Prewar Period

Hirai Tar? 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, 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. In the past, Shin Seinen had published stories by a variety of Western authors including Edgar Allan Poe, Arthur Conan Doyle, and G. K. Chesterton, but this was the first time Shin Seinen 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 Ruik? Kuroiwa, Kid? Okamoto, Jun'ichir? Tanizaki, Haruo Sat?, 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 twentieth-century Japanese popular literature: , which is about a woman who is killed in the course of sadomasochistic games with her husband, , which is about a man who kills an neighbor in a Tokyo boarding house by dropping poison through a hole in the attic floor into his mouth, and , 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" . For instance, a major portion of the plot of the novel , serialized from January 1929 to February 1930 in the journal , 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 Kogor? 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 , 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 (????) 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 . 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.

During World War II

In 1939, two years after the Marco Polo Bridge Incident and the breakout of the Second Sino-Japanese War in 1937, Rampo was ordered by government censors to drop his story , which he had published without incident a few years before, from a collection of his short stories that the publisher Shun'y?d? was reprinting. "The Caterpillar" is about a veteran who was turned into a quadriplegic and so disfigured by war that he was little more than a human "caterpillar," unable to talk, move, or live by himself. Censors banned the story, apparently believing that the story would detract from the current war effort. This came as a blow to Ranpo, who relied on royalties from reprints for income. The short story inspired director K?ji Wakamatsu, which draw from it his movie Caterpillar, which is scheduled to compete for the Golden Bear at the 60th Berlin International Film Festival.

Over the course of World War II, especially during the full-fledged war between the Japan and the US that began after in 1941, Rampo was active in his local patriotic, neighborhood organization, and he wrote a number of stories about young detectives and sleuths that might be seen as in line with the war effort, but he wrote most of these under different pseudonyms as if to disassociate them with his legacy. In February 1945, his family was evacuated from their home in Ikebukuro, Tokyo to Fukushima in northern Japan. Rampo remained until June, when he was suffering from malnutrition. Much of Ikebukuro was destroyed in Allied air raids and the subsequent fires that broke out in the city, but miraculously, the thick, earthen-walled warehouse which he used as his studio was spared, and still stands to this day beside the campus of Rikkyo University.

Postwar

In the postwar period, Rampo dedicated a great deal of energy to promoting mystery fiction, both in terms of the understanding of its history and encouraing the production of new mystery fiction. In 1946, he put his support behind a new journal called dedicated to mystery fiction, and in 1947, he founded the , which changed its name in 1963 to the . In addition, he wrote a large number of articles about the history of Japanese, European, and American mystery fiction. Many of these essays were published in book form. Other than essays, much of his postwar literary production consisted largely of novels for juvenile readers featuring Kogor? Akechi and the Boy Detectives Gang.

Another of his interests, especially during the late 1940s and 1950s, was bring attention to the work of his friend Jun'ichi Iwata (1900—1945), an anthropologist who had been a dear friend of Rampo and who spent many years researching the history of homosexuality in Japan. During the 1930s, Rampo and Iwata had engaged in a light-hearted competition to see who could find the most books about erotic desire between men, Rampo dedicating himself to books published in the West, and Iwata dedicating himself to books having to do with Japan. Iwata passed away in 1945, with only part of his work published, so Rampo worked to have the remaining work on queer historiography published.

In the postwar period, a large number of Rampo's books were made into films. The interest in using Rampo's literature as a departure point for creating films has continued well after his death. (See the section "In Popular Culture" below.) Rampo died from a cerebral hemorrhage in 1965. He was buried in the town of Tsu in Mie Prefecture, relatively near his birthplace.

Stories involving Kogor? Akechi

Other Stories

• Based on the adaption of the Meiji-period adaptation of Alice Muriel Williamson's A Woman in Grey by .

Director Teruo Ishii's Horrors of Malformed Men from 1969 incorporates plot elements from a number of Rampo stories. Noboru Tanaka filmed Watcher in the Attic as part of Nikkatsu's Roman porno series in 1976.

In the manga (1994 onward) and subsequent anime (1996 onward) Detective Conan, the protagonist Shin'ichi Kud?, chooses the pseudonym "Conan Edogawa," taking parts of the names of the British detective novelist Arthur Conan Doyle and Edogawa Rampo as he frantically attempts to make up a name to cover up his identity after he shrinks into a young boy. He lives with his best friend, whose father is a detective named Kogor?. Conan's mother also occasionally uses the fake name Fumiyo, a reference to the wife of Edogawa's character Kogor? Akechi.

In 1994, a film entitled Rampo inspired by Rampo's works was released in Japan (The film was retitled The Mystery of Rampo for its American release). Rampo himself is the lead character of the film and is portrayed by actor Naoto Takenaka.

The 1997 film Grosse Pointe Blank features a scene in which the main character, assassin Martin Q. Blank, attempts to drop poison into his target's mouth through a hole in the ceiling, the same method used in Stalker in the Attic.

The 1999 film Gemini is loosely based on a Rampo story.

The manga (2002 onward) and 2008 anime Nij? Mens? no Musume, or The Daughter of Twenty Faces, use Rampo's characters Kaijin Nij?-Mens? (The Mystery Man of Twenty Faces) and in a smaller role, Kogor? Akechi.

Some of Rampo's stories were later turned into short films in the 2005 compilation Rampo Noir, starring the well-known actor Tadanobu Asano.

Barbet Schroeder's 2008 film The Beast in the Shadow is an adaptation of Rampo's 1928 short story.

The horror manga artist Suehiro Maruo had adapted two of Rampo's stories: The Strange Tale of the Panorama Island (2008) and "The Caterpillar" (2009).

In 2009 the Japanese Google homepage displayed a logo commemorating his birthday on October 21.

English Translations of Rampo's Writing

• Edogawa, Rampo (1956), Japanese Tales of Mystery and Imagination, translated by James B. Harris. 14th ed. Rutland, VT: Charles E. Tuttle Company. ISBN 978-0804803199.
• Edogawa, Rampo (2006), The Black Lizard and the Beast in the Shadows, translated by Ian Hughes. Fukuoka: Kurodahan Press. ISBN 978-4902075212.
• Edogawa, Rampo (2008), The Edogawa Rampo Reader, translated by Seth Jacobowitz. Fukuoka: Kurodahan Press. ISBN 978-4902075250. Contains many of Rampo's early short stories and essays.
• Edogawa Ranpo (2008), "The Two-Sen Copper Coin," translated by Jeffrey Angles, Modanizumu: Modernist Fiction from Japan, 1913—1938, ed. William Tyler. Honolulu: University of Hawai'i Press. ISBN 978-0824832421. pp. 270—89.
• Edogawa Ranpo (2008), "The Man Traveling with the Brocade Portrait," translated by Michael Tangeman, Modanizumu: Modernist Fiction from Japan, 1913—1938, ed. William Tyler. Honolulu: University of Hawai'i Press. ISBN 978-0824832421. pp. 376—393.
• Edogawa Ranpo (2008), "The Caterpillar," translated by Michael Tangeman, Modanizumu: Modernist Fiction from Japan, 1913—1938, ed. William Tyler. Honolulu: University of Hawai'i Press. ISBN 978-0824832421. pp. 406—422.

Secondary Sources about Rampo

• Angles, Jeffrey (2010), Writing the Love of Boys: Desire between Men in Early Twentieth-Century Japanese Literature. Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press.
• Jacobowitz, Seth (2008), Introduction to The Edogawa Rampo Reader. Fukuoka: Kurodahan Press. ISBN 978-4902075250.
• Kawana, Sari (2008), Murder Most Modern: Detective Fiction and Japanese Culture. Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press. ISBN 978-0816650255.
• Silver, Mark (2008), Purloined Letters: Cultural Borrowing and Japanese Crime Literature, 1868-1937. Honolulu: University of Hawai'i Press. ISBN 978-0824831882.