Do we like Edogawa Ranpo?
Our score: 7 out of 10. Nothing harmful turned up and he backed younger writers, but the record is a century old and our sources are thin.
Edogawa Ranpo was born Hirai Tarō in Mie Prefecture in 1894 and grew up in Nagoya. He went to Tokyo in 1912 to study at Waseda, and took his pen name from Edgar Allan Poe. Later he worked as an editor at the detective magazine Hōseki.
His 1923 debut, The Two-Sen Copper Coin, is cited as Japan's first classic puzzle mystery. He went on to write twisted, human-scale horror, and his 1936 series introduced the Boy Detectives Club, which ran postwar until 1962. Nippon.com notes that the fear in his stories was always human in origin.
The scandal around him is about censorship, not conduct. Wartime censors banned his 1929 story The Caterpillar in 1939, and he could no longer get his fiction published. He did write essays for a navy-affiliated magazine, which had no prior censorship. That is all our sources say, so we can't tell you more about his wartime views.
On the harm check, nothing turned up. His 1930 novel Kotō no oni has a male homosexual love motif, and a scholar's abstract says nowhere in his work is there any judgment against homosexuality. He is also reported to have collaborated on research into the history of male homosexuality in Japan. We found no campaigning against any group.
The good stuff is real. His home gatherings led to the founding of the Detective Fiction Writers Club, now the Mystery Writers of Japan, and he nurtured young talent through his editing and his book collection. He praised Matsumoto Seichō's work, and kept Seichō's serial going when its first magazine folded.
The legacy is huge: Rikkyō University's memorial centre holds some 40,000 items, and he's still being adapted into manga, anime and TV. Detective Conan even ran a tribute episode in 2024. A century on, the record is thin but kind, so it's a yes from us.