Dear readers, jumping and crying out in surprise

And the answer is that one doesn’t need to delve too far into ”Gold Mask” to realise that it is closer to the latter, like reading a yarn out of something called ”Big Adventure Book for Boys”. It seems odd that literary bods invariably view Rampo as the greatest of all Japanese suspense and mystery authors when he writes in such undemanding, almost juvenile, style, at least on this evidence.

When we hunt for further details about Edogawa Rampo, which was a pseudonym for Taro Hirai (1894-1965), they generally offer that the pen name is a Japanese transliteration of Edgar Allen Poe, whom Rampo obviously admired. The strange thing is that while it can’t be denied they both went in for tales of mystery and the macabre, here again we find Rampo/Hirai writing in a far simpler style than Poe’s sometimes difficult-to-tackle sentences.

The Japanese writer was prolific and can’t be judged fully on just three titles. He is also said to have been much influenced by Arthur Conan Doyle, creator of Sherlock Holmes; G.K. Chesterton, best remembered for the priest-detective Father Brown; and science fiction novelist H.G. Wells, all British. British, American, Japanese – somehow it all fits together.

”Gold Mask” had its birth as a serial in a Japanese monthly magazine called King from September 1930 to October 1931. Rampo himself offered an explanatory commentary that is reprinted in this 2024 edition from publisher Penguin Random House. ”I wrote it one month at a time,” he clarified on July 2, 1931, ”driven by deadlines [for King], so it is not as if I prepared any clear plot in advance. As a result, its quality varied month-to-month depending on my mood, and upon reading it through as a whole there is definitely an impression that something is lacking.” King was a major magazine with the highest circulation in Japan, and thus certainly aimed at grown-ups.

Rampo says his idea for ”Gold Mask”  came from French symbolist writer Marcel Schwob’s short story ”Le Roi au masque d’or” (”The King in the Gold Mask”, 1892), which Rampo describes as a wonderful fantasy novel for which he had a boundless love. He was an ardent reader of Schwob.

And in conclusion, he informs: ”… not all Japanese detective novels are like ’Gold Mask’. In fact, ’Gold Mask’ is merely an outlier; most are more high-brow and intellectual. Please understand that ’Gold Mask’ was written for King, which has more than a million readers, and its main point was therefore to be something that anyone, old or young, man or woman, could read and enjoy.”

Looking back again, in 1962, Rampo recalled that this entertainment-for-all requirement from the publisher of King, Ködansha, was particularly strict. ”Consequently, I got into the spirit of things and decided to write something light in the style of Lupin [Arsène Lupin, a French gentleman-thief turned detective in stories by French author Maurice Leblanc, 1864-1941] and to bring deviant psychology into it… I think that this work may be the brightest and least morbid of my full-length novels.”

It’s good to have this frank self-assessment to guide us into a different cultural offering from another generation. ”Bright” it may or may not be – it’s certainly gory enough, a sort of twisted combination of Harry Houdini, the Invisible Man, Merlin the Magician, Zelig, Zorro and Professor Moriarty. When the bizarre figure in the gold mask and full-length golden cloak is trapped atop the Industry Tower roof at nighttime in Tokyo, lit by a searchlight and watched by an ant-like crowd below, we can’t help thinking of King Kong too.

The thief in the mask with its scary ear-to-ear crescent mouth is described variously as a gold monster or devil and a ghastly apparition glittering gold from head to toe. He/she is certainly a master of disguise too, abandoning the gleaming raiments at times to escape from seemingly impossible situations, like the one on the tower.

Such escapes involve superhuman feats and trickery, and this first escapade followed the theft of a giant pearl, the best in Japan and called the Queen of Shima, despite its being under extremely heavy guard. Next, Gold Mask steals a valuable Fujiwara-period wooden carving of Amida Buddha from the collection of Marquess Washio – antique artworks on par with national treasures – in Washio’s own locked museum, in a concrete storehouse.

By this time the dogged amateur private detective Akechi Kogoro, a Rampo staple, is on the trail and soon the two adverseries become locked in a battle of wits on a crime spree across Japan. But when we see Gold Mask is it always the real Gold Mask or an accomplice fooling people? How many Gold Masks are there? Kogoro himself disguises as Gold Mask once.

Perhaps King’s million-plus readership was part-due to encouraging its contributors to offer some direct contact with the magazine buyers who devoured their serials, waiting for the next monthly instalment of the cliff-hanger. For instance, ”I have no doubt, dear readers, that you harbor the same misgivings,” writes Rampo in the middle of the merry tale, when the possibility is raised that Gold Mask might be Koyuki the maid – a girl indeed! Could it be?

And, not to baffle the dear readers too much – ”… who was this armored warrior man? And who was the person he called ’boss’? The answer to these questions will gradually become clear as the story progresses.” Also, the explanatory, ”This, dear readers, is the reason why the Lady Yoshiko shouted, ’You!’ upon glimpsing Gold Mask’s bare face the night before.”

This latter incident was after the lady, the marquess’s daughter, was stabbed to death with a gold-handled dagger as she emerged frightened from her marble bathtub, leading to the odd comment by Rampo that ”The marquess was naturally unsettled by his only daughter’s untimely end. He even forgot his important guests… ”

And: ”… if you had been there, dear readers,  you would have jumped and cried out in surprise. So, just whose name did he write?  You will learn that soon enough as the story progresses… ” The story does indeed progress breathless escapade by breathless escapade, ”and would you believe it?” Rampo asks after yet another breathless escapade. Also, ”The reader has doubtless already guessed”, but another time, ”It is only natural, dear readers, that you should be in a hurry to hear that as soon as possible”.

Lest we are in danger of labouring the point, Ötori Fujiko, the fallen daughter of a famously wealthy man, has been beguiled by the demon and become his lover. A Fujiko family treasure, a 13th-century picture scroll of The Diary of Murasaki Shikibu, is missing. Ötori has been tracked down by Akechi and she is worried that ”Sooner or later I will be summoned to the police or the courthouse and be interrogated by dreadful people,” she thinks. ”The wretched image of herself tied to a post and being relentlessly tickled under the armpits by stern-faced police detectives came to her like a vision.”

Well, it’s better than having your fingernails pulled out, or the electrodes-on-the-genitals trick. “Has the author written a load of nonsense?” Rampo asks at one stage in foolhardy disregard of blunt replies from one million-plus King readers. Sayonara.