Edogawa Rampo - Biography - Before World War II

Before World War II

Tarō Hirai was born in Nabari, Mie Prefecture in 1894. He grew up in Nagoya and studied economics at Waseda University starting in 1912. After graduating in 1916 with a degree in economics he worked a series of odd jobs, including newspaper editing, drawing cartoons for magazine publications, selling soba noodles as a street vendor, and working in a bookstore.

In 1923 he made his literary debut by publishing the mystery story "The Two-Sen Copper Coin" (二銭銅貨, Ni-sen dōka?) under the pen name "Edogawa Rampo" (pronounced quickly, this humorous pseudonym sounds much like the name of the American pioneer of detective fiction, Edgar Allan Poe, whom he admired). The story appeared in the magazine Shin Seinen, a popular magazine written largely for an adolescent audience. Shin Seinen had previously published stories by a variety of Western authors including Poe, Arthur Conan Doyle, and G. K. Chesterton, but this was the first time the magazine published a major piece of mystery fiction by a Japanese author. Some, such as James B. Harris (Ranpo's first translator into English), have erroneously called this the first piece of modern mystery fiction by a Japanese writer, but well before Ranpo entered the literary scene in 1923, a number of other modern Japanese authors such as Ruikō Kuroiwa, Kidō Okamoto, Jun'ichirō Tanizaki, Haruo Satō, and Kaita Murayama had incorporated elements of sleuthing, mystery, and crime within stories involving adventure, intrigue, the bizarre, and the grotesque. What struck critics as new about Ranpo’s debut story "The Two-Sen Copper Coin" was that it focused on the logical process of ratiocination used to solve a mystery within a story that is closely related to Japanese culture. The story involves an extensive description of an ingenious code based on a Buddhist incantation known as the "nenbutsu" as well as Japanese-language Braille.

Over the course of the next several years, Rampo went on to write a number of other stories that focus on crimes and the processes involved in solving them. Among these stories are a number of stories that are now considered classics of early 20th-century Japanese popular literature: "Case of the Murder on D-Slope" (D坂の殺人事件, D-zaka no satsujin jiken?, January 1925), which is about a woman who is killed in the course of a sadomasochistic extramarital affair, "The Stalker in the Attic" (屋根裏の散歩者, Yane-ura no Sanposha?, August 1925), which is about a man who kills a neighbor in a Tokyo boarding house by dropping poison through a hole in the attic floor into his mouth, and "The Human Chair" (人間椅子, Ningen Isu?, October 1925), which is about a man who hides himself in a chair to feel the bodies on top of him. Mirrors, lenses, and other optical devices appear in many of Rampo's other early stories, such as "The Hell of Mirrors".

Although many of his first stories were primarily about sleuthing and the processes used in solving seemingly insolvable crimes, during the 1930s, he began to turn increasingly to stories that involved a combination of sensibilities often called "ero guro nansensu", from the three words "eroticism, grotesquerie, and the nonsensical". The presence of these sensibilities helped him sell his stories to sell to the public, which was increasingly eager to read his work. One finds in these stories a frequent tendency to incorporate elements of what the Japanese at that time called "abnormal sexuality" 変態性欲 (hentai seiyoku?). For instance, a major portion of the plot of the novel The Demon of the Lonely Isle (孤島の鬼, Kotō no oni?), serialized from January 1929 to February 1930 in the journal Morning Sun ( 朝日, Asahi?), involves a homosexual doctor and his infatuation for another main character.

By the 1930s, Rampo was writing regularly for a number of major public journals of popular literature, and he had emerged as the foremost voice of Japanese mystery fiction. The detective hero Kogorō Akechi, who had first appeared in the story "Case of the Murder on D-Slope" became a regular feature in his stories, a number of which pitted him against a dastardly criminal known as the Mystery Man of Twenty Faces (怪人二十面相, Kaijin ni-jū mensō?), who had an incredible ability to disguise himself and move throughout society. (A number of these novels were subsequently made into films.) The 1930 novel introduced the adolescent Kobayashi (小林少年) as Kogoro's sidekick, and in the period after World War II, Rampo wrote a number of novels for young readers that involved Kogoro and the adolescent Kobayashi as the leaders of a group of young sleuths called the "Boy Detective's Gang" (少年探偵団, Shōnen tantei dan?). These works were wildly popular and are still read by many young Japanese readers, much like the Hardy Boys or Nancy Drew mysteries are popular mysteries for adolescents in the English-speaking world.