Edogawa Rampo was a rather fascinating man. He deserves to be admired for his dedication to his craft, which saw him almost single-handedly translate the concept of detective fiction to Japan1. His fascination with the West allowed him to hone his craft through imitation, then invention, putting his own spin on the books he read, and which saw him create his name through a combination of homage and some very clever wordplay.
He is perhaps best known, though not in the West, where his namesake still reigns supreme, for his locked-room murders. In a translation of Rampo’s early work, William Varteresian argues that Rampo’s skill lay in just how he managed to do this. In discussing one of his earliest stories, The Case of the Murder on D Hill, he states that Rampo wrote it deliberately “as a response to critics who argued that it was impossible to set the secret incidents and mysterious dealings which formed the core of the modern Western mystery in the open, wood-and-paper houses of Japan”.2
It was obviously a success. However, reading through Rampo’s early work, the theme that stood out the most to me was not the specific elements of the locked-room mystery as a trope, but the common thread of the personality types that he employed, both for the victims and perpetrators of crime. In the collection of short stories published before the invention of his long-running detective, Akechi Kogoro, he wrote a series of unrelated mysteries, published in English as Japanese Tales of Mystery and Imagination. Rather than the typical detective fiction of a murder and resolution, these instead read as more akin to Roald Dahl’s Tales of the Unexpected. At a total of nine stories, it is a relatively short read, and yet they are the kind of stories that linger long after the reader has finished. From the beginning, they establish a gruesome fascination with the human body, warped and twisted both mentally and physically. Each one ends abruptly, with no resolution, and, in the case of The Cliff, quite literally on a cliff-hanger.
These stories belong to a sub-genre known as ero-guro-nansensu, or ‘erotic, gruesome nonsense’. Varteresian argues that this fascination with ero-guro-nansensu allowed Rampo to “explore the extremes of ugliness” in his work, and that “[his] concern is always more for the sensational effect of bizarre appearances and chilling deeds than for social realities.”3
Varteresian ties this fascination with the bizarre to the timeframe that Rampo lived through. Born in 1894, Rampo lived through the upheaval of the first half of the twentieth century in Japan. A time of massive upheaval and westernisation, he argues that Rampo’s fascination with and observations on the West is precisely what allowed him to create a new genre of detective fiction. By playing on the ‘newness’ of all things Western, Rampo was able to create a new and unsettling style of writing. His familiarity with all things Western meant that he was able to depict Western rooms, clothing, objects and even speech with ease, things which would not necessarily have been familiar to his readers. This creates a kind of superiority in his writings, almost an arrogance at deliberately including knowledge that he knew not all of his readers would understand.
To the modern reader, many of his descriptions are, as Varteresian puts it, “horrifically insensitive”, but it is exactly this that makes it effective4. Rampo himself considered these stories the weakest of his work, and this becomes clear when comparing it to his later work. Sadly, very little of his work has ever been translated, and so this and The Early Cases are some of the only works available in English. Interestingly, despite this dissatisfaction in Japanese Tales, he oversaw the English translation of it himself, working painstakingly line-by-line with the translator, James Harris, to ensure that the resulting work was as close to the original Japanese as possible5. However, with the recent rise in popularity in Japanese works throughout the West, there is hope that Rampo’s work may be translated in the future, where he can be placed in equal renown of his Western counterparts.