Mr. Moto

This article needs additional citations for verification. Please help improve this article by adding citations to reliable sources. Unsourced material may be challenged and removed. Find sources: "Mr. Moto" – news · newspapers · books · scholar · JSTOR (May 2020) (Learn how and when to remove this template message)

Mr. Moto is a fictional Japanese secret agent created by the American author

In various other media, Mr. Moto has been portrayed as an international detective. These include eight motion pictures starring Peter Lorre between 1937 and 1939, 23 radio shows starring James Monks broadcast in 1951,^[1] a 1965 film starring Henry Silva, and a 2003 comic book produced by Moonstone Books, later reprinted as Welcome Back, Mr. Moto.^[2]

Character in the novels

In Marquand's novels, the character calls himself I.A. Moto, and some other characters believe this to be a fairly obvious alias, since "moto" is usually the second part of a Japanese surname, as in Hashimoto. Though Mr. Moto is shrewd, tough and ruthless against his enemies, to most people in most situations he appears to be a harmless eccentric who sometimes calls himself stupid. The main characters in the novels are Westerners who encounter Mr. Moto in the course of their adventures in exotic lands and gradually come to realize what a formidable character he is.

In the first five novels, set in the era of expansionist Imperial Japan, Mr. Moto is an agent of the empire. In the final novel, set in the 1950s inside Japan, he is a senior intelligence official in the pro-Western Japanese government.

Physical description

He is physically described in Think Fast, Mr. Moto:^{[citation needed]}

Mr. Moto was a small man, delicate, almost fragile. … He was dressed formally in a morning coat and striped trousers. His black hair was carefully brushed in the Prussian style. He was smiling, showing a row of shiny gold-filled teeth, and as he smiled he drew in his breath with a polite, soft sibilant sound.

This basic description carries through most of the novels, with a slightly different description in Right You Are, Mr. Moto, set 20 years later than the other novels. In this novel he is described as "middle aged", and his hair as being "grayish and close-clipped." In two novels, Marquand describes Mr. Moto's build as "chunky".^{[citation needed]}

He is often described as wearing formal evening clothes that are impeccably tailored. On occasion his sartorial style is somewhat misguided such as in Mr. Moto Is So Sorry when he appears in black-and-white checked sports clothes with green and red golf stockings. When his outfits are commented upon, Mr. Moto makes excuses. In Stopover: Tokyo, he is said to have the imposing dignity of his samurai forebears when dressed in traditional Japanese clothing.^{[citation needed]}

Speech

In the prewar novels, Moto speaks a faintly comic English, with elaborate 'Oriental'-style politeness, with misuse of the definite and indefinite articles.^{[citation needed]} In Stopover: Tokyo, the final novel, he works directly with U.S. intelligence agents and speaks to them in perfect English, possibly suggesting his linguistic errors are simply a device to make people underestimate him.^{[citation needed]}

Personal life

Mr. Moto rarely discusses his personal life but in Think Fast, Mr. Moto he talks about his many talents.

Yes, I can do many, many things. I can mix drinks and wait on table, and I am a very good valet. I can navigate and manage small boats. I have studied at two foreign universities. I also know carpentry and surveying and five Chinese dialects. So very many things come in useful.

In Mr. Moto Is So Sorry he states that one of the foreign universities was in America where he studied anthropology. It is noted in this novel that he has enough knowledge of America to distinguish regional accents.

The novels generally involve a romance between the main character (often a disenfranchised expatriate American) and a mysterious woman. While Mr. Moto often despairs of the hero's attempts at saving the girl, he notes in Mr. Moto Is So Sorry that he himself is not immune to their charms.^{[citation needed]}

"So often", he said, "I have seen such gracious ladies disrupt political combinations." He sighed and still stared at the ceiling seemingly lost in memory. "Such a lovely girl in Washington – I was so much younger then. She sold me the navy plans of a submarine. The price was thirty thousand yen. When the blueprints came, they were of a tugboat. Such a lovely lady. Such a lovely lady in Tokyo. She took me to see the goldfish in her garden, and there were the assassins behind the little trees. Not her fault, but theirs that I am still alive – they were such poor shots. I do not understand lovely ladies, but I still trust them sometimes."

Politics

While he is a devoted servant of the

There is political significance, too, in the calculated appeal to American readers of the ever resourceful Mr. Moto, the representative of Eastern subtlety combined with Western efficiency, who emerges as a gentleman of wit and charm. This characterization had to survive some anti-Japanese sentiment that followed Japan's invasion of China in 1937. Up to 1939 it may have seemed possible, especially to those Americans unaware of or indifferent to the atrocities of the Japanese military in China, that Japan would be moderate and reasonable in its expansion in the Far East and that the Mr. Motos would defeat the Japanese military fanatics. Pearl Harbor ended American neutrality and American hopes for Japanese moderation, but not before Marquand's Moto series had become one of the most popular fictions ever to be run in an American magazine.[3]

Novels

• Saturday Evening Post
  in 1935 under the title No Hero.
• Saturday Evening Post
  in 1936. An expatriate American gets involved in intrigue in Peking when he tries to save an American woman from unscrupulous art dealers. Moto tries to save them both from a military takeover of Peking.
• Think Fast, Mr. Moto (1937) – Originally serialized in the
  Saturday Evening Post in 1936. The heir to an American banking firm is sent to Honolulu to clear up a family matter involving a gambling house. Moto is also drawn to Hawaii
  to stop money being channeled into China to support revolutionaries.
• Saturday Evening Post
  in 1938. An American on the run from authorities encounters Moto on a train journey through China. Moto is on his way to a life-or-death showdown with Russian spies and draws the hapless American into the situation when a secret message accidentally falls into the possession of a beautiful woman.
• Last Laugh, Mr. Moto (1942) – Originally serialized in
  Collier's Weekly in 1941 under the title Mercator Island. After Pearl Harbor the character of Moto was "interned for the duration" by the author.^[4] This novel, set in the Caribbean, had already been written prior to Pearl Harbor and was published afterward.^[5]
• Right You Are, Mr. Moto (aka Stopover: Tokyo and The Last of Mr. Moto) (1957) – This Cold War tale, different in several ways from its predecessors, was originally serialized in the
  Saturday Evening Post in 1956 and 1957 under the title Rendezvous in Tokyo. The original book was called Stopover: Tokyo and subsequent editions were called The Last of Mr. Moto and finally Right You Are, Mr. Moto.^[6]