Before World War II Tarō Hirai was born in
Nabari,
Mie Prefecture in 1894, where his grandfather had been a
samurai in the service of
Tsu Domain. His father was a merchant, who had also practiced law. The family moved to what is now
Kameyama, Mie, and from there to
Nagoya when he was age two. At the age of 17, he studied economics at
Waseda University in Tokyo 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 used bookstore. In 1923, he made his literary debut by publishing the mystery story under the pen name "Edogawa Ranpo" (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 ''
, a popular magazine written largely for an adolescent audience. Shin Seinen'' had previously published stories by a variety of Western authors including Poe,
Arthur Conan Doyle, and
G. K. Chesterton, but this was the first time the magazine 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, 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 chant known as the "
nenbutsu" as well as Japanese-language
Braille. Over the course of the next several years, Edogawa 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 20th-century Japanese popular literature: , which is about a woman who is killed in the course of a
sadomasochistic extramarital affair, , which is about a man who kills a 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 Edogawa's other early stories, such as "The Hell of Mirrors". The presence of these sensibilities helped him sell his stories 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 . 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, Edogawa 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
Kogorō Akechi, who had first appeared in the story "The Case of the Murder on D. Hill" 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 as Kogoro's sidekick, and in the period after
World War II, Edogawa wrote a number of novels for young readers that involved Kogoro and 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 outbreak of the
Second Sino-Japanese War in 1937, Edogawa 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'yōdō
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 Kōji Wakamatsu, who drew from it his movie Caterpillar'', which competed 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 Japan and the US that began in 1941, Edogawa was active in his local
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. Edogawa 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 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, Edogawa dedicated a great deal of energy to promoting mystery fiction, both in terms of the understanding of its history and encouraging 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
Kogorō Akechi and the Boy Detectives Club. In the 1950s, he and a bilingual translator collaborated for five years on a translation of Edogawa's works into English, published as
Japanese Tales of Mystery and Imagination by Tuttle. Since the translator could speak but not read Japanese and Edogawa could read but not write English, the translation was done aurally, with Edogawa reading each sentence aloud, then checking the written English. Another of his interests, especially during the late 1940s and 1950s, was bringing attention to the work of his dear friend Jun'ichi Iwata (1900–1945), an
anthropologist who had spent many years researching the history of
homosexuality in Japan. During the 1930s, Edogawa and Iwata had engaged in a lighthearted competition to see who could find the most books about erotic desire between men. Edogawa dedicated himself to finding books published in the West and Iwata dedicated himself to finding books having to do with Japan. Iwata died in 1945 with only part of his work published, so Edogawa worked to have the remaining work on gay historiography published. In the postwar period, a large number of Edogawa's books were made into films. The interest in using Edogawa's literature as a departure point for creating films has continued well after his death. Edogawa, who had a variety of health issues, including
atherosclerosis and
Parkinson's disease, died from a
cerebral hemorrhage at his home in 1965. His grave is at the
Tama Cemetery in
Fuchu, near Tokyo. The , named after him, is a Japanese literary award which has been presented every year by the
Mystery Writers of Japan since 1955. The winner is given a prize of ¥10 million with publication rights by Kodansha. ==Works in English translation==