Category: Japanese mystery stories

Forty Years of Detective Stories (3)

World War II had a big effect on Rampo, too. First of all, his style of story was incompatible with militarism. His stories failed to pass the censors, and his publishers also gave up on reprints, so he couldn’t expect any income from royalties. Detective writers had to channel their strengths in other fields, such as science stories, war stories, and spy stories. But there was no such path open to Edogawa Rampo. (He did write a series of fourteen science stories for boys called ‘Chie no Ichitarô’ (Clever Ichitarô), under the name ‘Komatsu Ryunosuke’, so he could make some money. He only wrote one story as ‘Edogawa Rampo’, which I’ll mention later. His savings ran out, so he was thinking about getting an office job just before the end of the war.)

It seems he didn’t need to go to the war, and he didn’t mention the reason. (Age? Health? Anyway, he had a some kind of reason.) His only son was sent to the front in 1943 and came back safely. Rampo stayed in Tokyo during the war. He who used to dislike people, and who loved to be alone (extremely so), was willing to be an air defense chief, and started to associate with his neighbours! He couldn’t drink, but he tried to drink! He made an air-raid shelter in his yard, made a vegetable farm, woke up early, offered up labour service, did training, and even stopped smoking. All of which means that Rampo the unhealthy became healthy during the War. Of course the War affected his mental state very much. Good or bad, the War had a big effect on Rampo; that was natural for the times, but I was still surprised to learn how much of an effect it was.

He wrote well about what happened to him during the War. It’s an experience no-one wants to see repeated, but it’s a very interesting story for me, who has no experience of life during wartime. During the War, he wrote only one story (a science story) as Edogawa Rampo, in which America appeared as the enemy (of course), called ‘Idainaru Yume’ (A Great Dream). With the whole society against ‘amusements’, he didn’t write much about detective stories. But he did write about how the detective writers around him spent the war years, or how people he knew passed away. (He didn’t have many friends because he disliked to see people, including writers.) His wartime writing is non-fiction from a Rampo point of view.

In what we could call a happy chance arising from the misery of war, he inherited many English detective stories from a friend who passed away, and during the Occupation he had a lot of chances to read detective stories left behind by American soldiers. Fortunately, Rampo’s huge library also survived the firebombing of Tokyo.

Near the end of the war, Rampo had been reduced to skin and bone because of an intestinal illness and malnourishment. Even so, he was optimistically thinking about how he could protect his books by bringing them to his fire-proof warehouse, to preserve them for a brighter future of Japanese detective stories. (And actually, he was right.) Rampo really was amazing.

–YS, 18 March 2006

18 March 2006