japanese authorsﾑAbe Kobo and Matsuo Yumiﾑuse the genre of detective fiction in order to interrogate the relationship between corporeal and urban space, and between knowledge of the body and knowledge of the city. In *The Ruined Map*, Abe follows a private detective as he attempts to solve a missing person case, a quest in which the detective finds himself becoming his own quarry, while in *Murder in Balloon Town*, Matsuo chronicles the frustrations of a female detective faced by a crime whose solution requires her to enter a world in which the (female) body is both the focus of and the model for social interaction. Despite their differences, I argue, both works share a vision of identity, bodily space, and the city in which each is radically intertwined with the other: Abe's meticulous account of his protagonist's daily movements across Tokyo elides into, and then is subsumed by, a narrative of personal transformation, while Matsuo's quasi-utopian urban environment is so profoundly defined by corporeality that knowledge of the city becomes inseparable from knowledge of the body. In both cases, the detectives' traditional tools -"street smarts", observation, and analysisﾑprove to be insufficient, making the solution of the mystery ultimately an existential rather than epistemological task.