Going for a Stroll: "The Stalker in the Attic" (1925) by Edogawa Rampo

Recently, I read the very first Japanese locked room mystery, entitled "D zaka no satsujin-jiken" ("The Case of the Murder on D. Hill," 1925), written by the father of the Japanese detective story, Edogawa Rampo, who penned it as a response to the critics of his time – who asserted that it was impossible to use the open, wood-and-paper houses of Japan as a stage for a Western-inspired mystery. Rampo proved them wrong by writing a short locked room story set in a traditional Japanese house with paper walls, sliding doors and tatami-matted floors.

Historically, "The Case of the Murder on D. Hill" is an important cornerstone of the Japanese detective story and handed a blueprint to both his contemporaries and successors to follow, but, purely as an impossible crime story, it's not really impressive. Rampo merely showed it was possible to stage a locked room murder in a wood-and-paper house without showing any ingenuity in the solution. Something he would rectify in another story from the same year.

"Yaneura no sanposha" ("The Stalker in the Attic") was originally published in the August, 1925, issue of Shin-Seinen and a translation was published in a collection of short stories and essays, The Edogawa Rampo Reader (2008), which gave 1926 as the story's original year of publication – which has to be wrong. The story is an inverted locked room mystery and remarkably modern in its subject matter.

Gōda Saburō is a restless, ennui-ridden and perpetual bored twenty-five year old man who left "no stone unturned in his search for amusement." A generous allowance from his parents allowed him to act with "reckless abandon" and regularly changed lodgings. There were two events that placed Gōda on the path of murder: one of them was becoming acquainted with Rampo's famous amateur detective, Akechi Kogorō, whose "wealth of fascinating crime stories" entertained Gōda. Akechi seemed to take an interest in his pathological personality.

The second event was discovering that the closet in his room, in a recently built boarding house, has a panel in the ceiling giving access to a normally inaccessible attic!

Tōeikan boarding house encircles a courtyard to form a square and the attic follows this shape, which means Gōda can walk around in a circle and return where he started, but the cherry on top is that the boardinghouse was "shoddily built" and the ceiling boards are riddled with gaps and knotholes – giving him a thrilling opportunity to spy on his neighbors. You read that right. A 1920s detective story about voyeurism and genre historians might want to take note of this story, but I'm unrepentant Golden Age detective fanboy and there were other features of the plot that fascinated me.

Firstly, there are the architectures features which are integrated into the plot in the tradition of the finest Golden Age detective stories.

"The Stalker in the Attic" solved the problem Rampo addressed in "The Case of the Murder on D. Hill" by merging the traditional Japanese houses with a Western-type building. The Tōeikan boarding house has sleek, sturdy walls of painted wood and doors fitted with "metal locks," which allowed for more privacy, but the interior of the rooms very much resembled a traditional Japanese house – especially when seen from above as "every item in the room is framed by tatami mats." Secondly, the movement of Gōda during his so-called "attic walks" is fascinating as he freely moves around the squared circle and spies on his fellow boarders in their rooms on the second floor. During one of his excursions, Gōda changes on a way to commit the perfect murder inside a locked room.

Gōda absolutely detests one of his fellow boarders, Endō, but, when he discovers the open mouth of the loudly snoring Endō lies smack dab under a knothole, he realizes the criminal potential of the situation. He can drip poison along a drawstring into his wide, open mouth and push a small bottle of poison through the knothole. Endō always locked his door and window before going to bed, which made it "impossible for someone to enter from the outside" and made his untimely death appear like a suicide.

So, purely as an impossible crime story, "The Stalker in the Attic" is not only the first truly Japanese locked room mystery, but the direct ancestor of the bizarre architecture so often found in the modern shin honkaku detective novels.

The way Rampo integrated the features of the boarding house into the plot reminded me of Soji Shimada's Naname yashiki no hanzai (Murder in the Crooked House, 1982), Yukito Ayatsuri's Jakkakukan no satsujin (The Decagon House Murders, 1987), Szu-Yen Lin's Death in the House of Rain (2005) and the many stories from The Kindaichi Case Files – e.g. The Alchemy Murder Case, The Prison Prep School Murder Case and The Antlion Murder Case. I was also reminded of Max Rittenberg's 1914 short story "The Invisible Bullet," collected in The Invisible Bullet and Other Strange Cases of Magnum, Scientific Consultant (2016), which deals with an impossible murder in a fencing academy situated on the top floor of a tall building. The way in which the layout of buildings are used in service of the plot and the original locked room-tricks showed that Rampo's "The Stalker in the Attic" and Rittenberg's "The Invisible Bullet" were ahead of their time in their respective regions. I seriously wonder if Rampo, who could read English, was aware of this particular story.

Akechi Kogorō appears on the scene in the final ten pages of the story to play a little cat-and-mouse game with Gōda, but this merely to give the story, which has already been told by this point, a tidy ending.

So very much like my rereading of Akimitsu Takagi's Shisei satsujin jiken (The Tattoo Murder Case, 1948), I appreciated "The Stalker in the Attic" a whole lot more the second time around. An important and well-done story that ought to be better known among a Western (locked room) mystery readers. Highly recommended!

A couple of notes for the curious: "The Stalker in the Attic" is the only good story collected in The Edogawa Rampo Reader, but the essays are really interesting and recommend "Fingerprint Novels of the Meiji Era," "Dickens and Poe" and "An Eccentric Idea" to every genre historian/scholar. Secondly, there's a Western hybrid of the detective and horror story, namely Ed Bryant's "The Lurker in the Bedroom" (1971), which reads like it was inspired by Rampo. Lastly, I clearly remember there was a floor plan of the boarding house, showing the attic route, but apparently, my memory deceived me. There's no floor plan.

The Tormented Bookshop: "The Case of the Murder on D. Hill" (1925) by Edogawa Rampo

Hirai Tarō is the father of the Japanese detective story and choose as his nom-de-plume a phonetic rendering of the name of the progenitor of the genre, Edgar Allan Poe, which translated to Japanese is "Edogawa Rampo" – whose work he greatly admired and developed in "a distinctly Japanese form." Rampo graduated from Waseda University in 1916, but had to work a series of odd jobs until Shin-Seinen (New Youth) published his first short story, "Nisendōka" ("The Two-Sen Copper Coin"), in 1923. A story inspired by Poe's "The Gold Bug" (1843).

"The Two-Sen Copper Coin" was the first step Rampo took to become the Founding Father of the Japanese detective story, but historically, one of his most important stories was published a few years later.

"D zaka no satsujin-jiken" ("The Case of the Murder on D. Hill") was originally published in the January, 1925, issue of Shin-Seinen and collected in The Early Cases of Akechi Kogorō (2014). Rampo wrote the story to disprove the claim that it was impossible to set "the secret incidents and mysterious dealings," forming "the core of the modern Western mystery," in "the open, wood-and-paper houses of Japan" – prophesying that the country will never produce a strong mystery tradition of its own (ha!). So he proved them wrong by constructing a locked room mystery set in one of those houses of paper and bamboo with sliding doors and tatami-matted floors.

However, the impossible murder in a secondhand bookshop is not what gives "The Case of the Murder on D. Hill" its historical status, but that it introduced the first iconic Japanese detective, Akechi Kogorō. I also think the story is, historically, interesting as an early example of the double solution reasoned from the same (physical and psychological) evidence. Anthony Berkeley would have loved this story for more than one reason!

"The Case of the Murder on D. Hill" is narrated by a young man, just out of school, but without work and idles away his time reading at his boardinghouse or staring out of the window of an inexpensive café, The Plum Blossom House, where he became acquainted with Akechi Kogorō – who charmed him with "his love of detective fiction." One day, they notice something irregular going on at the secondhand bookshop opposite the café. When they go to investigate, they discover the murder of the bookshop owner's wife. She had been a childhood friend of Akechi.

Only problem is that every entrance, or exit, was under observation by reputable witnesses and nobody was seen entering, or leaving, the secondhand bookshop at the time of the murder.

Regrettably, the identity of the murderer and solution to the locked room murder were uninspired, but where the story briefly became a genuine classic was when the narrator began to unfurl his solution to the crime. A solution brilliantly accusing Akechi (!) based on such clues as fingerprints on a light switch, a striped yukata (kimono) and the murderer's apparent ability to become invisible. Only other example of a false solution leveled against the detective that I can think can be found in Berkeley's masterly done Jumping Jenny (1933).

The translator of The Early Cases of Akechi Kogorō, William Varteresian, noted in his introduction that Rampo wanted to be "judged and considered on the same terms as those of prominent Western authors."

So, when stacked up against its Western counterparts of the period, "The Case of the Murder on D. Hill" is (plot-wise) a very minor work with only two distinguishing features: a correct and false solution that were extracted from the same evidence and the "disgraceful behavior" that provided a morbid motive for the murder. A motive that would certainly have raised some eyebrows in the Western world of 1925. However, in Japan, this story was as important as Poe's "The Murders in the Rue Morgue" (1841), Sir Arthur Conan Doyle's A Study in Scarlet (1887) and G.K. Chesterton's The Innocence of Father Brown (1911). Recommended to genre historians and readers interested in the history of the genre.

Just Another Face in the Crowd

"With your ordinary sort of adversary, yes. But, given an enemy endowed with a certain amount of cunning, the facts are those which he happens to have selected."

- Excerpt from Maurice Leblanc's The Hollow Needle (1909). 

Yesterday, a package arrived with the novel The Fiend with Twenty Faces (1936) by Edogawa Rampo, translated by Dan Luffey, wonderfully illustrated by Tim Smith 3 and prefaced by fellow mystery blogger Ho-Ling, which forced me to commit the blasphemous act of putting aside a John Dickson Carr novel to read this new acquisition before it ended up on that pile of unread mysteries for the next year or so – like was the case with the last Japanese mystery writer I tackled.

Well, first of all, I have to mention Ho-Ling's preface, in which he briskly sketches how The Boy Detectives series came into being, against a backdrop of ever-tightening government censorship, as well as drawing some interesting comparisons with the works of Maurice Leblanc and Gaston Leroux. It conveys a clear picture of what the series is about without spoiling any of the fun and gives you some understanding of its place in Japanese culture. I say "some" because a far, far away land where you can still hear the names of "Twenty Faces" and Akechi Kogoro on the streets of any neighborhood, not to mention bookstores everywhere stuffed with detective stories, impresses me as one of Chesterton's fleeting daydreams he had on a lazy afternoon when he dozed-off while imagining a new Father Brown story.

Anyway, I'm also glad that Ho-Ling penned this introduction because it gives me an opportunity to point out the atrocity that prefaced the Dybbuk Press edition of Israel Zangwill's The Big Bow Mystery (1891), which is a gem of an example of someone who hasn't the faintest idea what he's talking about or even seems aware of Google and Wikipedia. Inspector Poirot?! Really? In my opinion, it's the end-all argument in favor of taking away the right to freely write introductions for detective stories unless you can scroll through a list of names on the GADWiki without starting to look like a fish gasping for water. But on the review, shall we?

The Fiend with Twenty Faces was originally published as a serialization in Shonen Kurabu (Boy's Club), a magazine for children that began its circulation in 1914, and the battle-of-wits between the master detective Akechi Kogoro and the fleeting figure of the criminal with even more crimes than faces to his name has captured generation of readers ever since. "Twenty Faces" is a crook with the same old-school courtesy as his French counterpart, Arsène Lupin, when it comes to warning his victims before harvesting the paintings from their walls and ripping statues from their plinths – which is exactly what Mr. Hashiba found between his mail at the opening of this book.

Mr. Hashiba has in his possession a handful of diamonds, once encrusted in the crown of the House of Romanov, functioning now as their family heirlooms and wants to hold on to them, but they are swiped from underneath his nose effortlessly, however, the escape of the titular thief was a bit more problematic thanks to Mr. Hashiba's son Soji. Naturally, this does not bode well with the master criminal and kidnaps the boy to demand another one of the Hashiba's family treasure's as compensation and desperately the family summons Akechi Kogoro to their home, but the detective is abroad and in his place comes his assistant – a boy of ten or twelve years named Kobayashi Yoshio. However, do not allow his size and age to fool you as he's unusual bright and came very close to single handily defeating "Twenty Faces" before his mentor stepped into the picture.

What ensues is an adventure that reminded me at times of Tom's run-in with a gang of kidnappers in J. Jefferson Farjeon's Holiday Express (1935) and this book can be recommended to readers who enjoyed that particular story and to fans of Eoin Colfer's Half-Moon Investigations (2006), but I don't think, to be completely honest, that the book will excite the crowd of hungry mystery fans craving for more translations of Soji Shimada and Seichi Yokomizo. As fun as The Fiend with Twenty Faces is, it's also a bit too cute when it throws "twists" and "surprising revelations" around that you foresaw one or two chapters before officially being led in on the secret. No doubt this is engrossing stuff if you are 8-10 years old, but without the cultural or nostalgia factor it will do very little for older western readers, I'm afraid. Still, it's a nice book to indoctrinate the more impressionable minds among our families and friends and help them cultivate an appreciation for detective stories.

You have to admit that you were not expecting a review of this book from me anytime soon, now were you Ho-Ling? :)