Japanese Tales of Mystery & Imagination - Edogawa Rampo [1]
Edogawa Rampo was born October 21, 1894, in Nabari Town, Mie Prefecture, the son of a merchant who also practiced law. Most of his childhood was spent in Nagoya, but at the age of seventeen he went to Tokyo for higher studies. Entering Waseda University in 1912, he majored in economics and graduated with high honors four years later. During the next six years, Rampo tried his hand at diverse occupations, working successively as clerk for an import-export house, accountant at a shipbuilding yard, assistant editor of a newspaper, advertising solicitor, etc., etc. Frequently, between jobs, he followed the menial trade of peddling soba, or Japanese noodles, pulling the cart and blowing the eerie-sounding flute of the soba peddler, thus just managing to keep body and soul together.
It was not until 1923, the year of the great earthquake which devastated the whole of the Tokyo-Yokohama area, that Rampo discovered his real calling, i.e., writing mysteries. Until that time, no Japanese writer had attempted a modern detective story, although there did exist numerous translations of the works of Western writers.
In those days, only a single mystery magazine was in existence in the whole of Japan. This was the Shin Seinen which featured Japanese translations of the works of such Western mystery writers as Poe, Doyle, Chesterton, Freeman, and others.
Rampo, who had been an avid reader of American and European mysteries since his high school days, being jobless in Osaka at the time, mailed in to Shin Seinen a short mystery entitled "Nisen Doka" (The Two-Sen Copper Coin). Much to his surprise, the story was snapped up, and published by Shin Seinen side by side with the works of world-famous writers. Invited by the publishers to write more stories, Rampo readily complied, and as his reputation continued to grow by leaps and bounds as Japans first spinner of modern mystery yarns, he finally went to Tokyo to pursue his new vocation in earnest.
During the thirty-one years up to the present, Rampo has written a total of twenty full-length books, fifty-three short stories and novelettes, ten full-length books for juveniles, and six volumes of essays devoted to the mystery story. The stories contained in this book are the best selections from Rampo's stock of short stories.
In introducing this noted Japanese mystery writer to the Western public a brief résumé of the mystery story in Japan is also in order. Old tales of court trials imported from China were the very first detective stories read in Japan. However, it was not until the year 1660 that a Japanese writer came under the spell of these Chinese classics and began to write stories of a similar nature.
During the next two centuries, various other writers turned out works along the same lines, the most famous of them being Saikaku Ihara's Records of Trials Held Beneath a Cherry Tree, published in the year 1689.
The next turning point came in the Meiji Period (1868-1912), when the Chinese-patterned detective story began to lose its popularity, and a new era of crime literature came into being with the rapid importation, translation, and sale of American, English, and French mystery classics. One of the earliest translators of these Western works into Japanese was Ruiko Kuroiwa, who from 1887 until the close of the century translated dozens of detective novels, thus introducing the modern Western crime story to Japanese readers. Among the many works which he translated into the Japanese language those of French writers predominated. Some fifteen or sixteen novels by Du Boisgobey, four novels by Gaboriau, as well as works by Wilkie Collins, A. K. Green, and others were translated by him and serialized in Japanese newspapers.
Subsequently, many other translators turned out numerous works by American and English writers, until finally, in the year 1923, the first original Japanese mystery story, Edogawa Rampo's "The Two-Sen Copper Coin," was born.
With the ice thus finally broken, a purely Japanese school of modern mystery fiction rapidly began to take shape, with the majority