Beast in the Shadows

"Have you noticed the pronunciation of the name, which sounds like ‘Edgar Allan Poe’? He is probably the father of the classic Japanese mystery, the one who made detective stories popular in Japan. He was not the first. Before him there was Ruiko Kuroiwa, the journalist who went to Europe right after the Meiji Restoration in the 1870s. He basically imported the crime mystery to Japan by translating foreign authors. Before that in the Japanese market, it was mainly ghost stories (like Amabie, a spirit which cures people from plagues). But it was Edogawa Rampo who laid the foundation of the mystery genre though the Shin Seinen magazine, published by Hakubunkan Press. He was also my grandfather’s mentor and an editor at Shin Seinen — which means ‘new youth’ — and he asked my grandfather to join it. They spent time working together as editors there in the 1920s. In Beast in the Shadows , he put in a lot of the elements of what he wanted crime mysteries in Japan to be about. At the beginning of the story he writes, “there are two types of detective novelist.” One is the “criminal sort” who depicts “the cruel psychology of the criminal.” The other is “the detective type . . . whose only interest is in the intellectual process of detection.” The two types are combined in this novel, reinforcing each other through the two detective novelists in the story, Shundei Oe (who represents the first type) and Samukawa (who represents the other type). It doesn’t have the horrific taste of some of his other works, which are more like Edgar Allan Poe’s, but it does have the great deduction-focused process with sadistic elements that characterises his novels. In the same edition, there is also another story by Edogawa Rampo, The Black Lizard . This is one of his masterpieces. It has been broadcast as a TV drama many times with different casts. I like the translation too. Compared to The Black Lizard , the way the plot unfolds is more interesting, people want to know what’s going on."