Category: Japanese mystery stories

Forty Years of Detective Stories (1)

…but it isn’t about myself: Forty Years of Detective Stories is the title of a two-volume collection of essays by Edogawa Rampo which we bought recently (volumes 28 and 29 of the new Kôbunsha edition of his collected works). At first, we borrowed a different edition from the library, but we wanted to own them ourselves. The library books we borrowed were two volumes of a 25 volume collected works, published by Kôdansha in 1979. The design of the books themselves is very cool, and the design becomes cooler when you can see all the books together, so we want to own them some day, but they are too expensive for us now. That’s one reason why we bought volumes 24 to 30 of the Kôbunsha edition (seven volumes of Rampo essays) the most recent of which was published in February this year. (We think we have almost all of Rampo’s stories except the stories for kids, but the publishers are not same at all.)

It wasn’t so long ago that I started to be conscious of Rampo as Rampo. I just watched the Akechi Kogoro series on TV, then read his well known short stories. I didn’t read his stories for kids when I was a kid. But of course I knew the famous melody (from an old radio adaptation of the stories) ‘We, we, we are boy detectives’… I think I was first conscious of Rampo when I was living in a foreign country and my family sent me some Japanese books, one of which was a collection of Rampo’s short stories that I had read before. My interest in Rampo probably dates to that time. I became conscious of Rampo stories as Japanese mysteries. I started to collect his works, but only in the five or six years since I moved back to Japan. I am still a Rampo beginner.

I’ve always liked to read essays, and these are very interesting books: to learn through Rampo about the early period of Japanese mystery history, and also to learn about Rampo’s personality (even though it might just be the surface). Comparing the sections written before and during World War II to those written after the War, I find the former especially interesting for me, because Rampo wrote in such detail about his character and what was happening to him.

The Japanese mystery started with translation and adaptations of western detective stories. Rampo made his debut wih ‘Nisen dôka’ (The Two Sen Copper Coin), which was one of the first original detective stories in Japanese, in a magazine called Shin Seinen (New Youth). This magazine started in 1920 as a lifestyle magazine, and later introduced foreign detective stories, and also invited original Japanese stories, because the first head editor (Morimura Uson) was a serious fan of detective stories. By the end of the Taisho period (around 1925), many people all over Japan had come to love detective stories. Rampo was among them, as was Yokomizo Seishi. (To digress: Yokomizo started to write stories earlier than Rampo as a professional writer, but he became the head editor of Shin Seinen, so that might have been why he was a late bloomer as a popular writer.)

Rampo left many scrapbooks about himself instead of writing diaries, and he based the following collections of reminiscences on them.

Ten Years of Detective Stories
Volume 13 of the Heibonsha Collected Works (1932)
This is included in volume 24 Akunin shigan (Villain Desire) by Kôbunsha (2005)

Fifteen Years of Detective Stories
Essays at the end of each volume in the Shinchosha Collected Works (1938-1939)
Included in Kôbunsha’s volume 25, Oni no kotoba (Words of the Demon) (2005)

Forty Years of Detective Stories
Serialized as ‘Thirty Years of Detective Stories’ in Shin Seinen starting in 1949, then as ‘Thirty-Five Years of Detective Stories’ in the magazine Hoseki for twelve years, until 1960.
The original publication of these Kôbunsha volumes 28 and 29 that I’m writing about.

We learn about Rampo’s awakening to detective stories, his start as a professional writer, and his friendship with other detective writers at the time. (He basically liked literary group activities: he appeared on radio programs and on the stage with other writers. They even went riding together on a merry-go-round!) Shy and also businesslike, he always described himself as having opposing personalities. And his personality caused him shame, self-hatred, self-criticism, and a dislike to see other people. (As I was reading, I often felt he didn’t need to think that way so much. He basically seems to have been serious and modest. However, he also liked to be praised: I shouldn’t say so, but it sounds charming.) He wrote in a narrative style, and expressed his feelings directly, so I felt happy as a reader.

Earlier, I introduced the English translation os Rampo’s The Black Lizard and Beast in the Shadows, so I want to write about his Forty Years of Detective Stories, too.

But, in my student days, my comments after reading were terrible: mostly synopsis, with very few comments. Because of shallow thinking or a lack of expressiveness… Anyway, my writing is like that, so please forgive me!

–YS, 16 March 2006

16 March 2006