Japanese Detective Novels - Part Two of Edogawa Ranpo
Please note that the overview below reveals details of the plot of
the stories. The titles of the stories link to Aozora Bunko. The titles
between " " are short stories.
1927
Issunboshi (The Dwarf, published in the Asahi Shinbun)[tr. Willaim Varteresian in The Early Cases of Akechi Kogoro (Kurodahan Press, 2014)]
A short but sprawling Ero-Guro novel, in which Akechi Kogoro faces off with a mysterious, evil dwarf. Michiko, a young upper class woman has disappeared. Her beautiful mother, Yurie, calls in Akechi but it seems already too late as the victim's limbs are appearing in various places all over Tokyo. The dwarf has been spotted in nightly Asasuka Park carrying a female arm around and he has also been on the scene in a Ginza department store where a mannequin showing the latest kimono fashion boasts an arm which is too real to be true. But the dwarf's repertory of evil is not yet exhausted: next we find him, wearing prostheses to hide his stunted limbs, blackmailing Yurie into a rendezvous... he has been in love with her for ten years, he confesses... Unfortunately, although Ranpo writes a very impressive first chapter, afterwards his concentration is diluted and the story breaks up in various loose episodes.
Together with Blind Beast, the present story served as the basis for Ishii Teruo's self-produced DV-shot Blind Beast vs. Killer Dwarf (Moju vs Issunboshi, 2004), featuring director Tsukamoto Shin'ya in the role of Akechi Kogoro.
Panoramato Kidan (Strange Tale of Panorama Island, published in Shin Seinen)
[tr. by Elaine Kazu Gerbert (University of Hawai'i Press, 2013)]
A short novel on the theme of the doppelganger and appropriated identity. Hitomi Hirosuke is a poor man who dreams of creating a utopia on earth. He sees his chance when a rich man, Komoda, to whom he bears an uncanny resemblance, dies - Hitomi fakes his own suicide and then takes over the life of Komoda, pretending to have been only apparently dead. There is one problem: Komoda's wife will undoubtedly notice the difference when he sleeps with her, so he tries to practice abstention, but that is not at all easy as Chiyoko is very beautiful... He throws himself, however, into his project of turning an uninhabited island that belongs to the Komoda family into his dreamed utopia, "Panorama Island." He fills the whole island with clever optical illusions and mechanically produced simulated realities. When the island utopia is finished, Hitomi takes "his" wife to visit the island together. In the meantime, his false identity has been guessed by her and he decides to kill her during the visit. A fine novella in which Ranpo manages to keep his concentration on the topic. It should however be mentioned that Ranpo took some of the ideas from not only Edgar Allen Poe ("The Domain of Arnheim," 1846), but also Tanizaki Junichiro ("The Golden Death," 1914), his most beloved Japanese author.
Together with Koto no Oni, this story formed the (loose) inspiration for Horrors of Malformed Men (Kyofu Kikei Ningen, 1969) by Ishii Teruo.
1928
Ranpo feels an aversion to The Dwarf, although that novel becomes very popular and is even made into a film already in 1927. He therefore writes very little in 1927 and early 1928 and instead takes a couple of long trips, wandering around the country. In 1927 Ranpo buys the management right to a dormitory near Waseda University (as a source of extra income) and his wife takes care of the running of this lodging house. In August 1928, after a long interval, his novella Beast in the Shadows starts appearing and receives much praise.Inju (Beast in the Shadows, published in Shin Seinen)
[tr. by Ian Hughes in The Black Lizard and Beast in the Shadows (Kurodahan Press 2006)]
A novella that again combines classic detective elements with the erotic and grotesque. It also contains the doppelganger motif we so often find in Ranpo's fiction. The narrator is a detective novelist who is asked for help by an alluring young married woman named Shizuko. She claims she is receiving threatening letters from a jilted lover who also is a detective novelist (a rival of the narrator) who apparently writes Ero-Guro mysteries under the pen name Oe Shundei. The letters contain many intimate details, as if Shundei is even peeping into her bedroom from above the ceiling (like "The Stalker in the Attic") and observing her relation with her husband, a rich businessman. However, the narrator is led to believe that Shizuko's husband is the culprit, and that he is impersonating Shundei who in fact does not exist. A riding crop the narrator spots in the couple's bedroom suggests a sadomasochistic relationship. In the meantime, the narrator and Shizuko slip into a secret romance. Then the husband is found murdered, his body drifting in the River Sumida which flows behind the house. Now the narrator starts thinking that perhaps Shizuko is the culprit - she may have used the story about Shundei as a ruse to be able to murder her husband. But when Shizuko commits suicide because of the accusations leveled at her, the narrator is shocked... was his suspicion of Shizuko premature? Does a man called Shundei exist or is he purely fictional? Where lies the truth? Although there is a lot of ratiocination in this story, it ultimately leads nowhere, as if Ranpo wants to say that in a world of doppelgangers and mirrors the truth remains elusive. Arguably Ranpo's best novella.
This novella was filmed in 1977 by Kato tai as Edogawa Ranpo no Inju.
1929
In January 1929 Ranpo starts the long serial of The Demon of the Desert Isle, which will run in the magazine Asahi until February 1930. In February 1929 The Gentleman in the Air (Kuchu Shinshi) is published, a collaborative effort of Ranpo with five others (although Ranpo apparently did most of the writing). It is a rather wild SF adventure novel for a juvenile public (reason for leaving it out below). When in April Kosakai Fuboku dies, Ranpo undertakes the editing of his Complete Works. In June Ranpo's essay collection Akunin Shigan (Desire to be a Wicked Person) is published. He also translates stories by Poe and Hoffman for a series "popular literature of the world." In August he starts serializing The Spider Man, a novel featuring Akechi Kogoro, in Kodan Club, the magazine of the Kodansha publishing house. This story will run till June the next year. In 1929, Ranpo also writes several important short stories.“Imomushi” (The Caterpillar, published in Shin Seinen)
[tr. Michael Tangeman in Modanizumu, Modernist Fiction from Japan, by William J. Tyler (Hawaii UP); as well as James B. Harris in Japanese Tales of Mystery and Imagination (Tuttle)]
The
"caterpillar" is the symbol for Lieutenant Sunaga, a war veteran whose
body has been terribly mutilated in battle: he has lost both legs and
arms, and can neither hear nor speak. He has only his eyesight left. The
lieutenant crawls through the room like a hideous insect, in nothing
resembling the handsome man he once was. His wife, who has to nurse him,
is filled with hatred for this ugly lump of flesh, but at the same time
she is strangely attracted to it. She plays cruel games with her
amputee husband, the stress and sexual frustration arouse her basest
instincts, leading to further mutilation and ultimate disaster. This has
been interpreted as an antiwar story, but in fact, the emphasis is
wholly on the sadistic Ero-Guro elements.
"The
Caterpillar" is one of the four short films in the compilation Ranpo Jigoku (Rampo Noir) from 2005, an episode filmed by "splatter" and "pink
movie" director Sato Hisayasu. The story also served as the basis for
the film Caterpillar (Kyatapira), made by Wakamatsu Koji in 2010, in
which the antiwar message has become central.
Koto no Oni (The Demon of the Desert Isle, published in the magazine Asahi)
[No
English translation available. French translation by Sophie Bescond as Le Démon de l'Île Solitaire (Kindle)]
Called
one of "the most deliberately, bizarrely outre of Ranpo's works" (Mark
Silver), a hybrid between a murder mystery, adventure tale and science
fiction. The story contains a rather politically incorrect element, the
willful creation of heavily handicapped people (I was reminded of the
1932 film Freaks by Tod Browning). Before
the main story gets underway, Hatsuyo, the girlfriend of the narrator
(an ordinary accountant named Minoura) has been found murdered in a
locked room; the mystery is solved by a detective - the culprit is a
ten-year old child contortionist, who is himself murdered before the
motive can be made clear. The main story is the quest for that motive,
which brings Minoura with his friend Moroto (who pesters him with
homosexual advances) to a desert isle presided over by Takegoro, a
hunchback and a sort of Japanese Dr. Moreau, who wants to "rid Japan of
healthy people and fill it with freaks." His project is to abduct
children, stunt their growth in tight-fitting boxes, and surgically
graft foreign body parts unto them, even animal fur. Among the children
is an adolescent pair of opposite-sex Siamese twins who have been
surgically attached at the hip - one a beautiful young woman, the other a
foul-mouthed and unkempt boy – and the pair seems to revel in a
nightmarish sort of sexual ecstasy. The young woman proves to be
Hatsuyo's sister, and the motive for the original murder is a treasure
belonging to her family, which lies buried deep in the catacombs under
the island. Minoura manages to find it and finally marries Hatsuyo's
sister (after she has been surgically detached from the boy), but his
hair has literally become white because of all the dangers he has had to
face...
Together with Panorama-to Kidan, this story formed the
(loose) inspiration for Horrors of Malformed Men (Kyofu Kikei Ningen,
1969) by Ishii Teruo.
[tr. Michael Tangeman in Modanizumu, Modernist Fiction from Japan, by William J. Tyler (Hawaii UP); as well as James B. Harris in Japanese Tales of Mystery and Imagination (Tuttle)]
A
very complex story demonstrating that Ranpo was a great Modernist
author. The narrator hears the story from a stranger on the train. The
stranger is an old man carrying a picture on which two cloth dolls, both
a foot high, are affixed, representing a love scene from a famous
Kabuki play. One of the dolls represents an elderly man, the other a
beautiful girl of about seventeen years old. The dolls are sensual and
very life-like – the traveler in facts treats them as if alive, for he
puts the picture in the window of the train with the picture to the
outside, so that the dolls can enjoy the scenery. The old man then tells
the story of these two dolls. The man in the picture is his older
brother who once, looking through a pair of binoculars, spotted an
enchanting and mysterious girl. He desperately tried to find her, only
to discover she was a cloth doll in a picture on display in a peep-show
booth in the fairgrounds of Asakusa. By having his younger brother gaze
through the wrong end of the pair of binoculars, the man has himself
magically reduced in size so that he can enter the picture and become
the girl’s lover. The younger brother then buys the picture and devotes
his life to caring for it. The narrator notices that, while the girl
doll remains forever young, the man in the picture has been ravaged by
age and his face is twisted in an expression of anguish.
This story is an
absolute masterwork, which is more evident when you read not the Tuttle
translation, but the translation by Michael Tangeman in Modanizumu which
brings out all the subtle nuances.
Kumo Otoko (The Spider Man, published in Kodan Club)
[tr. no translation available]
A novel about a master criminal who during the day poses
as the handicapped criminologist Kuroyanagi, but by night becomes a
blood-sucking serial killer who collects women’s corpses. The Spider Man
lures the women to his lair by placing fake job ads in the paper - the 1920s were a period that so-called moga ("modern girls") started getting jobs and financial independence by working in offices and department stores. As their parents did not always agree to their wish to work, they often kept their job interviews secret until everything was settled. That makes it easier for the Spider Man to make them disappear. He is on a murder and dismembering spray until Akechi
Kogoro finally manages to capture him. Like Blind Beast, Spider Man
displays his victims in places of high visibility: in an aquarium tank,
at a magic show and as a model in a pharmacy. “Murder is art… Young
beautiful women are materials for my art.”
“Mushi” (The Devouring Insects, published in Kaizo)
[tr. Alexis Brown in The Pomegranate and The Devouring Insects (Kindle Book)]
A pure “ero-guro” story. The protagonist (Masaki Aizo) is a well-off bachelor who spends most of his time in his storehouse filled with old books and antiques. When he meets an old flame from school who is now a famous actress (Kinoshita Fuyo), his love for her is rekindled, but she rejects his advances. She has become the girlfriend of another former classmate (Ikeuchi Kotaro) and Masaki stalks them for several months around Tokyo to spy on their lovemaking. When he observes the couple’s ecstasy (and especially when Fuyo makes some denigrating remarks about himself), his anger reaches a dangerous boiling point. He poses as a taxi driver to kidnap Fuyo, strangles her and takes the corpse to his storehouse, planning to throw it into the empty well in the garden. But the doll-like corpse yields an array of unexpected pleasures when he embraces it, so Masaki keeps it in his storehouse. When the corpse starts decomposing, Masaki anxiously looks for ways of preservation. He tries to inject embalming fluid into the veins, but fails doing that properly. Next he uses flashy make-up to hide the death-spots on the corpse... This is really the utmost of “ero-guro” – Ranpo serves up a rather sickening dose of necrophilia. In the end Masaki commits suicide and is finally discovered embracing the putrified remains of Fuyo...
This story formed the basis of the fourth episode in the anthology movie “Rampo Noir” (Ranpo Jigoku, 2005), filmed by Kaneko Atsushi. The infatuated man was played by Asano Tadanobu, and the actress by Ogawa Tamaki. As a manga artist, the director filled this segment with lush visuals and pop colors.
“Nani Mono” (Who, published in Jiji Shinpo)
[No translation available]
Novella featuring Akechi Kogoro. The narrator is enjoying the last summer vacation of his student life at the Kamakura residence of his friend Yuki Koichi, together with his other friend Koda Shintaro. One night, Koichi is shot in his father's study and seriously injured in his leg. Apparently, a robber was just climbing into the study through the window, and being disturbed, used his pistol. Taking advantage of his detective hobby, Koichi, while in his hospital bed, tries to solve the case with information received from the narrator and police inspector Hatano. His reasoning seems flawless... although it is later overturned by a mysterious man. Ranpo thought this story contained a quite good trick, and was surprised by the lack of response.
1930
The Spider Man, published in book form in October 1930, becomes a bestseller - the country clearly was in an "Ero-Guro" mood. A volume with previously written short stories figuring Akechi Kogoro is also brought out. Ranpo becomes quite famous and the legend is born that he even in the daytime closes the shutters of his house to write by candle light. Ranpo works hard this year: from January to December Ranpo serializes his new novel The Hunter of the Grotesque, from July 1930 to may 1931 The Magician (again in Kodan Club), from September 1930 to October 1931 Gold Mask appears in the magazine King, and also from September 1930 to March 1931 The Vampire. These long serials apparently leave Ranpo no time to devise new short stories.Ryoki na Hate (The Hunter of the Grotesque, published in Bungei Club)
[tr. by Alexis Brown as The Hunter of the Grotesque: From the Casebook of Akechi Kogoro (Kindle)]
The title is also rendered into English as "Beyond the Bizarre." This is a novel which halfway goes astray, as happens so often to Ranpo - while the beginning is quite strong. It is a doppelganger fiction: a wealthy married man called Aoki, who calls himself a "curiosity hunter", visits a fairground in Tokyo when he sees someone who looks exactly like his friend Shinagawa. That is strange, for Shinagawa hated such places. The man indeed turns our to be someone else. Next Aoki on his hunts of the grotesque discovers a house where secret assignations can be enjoyed. After taking part himself, he bribes the owner to let him peep on other couples. To his surprise, one of those other couples includes Shinagawa again, who engages in sadomasochistic activities - and again it is the double. In Nagoya, where his main residence is, Aoki thinks his wife is cheating on him, but he may have seen her double as well. Doubles are proliferating, and from this point on the story starts to fragment. Apparently, Ranpo didn't know how to continue as he always worked without a plan - he therefore gradually ditches the initial characters and continues with a quite different story featuring Akechi Kogoro (who is often brought on when Ranpo doesn't know how to continue or close a story). Ranpo serves up a huge criminal conspiracy where doubles are used to replace the political and police top of Japan (even the prime minister). Those doubles have been engineered through plastic surgery by a mad professor in order to destroy the country - but Akechi saves the day. This really is total junk, and discounts the interesting doppelganger mystery and curiosity hunting ("an obsessive desire for the stimulation of the senses by seeking out all manner of titillating sights," as Posadas phrases it in Double Visions, Double Fictions) with which the novel started - such "flanerie" was at that time a popular phenomenon in Japanese society.
Majutsushi (The Magician, published in Kodan Club)
[No translation available]
Novel in the style of The Spider Man. After resolving that earlier case, Akechi Kogoro takes a rest at a lakeside hotel. Here he gets to know Tamamura Taeko, the daughter of a famous Tokyo jeweler, with whom he falls in love... and so he becomes involved in the mysterious incidents which plague the Tamamura family. It starts when Taeko's uncle, after receiving several strange messages, is killed in his room and the head is stolen from the bloody corpse. Behind these crimes hides a magician, who is the secret leader of a group of criminals. Again an rather wild adventure novel in the style of Maurice Leblanc and Kuroiwa Ruiko, not a detective story - don't be confused by the presence of Akechi Kogoro!
Ogon Kamen (Gold Mask, published in King)
[tr. William Varteresian (Kurodahan Press, 2019)]
A novel which pits Japanese master detective Akechi Kogoro against Maurice Leblanc's gentleman thief Arsene Lupin.
Lupin featured in 17 novels and 39 short stories by Leblanc, starting
with "The Arrest of Arsene Lupin" from 1905. In 1906 Leblanc pitted his
master thief against Sherlock Holmes in the story "Sherlock Holmes
Arrives Too Late" - the name Sherlock Holmes was for copyright reasons
later changed into "Herlock Sholmes." Ranpo repeats
Leblanc's trick by bringing on Leblanc's Lupin, a Lupin who displays
something of a a colonial and racist attitude and is castigated by Ranpo
for his lack of chivalry. Lupin would later be transformed in "The
Twenty Faces," the master thief from Ranpo's children's books. And again
much later, he would keep Japanese minds occupied as Lupin III, the
grandson of Arsene Lupin, whose adventures form a manga (and anime)
series written and illustrated by Monkey Punch. It is clear that Ranpo was rather strongly influenced by Maurice Leblanc: with both writers, the master thief announces his crimes in advance and escapes by a trick which is soon after explained. In both cases, there is no real mystery – we know the thief will get away and we know that the trick will be discovered, and that this will be repeated an X number of times. Gold Mask is episodic and light – Ranpo said of himself that he was not good in writing novels, he was in the first place a short story writer, so in his longer works there is no overarching structure, but he just strings several short stories together. Ranpo’s style of writing in this particular book also seems rather uninterested – as if he wanted to tell his story as quickly and with as little details as possible so that he could soon finish it. There is little "showing," but almost only quick "telling." There is also none of the fascination we find in Ranpo's "ero-guro" productions. It is almost a children's book.
Kyuketsuki (The Vampire, published in Hochi Shinbun)
[No English translation available. French translation by Sophie Bescond as Le Vampire: Une enquête de Kogorô Akechi (Kindle)]
The great beauty Hatayanagi Shizuko, a woman inspired only by money, in the past has abandoned her poor lover to marry a dishonest businessman. She later became a widow and now has a relationship with a youth called Mitani - who won her through a duel with glasses of poisoned wine with another lover. But now a mysterious man without lips suddenly attacks her. Shizuko and her six-year-old son are kidnapped, and Akechi Kogoro makes his appearance. He quickly discovers a whole web of mysteries…. Rather than a detective novel, this work is a quick-paced adventure novel, like Gold Mask in the style of Gaston Leroux and Maurice Leblanc.
1931
In
May 1931 Ranpo's Complete Works are published by Heibonsha in 30
volumes (for the attachment to the Complete Works, Ranpo wrote a new
story, "Landscape of Hell"). In February 1931 The Blind Beast starts
appearing, until March 1932. Other long serials started this year are
The Horror King and The Demon. Ranpo also writes his first of several
free adaptations of foreign novels, The White-haired Ghost after
Vendetta by Marie Corelli - in fact, this was the novel which had inspired him to write The Demon of the Desert Isle two years before. After a conflict with the lodgers, in November Ranpo gives up his side business of managing lodging houses.
Moju (The Blind Beast, published in magazine Asahi)
[tr. by Anthony Whyte (Shinbaku Books, 2009]
A
deranged, blind sculptor is obsessed with making a statue of absolute beauty
out of the body parts of beautiful, real women (he can't see, but he can feel). He captures a well-known singer and imprisons her
in a labyrinth of giant sculptured body parts, before killing and
dismembering her and scattering her limbs, head and torso all over
Tokyo. But far from being satisfied, the blind killer continues on his
sexually-charged spree of amputation and decapitation, making in total seven victims, all with one
purpose: a grisly exhibition of human sculptures which are a bit too life-like
for comfort. Some are used as stage props, others become part of a nude doll at a
Ginza intersection, and again others are used as unlikely weights for advertising balloons. Crime advertises itself for all to see. Pure
Ero-Guro. This a novella of about 100 pages, and it remains quite focused.
This story was used as the inspiration for Moju: The Blind Beast, a great cult film made in 1969 by Masumura Yasuzo (see my
review in Best Japanese Cult Films; also see my post on Masumura
Yasuzo).
“Mera Hakase” (Dr. Mera’s Mysterious Crimes, published in Bungei Club)
[tr. Seth Jacobowitz in The Edogawa Rampo Reader (Kurodahan Press 2008)]
Excellent short story about a malignant ophtalmologist who with the use of hypnosis and carefully crafted mannequins entices his victims to commit suicide by hanging themselves outside the window of an office building in Marunouchi.
Jigoku Fukei (Landscape of Hell, partly published in Tantei Shumi)
[No translation available]
Novella in which Ranpo got stuck, but which he later finished for the publication of his Collected Works. A man called Kitagawa Jiroemon has built a weird amusement park in his hometown where he lives a decadent life with his friends. Those friends then are killed one after another. Inspector Kijima tries to solve the case, but the murders continue. A note is discovered that there will be a massacre at the Carnival Festival. Although the police recommends to cancel that festival, Kitagawa Jiroemon disagrees and gathers people from all over the country...
Kyofu-o (The Horror King, published in Kodan Club)
[No translation available]
A phantom called the Horror King makes the whole country tremble. He uses various means to spread fear, such as by having an airplane write "Horror King" in the clouds. Detective novelist Oe Rando, after himself being targeted by the Horror King, tries to find out the identity of this terrible criminal... This is another novel where Ranpo lost control: the contents are lively, but about halfway things get out of hand, and many mysteries are never resolved. Ranpo himself considered this work a failure.
"Oni" (The Demon, published in King)
[No translation available]
A short story about a murder on a mountain path: Tsuruko, a young woman from the village has been killed, and her face has been eaten by a wild dog. Her fiance, Kokichi, is the main suspect, for it seems he has called her out to that lonely place (the marraige had been decided by the families, but he didn't agree to marrying Tsuruko). However, he maintains he was in town with his lover, Kinuko. But Kinuko says she hasn't met with Kokichi that day... Has Kokichi brutally killed Tsuruko, like an "oni", demon?
1932-1933
After
having been very busy the previous years, in March 1932 Ranpo decides
to take a break and he travels to Kyoto and Nara with his family. In
June his sister Tamako (with whom Ranpo had been close) dies from
pleurisy at age 16. In July and August Ranpo visits the Tohoku region,
this time alone. He publishes very little, only revising an old story
written in his student days ("The Matchlock Gun" (Hinawaju), and
participating in the fifth of his adventure novels written together with
others, Murder Labyrinth (Satsujin Meiro). Also 1933 is a slump for Ranpo: he starts only two serial novels,
Akuryo (The Evil Spirit) and Yochu (The Monster Worm) and gives up the
first one while still unfinished. It is perhaps significant that this unfinished book
was started as a traditional whodunit.
Yochu (The Monster Worm, published in King)
[No translation available]
A
complex story in which Ranpo's usual ero-guro elements are on full
display: the murder and dismemberment of an actress, a female dwarf, a
kidnapped girl, a competition between detective and criminal in wearing
various disguises, a body displayed in a show window at the Ginza, and
so on. The
main character is a student, Aikawa Mamoru, whose sister Tamako has
disappeared; he puts detective Mikasa Ryusuke on the trail, and helps
out himself. The "monster worm" of the title doesn't refer to an insect,
but to a red scorpion - which is the name of a gang of criminals. The
killer ("Blue Glasses") is this time not a man but a woman. After the
war, Ranpo reused materials from this novel for three different books
for young adults (with the ero-guro elements removed, of course).
1934
In April 1933 Ranpo has moved to the Minato Ward but as the location of his new house is too noisy, in 1934 he stays long-term in a hotel in Azabu. In July 1934 Ranpo finally buys the house in Ikebukuro where he will live for the rest of his life (the house was happily spared during the war, and still exists with the kura (storehouse) which served as his library; they are under the management of Rikkyo University, and partly open to the public on designated days). Ranpo publishes two novels with strong Ero-Guro elements, as well as a short story, The Pomegranate. The Black Lizard is serialized from January to November; The Human Leopard from January 1934 to May 1935 - this story again appears in Kodan Club.
Kuro Tokage (The Black Lizard, published in Hinode)
[tr. by Ian Hughes included in The Black Lizard and Beast in the Shadows (Kurodahan Press 2006)]
Pure Ero-Guro camp. Akechi Kogoro competes in cleverness with the Queen of the Underworld, the Black Lizard, who has kidnapped the daughter of a jeweller to obtain a precious diamond. The finale plays out in the secret lair of the Black Lizard on a remote island, where she keeps an eerie collection of naked life-size dolls...
Made into a great cult film by Kinji Fukasaku in 1968.
Ningen Hyo (The Human Leopard, published in Kodan Club)
[No translation available]
Ranpo's last novel, an adventure story featuring Akechi Kogoro. Unfortunately, the story is again rather silly. It concerns a monster, called Onda, who is half-beast half-human, and who slaughters one woman after another, installing fear into the metropolis. Detective Akechi Kogoro pursues Onda and - himself disguised as the monster - tries to find his hide-out. But at the same time Onda manages to kidnap Akechi's wife Fumio... Unfortunately, this novel again consists of a loose series of rather silly episodes...
"Zakuro" (Pomegranate, published in Chuo Koron)
[tr. Alexis Brown in The Pomegranate and The devouring Insects (Kindle Book)]
"Pomegranate" was published in the famous literary magazine “Chuo Koron.” It is one of Ranpo’s best stories in the “pure” detective genre. Interestingly, as in Ranpo’s very first story, “The Two-Sen Copper Coin”, this (more or less) last story is again a coming-to-grips with Western detective fiction. While that first story used elements of Poe and turned the traditional puzzle story on its head, here Ranpo borrows from "Trent's Last Case," usually considered as the first novel belonging to England’s Golden Age of puzzle detective fiction. In that novel, we find a trick which Ranpo copies, but also deeply changes, making it a double trick. The “pomegranate” of the title refers to the face of the murdered man, which is disfigured by sulfuric acid during the murder, and also to the perpetrator who in the end kills himself by jumping into a deep ravine – his bloody remains spreading over the surface of the river down below like the sight of a cross-sectioned pomegranate.
A strong story and a worthy finale to Ranpo's detective stories.
1935-1936
In
1935, Ranpo undergoes the negative influence of having stopped
serializing The Evil Spirit (Akuryo) without finishing it. On top of
that, in September 1934 his story "The Pomegranate" (Zakuro) had been
published in the literary magazine Chuo Koron, the first time Ranpo published one of his works in this intellectual bulwark. Unfortunately,
the story was so heavily criticized by the literary establishment that
it severely demotivated Ranpo. As the sad result, he gave up most of his
creative work and instead from this time on concentrated on essays,
adaptations of foreign novels and juvenile fiction (to be more precise:
over the next 25 years, until 1960, Ranpo would now and then still write
a short story, but only to a total of ten over this whole period). Ranpo's first book for young adults is The Fiend with the Twenty Faces -
in the late 1930s, Ranpo would write four more such books, and after
the war about 30 more (often vandalizing his own stories and novels for
content). 1936 is also the year Ranpo's first collection of reviews, Oni
no Kotoba (Words of a Demon) appears.
Kaijin Niju Menso (The Fiend with Twenty Faces, published in Shonen Club)
[Translated by Dan Luffey for Kurodahan Press (2011)]
Due
to the wars waged by Japan in the second half of the 1930s, both
classical and Ero-Guro mysteries were increasingly frowned upon by
society, so Edogawa Ranpo moved to mystery and adventure stories for
boys, starting with The Fiend with Twenty Faces in 1936. Akechi
Kogoro figures as detective in the story and he is helped by a twelve
year old boy called Kobayashi (as well as "the Boy Detectives Club") in
his fight against an Arsene Lupin-like master-thief, called "The Fiend
with the Twenty Faces." Like The Gold Mask, these stories for
teenage boys are strongly influenced by Maurice Leblanc and his Lupin
character. Ranpo wrote 34 installments in this long-running and very
popular series (the last one dates from 1962), often recycling and
infantilizing previous work. It at least has the merit that it made a
whole generation of Japanese enthusiastic for the detective genre, which
helped foster the postwar boom. The "Fiend with Twenty Faces" became a
proverbial celebrity, and also Akechi Kogoro probably has most of his
great fame to thank to this series of adolescent novels.
About Akechi Kogoro, Ranpo's master detective: In contrast to Hanshichi, Japan's first serial detective, who appears from 1917 on in numerous short stories by Okamoto Kido (see my previous article), Akechi Kogoro's character was initially not planned by Ranpo. In the first story, "D. Hill" of 1925, he is an amateur detective with a young, collegiate image. In the four next stories in which he appears (until and including "The Stalker in the Attic"), all still from 1925, he functions as a sort of plot device, appearing only towards the end of the stories to explain his solution. His personality remains rather vague. Then in The Dwarf from 1926 he appears as a professional detective who has spent time in Shanghai and wears Chinese robes. At the time of his next appearance, in The Spiderman of 1929, he has English-colonial or Indian looks and now is called a "master detective." In this capacity he will return in five more stories and novels; "Who" (1929), The Hunter of the Grotesque, The Magician, Gold Mask and The Vampire (all 1930). And finally, from 1936 on, he is transformed into the dandy-like detective hero in the 27 volumes of the Boys Detective Club series of juvenile books. It is only there that he finds his final and stable form, with a twelve year old boy called Kobayashi and the Boys Detective Club as helpers.
As
the war erupted in 1937, it became increasingly difficult to write for
Edogawa Ranpo (and others). In 1939, The Caterpillar was proscribed as
against the military (although it had no such intent) and had to be cut
from all his Complete Works - in fact, until 1941 Ranpo's Complete Works
were unavailable. Ranpo was almost silent during the remaining war
years. After the war, from 1949 he continued writing his juvenile
detectives and adventure stories, and also continued as an important
essay writer and critic of mystery fiction. But his creative vein
remained mostly silent, perhaps also because the Ero-Guro period was
over (it had in fact ended in the mid-1930s, about the same time that
Ranpo stopped writing). The years after the war saw the explosive
popularity of the whodunit and we get the first great Japanese authors
of classical puzzle mysteries in Yokomizo Seishi and Takagi Akimitsu.
Ranpo joined in the trend by becoming a strong promotor of the whodunit.
This has obscured the fact that Ranpo himself never wrote traditional
whodunits, except for a handful of short stories, something which stands
in stark contrast to Yokomizo Seishi, who debuted like Ranpo in the
early 1920s, wrote ero-guro stories (and many historical detective
stories) before the war, but after the war in fact wrote his main oeuvre
in the classical puzzle detective novels featuring detective Kindaichi
Kosuke. The majority of Ranpo's creative work between 1923 and 1936 is
in the Ero-Guro style; the rest are either psychological mysteries or
metafictional mysteries.
This article incorporates parts of my previous post, the "Ero-Guro" Mysteries of Edogawa Ranpo.
Also see my articles about Ranpo on Screen:
Edogawa Ranpo on Screen (1)
Edogawa Ranpo on Screen (2)
Studies used as reference in writing this article:
Purloined Letters: Cultural Borrowing and Japanese Crime Literature, 1868-1937, by Mark Silver (Univ of Hawaii Pr, 2008)
Murder Most Modern: Detective Fiction and Japanese Culture, by Sari Kawana (Univ of Minnesota Pr, 2008)
Mord in Japan, by Robert F. Wittkamp (Iudicium, 2002)
Three Tales of Doll Love by Edogawa Ranpo
Culture and authenticity: the discursive space of Japanese detective fiction and the formation of the national imaginary, by Satomi Saito (University of Iowa)
Double Visions, Double Fictions: The Doppelganger in Japanese Film and Literature, by Baryon Tensor Posadas (University of Minnesota Press, 2008)
Writing the Love of Boys: Origins of Bishonen Culture in Modernist Japanese Literature, by Jeffrey Angles (University of Minnesota Press, 2011)
Monogatari Nihon Suiri Shosetsu-shi, by Gohara Hiroshi (Kodansha, 2010)