Do we like Edogawa Ranpo?
Our score: 7 out of 10. Decent and on the right side by what we could find, but the record we could open is thin, so no higher.
First up, a heads-up: we've gone with Edogawa Ranpo, the Japanese author who died in 1965. There's also a singer-songwriter called Ranpo and a famous detective of the same name in the anime Bungo Stray Dogs, but the author is by far the one the news covers.
Born Hirai Tarō in 1894, he grew up in Nagoya and moved to Tokyo in 1912 to study at Waseda University, where he read Edgar Allan Poe and Arthur Conan Doyle in English. His pen name is a nod to Poe, and his debut was a code-cracking tale, “The Two-Sen Copper Coin”. Not a bad start for a bloke who basically invented the modern Japanese detective novel.
His 1920s and 30s stories, like “The Human Chair”, were tagged eroguro (erotic-grotesque) by critics and dwelt on human fears and desires. Then came the Boy Detectives Club series from 1936, which ran until 1962. He also stepped back from fiction for a stretch and became chief editor of the magazine Hōseki, where he found young talent.
The war is the tricky bit. His 1929 story “The Caterpillar” was banned by wartime censors in 1939, and he could no longer get stories published. He wrote essays for a navy-affiliated magazine, which had no prior censorship, and the 2021 Nippon.com piece we read doesn't paint anything harmful in them. Thin coverage though, so that's a gap, not a clean bill.
On the harm check, we found no hateful words, no campaigning against anyone and no dodgy company. The Nippon.com article notes his 1930 novel had a motif of male homosexual love, and that the Black Lizard character is never clearly a woman. The scholar quoted there says his interest was in people whose inner selves differ from their bodies, not in prejudice.
The good stuff is real. After the war he assisted police with the 1948 Teigin Incident investigation, and his Tokyo home and book collection helped found the Mystery Writers of Japan. Rikkyo University took over the residence and collection in 2002 and reopened it to the public in 2025, with free entry. Rikkyo calls him “a key figure in the development of mystery and thriller fiction”.