Edogawa Ranpo's Mystery Storehouse

By various authors

Independently published (2025)
ISBN-13: 978-8307774892

Review by Shehrazade Zafar-Arif

Edogawa Ranpo (1894-1965), also romanized as Edogawa Rampo, spearheaded the golden age of Japanese detective fiction. Known as Japan’s master of the macabre, his ability to manipulate suspense and the grotesque to evoke both horror and terror has influenced countless Japanese writers and film-makers that came after him. But who influenced Ranpo himself?

The authors in this collection are all contemporaries of Ranpo, whose works were all found in the storehouse of his Tokyo home, inspiring the name of this anthology. Fittingly, these Edo-era (1603-1868) storehouses often played a role in Ranpo’s mysteries as props for concealing and revealing long-hidden secrets. Translated by Alexis J Brown, these stories are now available in English for the first time, and can give us an insight into what sorts of stories intrigued and inspired the master of the macabre. Each one approaches the mystery genre in different and delightful ways, filled with memorable characters and twists.

Oshita Udaru’s ‘Death’s Reflection’ is told in the format of a letter written by a murderer on death row, revealing the story behind the gruesome murder he’s been charged with. The letter medium, along with the intimate, confessional tone, instantly immerses us into the unhinged mind of a murderer. There’s something macabrely thrilling about this close proximity, and about the clinical honesty with which the nameless narrator unpacks his motives.

Often, the overriding question in a murder mystery is not who or how, but why. The murderer’s motive is sometimes more intriguing than their identity or the nature of the crime itself, which is why it’s so entertaining to read a story from the perspective of a killer.

Otsubo Sunao’s ‘Tengu’ also plays with this sense of intrigue, following a narrator obsessed with murdering a young woman he encounters at a hotel, as revenge for a perceived humiliation. But in this case, we find out the motive and the victim fairly soon, and the sense of dread and suspense is built through wondering how the fatal act will occur. The narrative voice is repugnant in its smugness and the terrifyingly methodical way in which the murderer talks us through the different, and often complicated, ways in which he could kill his victim.

Though ‘Tengu’ is rooted firmly in human evil, it also plays on our innate fear of the supernatural, represented here in the image of the titular tengu, a mischievous yokai creature which the narrator works into his murder plot. 

‘The Woman With the Umbrella’, by Tachibana Soto, leans even more heavily into this sense of supernatural dread. It is a classic ghost story about the abused, unhappy wife of a farmer, waiting eternally for her husband at a train station. It’s the shortest of the stories in the collection, but packs the strongest emotional gut-punch. The tragedy of the woman’s story is punctuated by the dreamy, atmospheric language that paints a haunting, vivid image of a ghostly sighting in a rain-soaked train station - a liminal space that seems apt for a haunting.

Setting inevitably dominates many of these stories, becoming as much a character as the various murderers, victims, and detectives that populate them. ‘Escape From the Swamp House’, by Ksuda Kyosuke, is the story of a daring prison break, featuring a number of colourful and often repulsive characters. But the real star of the story is the prison itself: claustrophobic and nightmarish, a place where prisoners are put to hard labour under the watchful eye of the panopticon of guard watchtowers. The prison feels like the true villain of the story, and makes an apt setting for a story full of twists and turns, as swapped identities and double crosses between the prisoners leave us uncertain and paranoid about what’s real and what isn’t.

Hisao Juran’s ‘The Premonition’ is another story that also centres around this sense of paranoia regarding the blurred lines between perception and reality. In this somewhat fantastic story, a painter is warned by his romantic rival that he will die on his honeymoon, and the details of this premonition start coming true in horrifying detail. We come to share the protagonist’s sense of dizzying disorientation, and the creeping horror of losing sense of what’s real and what isn’t. This feeling of disorientation makes the story’s twist ending feel all the more jarring.

These stories are full of twist endings, the kind that play with our expectations about what a story promises to be and what it turns out to be. Yamamoto Nogitaro’s ‘The Myoga Crest’, for instance, is a family mystery that starts out with a sense of child-like wonder as an orphan girl longs to know more about her parents and their mysterious deaths. But the tone grows darker as the girl grows older, and turns into a story about obsession and generational trauma as much as it is a journey narrative. The twist at the end seems to come as a warning to not dig too much into the past if you’re not prepared to face the horrors that may lie there.

Kosakai Fuboku’s ‘Corpse-Scented Candles’ is another story that plays with our expectations, by keeping us guessing about whether a central character is lying to us or not. A priest confesses his obsession with the smell of burning human fat to a horrified young monk who is trapped alone with him - but how honest is he really being? This delightfully grotesque story also uses body horror through the image of the candles made of human fat, evoking a sense of primal disgust at the idea of the sanctity of the human body being distorted.

It’s an image that you would expect to find in a manga by horror manga artist Junji Ito - who was, in fact, inspired by Ranpo, and adapted two of his stories, ‘The Human Chair’ and ‘An Unearthly Love’. As with any literary canon, Japanese horror fiction exists in conversation with its predecessors and contemporaries, and body horror is a common trope used across literature, film, and manga.

But Japanese mystery fiction also worked in conversation with its Western counterpart, from which it was often inspired. Ranpo himself was a great admirer of the western mystery and horror genres - his pen name was inspired by Edgar Allen Poe, and he spent much of his college years translating Arthur Conan Doyle’s works into Japanese. So it’s no surprise to encounter the cynical but brilliant, fast-talking and even quicker thinking detective archetype, reminiscent of Sherlock Holmes or Hercule Poirot, in Unno Juzo’s ‘The Reptile House Murder’ - my favourite story in the anthology.

In ‘The Reptile House Murder’, the director of a zoo goes missing, and his daughter hires private detective Homura Shoruku to solve the case. For me, this story embodies all the best parts of the mystery genre, which occur here and there throughout the collection. It presents us with a line-up of memorable suspects, and the relentless pace of Homura’s investigation creates a sense of momentum and suspense as clues are drip-fed to us. The sprawling, labyrinthine zoo makes for an exhilarating setting, packed with sinister images, from the boa constrictors coiled in their tanks to the feed shed filled with chunks of bloody meat for the animals - all perfect for concealing a body.

It also showcases one of the biggest appeals of detective fiction and mystery stories: the chance to play detective alongside the protagonist, to try and solve the riddle posed by the text as we read. It appeals to our very human sense of curiosity, and allows us to experience that triumphant ‘aha!’ moment alongside Homura when he finally solves the mystery.

This genre - which consumed Edogawa Ranpo and his contemporaries - is, inevitably, preoccupied with dissecting human nature, often in grotesque ways: from the obsession with unpacking a murderer’s motives to the drive to learn the truth at all costs to the primal dread that comes with the lines of reality and illusion being occurred. All in all, this collection is a master class in inspiring fear and suspense.