Category: Japanese mystery stories

Forty Years of Detective Stories (2)

Rampo said he was bad at writing long stories. His own selection of his best work features short stories from his early career. At that time, the style was not to write a long story for a book, but to seriealise a long story in a newspaper and later publish it as a book. Rampo said he couldn’t work out the whole story before he started to write, so he always had a hard time working in a haphazard way. Even when he was asked why, he didn’t know the reason. Newspaper work had frequent deadlines, and he had to have a climax in each every day’s instalment. His long stories were usually well received by readers, but his strong sense that the work was weak was always getting stronger.

And we can learn in Forty Years of Detective Stories what inspired Rampo to write ‘D-saka no setsujinjiken’ (The D Hill Murder Case), ‘Yaneura no samposha’ (The Walker in the Attic), ‘Ningen isu’ (The Human Chair), ‘Kagami jikoku’ (The Hell of Mirrors). (It’s all amazing, but I won’t go into it here.) ‘Flashes of inspiration’ is the most suitable way to describe these stories: Rampo was full of original ideas. When he wrote a short story, he was able to give it a consistent atmosphere according to the original idea; but he often said he sometimes drifted from his first intentions when he wrote a long story.

In 1923, Rampo made his professional debut ‘Nisen dôka’ (The Two Sen Copper Coin); in 1925, he became a full-time writer. He later thought this was his best time as a writer, but he felt his novelist’s power had been exhausted during those two years; so, in 1927, he first announced his intention to stop writing. He also felt his style ran contrary to the bright, modern style he thought the times demanded.

Fourteen months later, he wrote the novella Injû (The Beast in the Shadows). Yokomizo Seishi, who was the head editor of Shin Seinen at the time, praised it highly, and it was popular with readers. It went into a third printing, even though it was published in a magazine.

After that, he became humble about himself, calling himself the ‘model of a hack writer’ or ‘owner of an overvalued reputation’, and little by little he came to dislike to see people. His ero-guro (erotic grotesque) style started to walk by itself.

In 1932, he announced that he had stopped writing a second time. He wandered all over Japan for about twenty months, until he wrote ‘Akuryô’ (Evil Spirit) for the November 1933 issue of Shin Seinen. With more to follow…

Around that time, Rampo became as well known as a famous actor, news announcer, or athlete. He became more of a target for gossip, and he probably had a lot of things to worry about. (However, we could say that it’s because he became such a well-known person that his name is still known today.)

Rampo said he made his living from royalties during this period when he stopped to write. There have been many zenshû (complete works) editions of Rampo over the past seventy-odd years. When I told Chris about this, he said that foreign countries don’t have zenshû editions like we do in Japan. For example, there are complete works editions for Shakespeare, but there aren’t for Agatha Christie or Ellery Queen. In English-speaking countries, there is a different shade of meaning for ‘complete works’ from our sense in Japan. ‘Complete works’ in those countries are for people who study and research, not for regular readers. So the prices are very high.

When I heard that, I thought it may be difficult to get Rampo’s collected essays if I lived in a foreign country. Whenever Rampo had a hard time writing stories, he wrote essays instead – like ducking out of his real work. The stories are his main work, so the essays are usually tacked on at the end of complete works. I could say they came into the world as happy accidents. But I wanted to read them.

–YS, 17 March 2006

17 March 2006