So where does Ranpo’s true value lie? Scrutinizing the Human Mindīorn as Hirai Tarō in Mie Prefecture in October 1894 and raised in Nagoya, Ranpo came to enjoy adaptations and abridged translations of English-language detective stories through writers like Kuroiwa Ruikō.
“Ranpo regularly hit a dead end while working on his novels, got fed up, and abandoned them,” Ishikawa says. The older writer, however, struggled with the long form. After this, he published many novels about serial murderers, which often drew on traditional customs and legends. Shortly after the end of the conflict, he rose to fame through The Honjin Murders, a locked-room mystery featuring the great detective Kindaichi Kōsuke. Yokomizo was eight years younger than Ranpo and supported his work as an editor before World War II. He tried to write honkaku stories, but they brought him no success.” “Ranpo thought he wanted to write honkaku mysteries, but really only his early stories like “The Two-Sen Copper Coin” and “Shinri shiken” can be said to fit into the genre. “These detective stories are structured to basically preserve a fair relationship between the reader and writer,” explains Ishikawa Takumi, a literature professor at Rikkyō University. In the honkaku genre, key information is meticulously revealed to readers and there is a logical explanation for who the culprit is. A Guardian article suggested the first story in the genre was Edogawa Ranpo’s debut, a code-cracking tale called “Nisen dōka” (trans. Over the past few years, there has been growing overseas interest in Japan’s classic honkaku mysteries, including works like Yokomizo Seishi’s Honjin satsujin jiken (published in Japanese in 1947 and in an English translation by Louise Heal Kawai as The Honjin Murders in 2019).
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