He tried to write honkaku stories, but they brought him no success.” “Ranpo thought he wanted to write honkaku mysteries, but really only his early stories like “The Two-Sen Copper Coin” and “Shinri shiken” can be said to fit into the genre. “These detective stories are structured to basically preserve a fair relationship between the reader and writer,” explains Ishikawa Takumi, a literature professor at Rikkyō University. In the honkaku genre, key information is meticulously revealed to readers and there is a logical explanation for who the culprit is. A Guardian article suggested the first story in the genre was Edogawa Ranpo’s debut, a code-cracking tale called “Nisen dōka” (trans. Over the past few years, there has been growing overseas interest in Japan’s classic honkaku mysteries, including works like Yokomizo Seishi’s Honjin satsujin jiken (published in Japanese in 1947 and in an English translation by Louise Heal Kawai as The Honjin Murders in 2019).
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