Scandinavian countries have gone from mostly importing crime fiction to being, in the twenty-first century, the genre’s lead exporters. The chapter considers this transnationalization from three perspectives, showing how Scandinavian crime writing adapts international genres to local concerns, how notable examples of the genre engage with the wider world, and how novels and TV series circulate within transnational networks. It argues that Scandinavian crime fiction is bound up with transnational and transmedial networks of influence, appropriation and innovation. Sjöwall and Wahlöö’s procedurals reflect popular geopolitics while their proto-typical Scandinavian cop longs for a Swedish welfare utopia. Cross-border crimes in works by Henning Mankell, Anne Holt and Peter Høeg critique global structures of social and racial inequality and challenge the demarcation between the local and the global. More recent global bestsellers by Stieg Larsson and Jo Nesbø employ hybrid genres to tell stories of a globalizing world where the relationship between the welfare state and global neoliberalism, and between the bounded nation and an increasingly transnational world are key ingredients.

This chapter traces the origins of today’s Japanese precariat class back to the post–Second World War development of the Japanese ‘welfare society’ – an alternative model to the West’s ‘welfare state’. The Japanese Constitution of 1945, promulgated in the wake of the country’s defeat, included social rights, but tethered them to an older, traditional concept – never before legislated – of the ‘right to existence’ (seizonken). Efforts were made after the war to investigate working-class conditions and devise social policies favourable to meeting the needs of workers and their families. But strong opposition to unionism, socialism and the welfare state bent these efforts towards a non-state model of social solidarity, one that saw the individual as belonging to a company and family – what came to be called a ‘welfare society’ by the late 1970s. By that time, only full-time male workers receiving monthly salaries benefited from the socio-economic policies of the immediate post-war era; women were excluded. Thus, decades before the advent of neo-liberalism, social rights were being undermined, workplace hierarchies were being created, and the rise of the precariat was underway.