John Launer is a retired GP and family therapist, now working as a medical educator and writer. He is on X: @johnlauner
How’s this for a plot? A Japanese novelist who writes detective stories becomes acquainted, apparently by chance, with an attractive young married woman. She confides in him that she is receiving death threats from another Japanese writer of detective fiction who used to be her lover and feels bitterly rejected. Novelist A (who knows Novelist B to be secretive and reclusive as well as a literary rival) determines to track him down.
I had never heard of Edogawa Rampo until I bought “Beast in the Shadows” on impulse in an airport bookshop.
Matters turn nasty when Novelist B starts threatening to kill the young woman’s husband first, in order to increase her terror. Shortly afterwards the husband’s corpse is indeed fished out of Tokyo’s Sumida river, inexplicably wearing nothing except his underpants and a fluffy wig. Novelist A promptly becomes entangled romantically with the bereaved wife, who turns out to have a penchant for being whipped. Novelist A, together with any readers who are not exceptionally dim, by now suspects that nothing is quite as straightforward as it seems, although straightforward is scarcely a word that springs to mind as the plot develops.
I had never heard of Edogawa Rampo until I bought “Beast in the Shadows” on impulse in an airport bookshop. Rampo was evidently regarded as the greatest of all Japanese suspense writers. His real name was Taro Hirai and he lived from 1894 to 1965. His pen name was a spoof transliteration of a Japanese person trying to pronounce “Edgar Allen Poe.” His book includes everything that his elaborately contrived alias would lead you to expect – a delicious mixture of noir, Gothic, humour and perversity.
The narrator in the book is Novelist A, and he is at pains to emphasise that what he is writing is not fiction but a memoir of real events that he might turn into a novel in the future. Rampo depicts him as somewhat slow on the uptake. This inevitably draws the reader into trying to surmise in advance where the clues will lead him – but both narrator and reader turn out to be ridiculously wrong. Rampo has led us up the garden path. The perpetrator is also said to be using tactics that echo some of Novelist B’s short stories but this too is joke, since the stories mentioned were apparently well known ones by Rampo himself. Near the end, an entirely alternative set of realities appears to explain everything. Or does it?
What might we as readers be revealing to those around us or concealing from them and ourselves?
In the last chapter, the narrator starts to express a new set of doubts, and readers are left to decide for themselves what really happened. Was Novelist A as virtuous as he made out? Was the wife, then widow, then mistress, all she seemed to be? What was Novelist B’s true identity? What was the author Edogawa Rampo trying to tell you about himself and his predilections? What might we as readers be revealing to those around us or concealing from them and ourselves?
“Beast in the Shadows” is short, a mere novella of 100 pages. I immediately re-read it from cover to cover, to savour how almost every word from the beginning to the end is freighted with layers of unexpected meaning. I apologise for any spoilers in this account of the book but can promise you there are still enough puzzles in it to keep you entertained. And of course I may even have misled you in places. You never know.
Featured book: Beast in the Shadows by Edogawa Rampo. Translated by Ian Hunter. London, Penguin Random House, 2023
Featured Photo by Maxim Hopman on Unsplash
