It may come as a surprise to people who aren’t familiar with his work, but Rampo actually wrote quite a number of essays, especially about himself.
This book contains eight of his short stories, including his best work ‘The Stalker in the Attic’ (‘Yaneura no Sanposha’), and ten of his essays.
Let’s learn about cute uncle Rampo! I must say that there is a lot more to Rampo than just boy detectives (Shonen tanteidan), the Phantom with Twenty Faces (Kaijin Nijumenso), and ero-guro (erotic-grotesque)!

Anyway, this is an English-language book. (Chris edited and designed it.)
English readers, please read it!
In addition, there are many Japanese Rampo books available. Personally, I want you to read Forty Years of Detective Stories (Tantei shosetsu yonjunen)!

This is a very interesting book. If you can’t read the Japanese, you can read a four part summary series on our website:
Forty Years of Detective Stories (1)
Forty Years of Detective Stories (2)
Forty Years of Detective Stories (3)
Forty Years of Detective Stories (4)

– YS, 24 December 2008

By the way, more of Edogawa Rampo’s stories have been translated into Italian or French than English. (However, a book of English versions of some essays and short stories is now in process.)
Recently, his novel Inju (Beast in the Shadows) was made into a movie (also called Inju) by a French director.
I read some articles about it, and it sounds like an erotic movie more than a mystery story. Aah-ah. Why did the housewife Shizuko become a geisha? Why did the mystery writer Samukawa become a nice looking French writer?

Rampo’s world has been changing more and more!
I wonder if foreign people know that Edogawa Rampo wrote mystery stories including the ones for kids that feature Akechi Kogoro and the boy detective Kobayashi, or that he was instrumental in introducing many foreign mystery stories into Japan after World War II?
Well, it’s too sad but it’s true that erotic–grotesque things have more impact and more popular appeal.

– YS, 4 September 2008

We usually don’t go to the movie theatre. The last time was Godzilla: Final Wars two years ago.
We probably aren’t movie lovers. And also, in the city where we lived before, the matinee price was $5 and the regular price was $8, so we feel the Japanese movie price is too expensive for us. Of course, we have been here for seven years, but we still feel it’s too high. We usually wait for movies to be broadcast on TV. The likes of us went to watch it at the movie theatre! What a surprise!

Thirty years ago, the original version of this movie was a sensation for everyone, because of the major advertising by the original novel’s publisher, and also the movie’s production.
In the remake, the picture colour is pale like an old photograph. The original was much more vivid. I don’t know what it was like in the actual 22nd year of Showa (1947), but it was only two years after the war: the characters in this new version are all too clean looking.
I’m not complaining about the movie, but the previous one made a strong impression on me, so I’m inclined to prefer the older one if I compare the two movies. I don’t need to compare them though…

By the way, the image below incorporates the original book cover published in Showa 47. This cover probably also gave me a strong impression of the story.

Stories about receiving a large inheritance among relatives are common in mysteries from other countries, but anyway we love what Kindaichi Kosuke gets up to in typically beautiful scenes from an older Japan.

– YS, 21 December 2006

World War II cut off western culture, and caused an empty time for western detective stories in Japan. Everything related to the enemy was evil!

First of all, it was very hard to get western books from 1937 to 1945. After the war, there were books left by American soldiers at used book stores in Kanda, and the American army opened a library; however, for some reason, the Kanda book stores couldn’t handle books from the Occupation forces after 1946. And it was also impossible for people to import books by themselves.

From 1946, it became difficult to translate into Japanese. Even including older work, to publish a translation without permission was no longer allowed. Even if one could get permission, there was no way to pay the royalty (because the flow of money to and from Japan was tightly controlled). At the time, Rampo was fascinated by The Phantom Lady by William Irish and he had a plan to translate it. But unfortunately, that plan disappeared. Around the end of 1949, some foreign rights agencies came into being, and after that the translation of detective stories into Japanese became active again.

On the other hand, made-in-Japan detective stories enjoyed a publishing boom. One reason was that the Occupation forces had banned the historical fiction people favoured, and detective stories became a substitute. It was a temporary boost for smaller publishers though, because the big publishers had not yet recovered from the war. Later on came the true detective story boom, led by Matsumoto Seicho and others, in the Showa thirties (1955 to 1964).

After the war, Forty Years of Detective Stories is mainly a report of major events, so it not so fun to read for me. As a reader, I find that the negative Rampo, who was always down on himself and disliked to see other people, is more interesting to read. (Sorry to say, because Rampo himself probably had a hard time.) The Rampo actively working in the public eye for the development of Japanese detective stories is completely different from the person he was before the war. Lecturing in many places, going to symposia, writing essays, starting the detective writers’ club, discovering new writers, and so on: he was like a different person. In that sense, the war made Rampo a better person. He didn’t mean to stop writing stories at all, but he believed he couldn’t write what the times required, and it seems he was never satisfied with his work. And yet, how many people nowadays who create art and literature really have something to say to society?

In a 1957 postscript to the book, he wrote about the relationship between his creative energy and chronic sinusitis. Rampo had this trouble for a long time, since he was a child, and he had surgery for it several times. So he seriously wondered whether or not it had damaged his brain. He felt that at some point his creativity, which was so important to him, had dried out. He came to the conclusion that his disease and his creativity weren’t related to each other, but he didn’t want to believe that his creative power was limited. If he thought that the sinusitis affected his creativity, it somehow made him feel better, so his thinking about it kept wavering. From a different point of view, it might seem silly, but it was very important to him.

I’m a reader, not a critic, so I don’t really need to tell you all about a book Rampo spent a long time writing. But I hope my writing encourages people who are interested in this book to read it themselves.

Part Four (of a four part series)

To go back to the previous part, please click here.

–YS, 28 March 2006

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.

Part Three (of a four part series)

To go to the next part, please click here.

To go back to the previous part, please click here.

–YS, 18 March 2006

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.

Part Two (of a four part series)