Original Rampo manuscript found

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Original Rampo manuscript found
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Original Rampo manuscript found



The Yomiuri Shimbun

The first page of a recently discovered handwritten manuscript of “The Golden Mask” by Edogawa Rampo

August 22, 2013

The Yomiuri Shimbun

A complete 453-page handwritten manuscript of “Ogon Kamen” (The Golden Mask), a story by famed mystery novelist Edogawa Rampo (1894-1965) in which detective Kogoro Akechi confronts phantom thief Arsene Lupin, has been discovered.

It is extremely rare for one of Rampo’s handwritten manuscripts from before the Pacific War to be found in such complete form.

From the scratchy, rushed-looking handwriting, the original manuscript of one of the high points of Rampo’s work suggest how busy the popular novelist was, having many serial novels running in magazines at that time.

“The Golden Mask” was a 12-installment serial novel that ran in Kodansha Ltd.’s popular general-interest magazine Kingu from September 1930 to October 1931, with two months skipped. It was an entertainment novel written at the time when Rampo was simultaneously authoring many serial novels. The image of a grinning golden mask is said to have established Rampo’s popularity. The author later described “The Golden Mask” in a review of his own works as “the least unwholesome, but bright, story among my long novels.”

After an outside party who had borrowed the manuscript from Kodansha in 1986 returned it, its whereabouts became unclear.

Later, after a Kodansha editor died in 1995, the company sent the person’s belongings to their family. In 2012, a family member told Kodansha that the manuscript had turned up among those belongings. It is unknown why the manuscripts were included in the belongings, the publisher said.

While Rampo had publishers return manuscripts of his postwar works to him so he could keep them himself, very few prewar manuscripts have been discovered in such a complete set.

The letters in the manuscript are scribbled, suggesting the author wrote them in a very hurried manner. The margin of one page contains an instruction to change the title of a chapter from “Golden snake” to “Mystery in the atelier.”



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The Yomiuri Shimbun

An image of “The Golden Mask” drawn by popular illustrator Sentaro Iwata for Tantei Shumi, a magazine supplement to vol. 7 of “Edogawa Rampo Zenshu” (Complete collection of Edogawa Rampo’s works) published by Kobunsha under its Kobunsha Bunko imprint

One installment near the end had its chapter title left blank, but Rampo gave instructions as to what it should be called in a note in the margin of a later page.

All these findings show Rampo was on a very tight schedule and had to start writing each installment before he had finalized his ideas for it.

It was also learned that the expression “an old Buddha statue,” which was misprinted as “a Buddha statue made of metal mesh” when the installment was carried in the magazine, was originally “a gilt bronze Buddha statue,” according to the original manuscript.

Hirohisa Shimpo, a book reviewer knowledgeable about Rampo, commented: “Manuscripts of Rampo’s postwar works after he became a big name are very easy to read, but he probably had to write very fast to meet deadlines before the war. Through this discovery we can sense Rampo’s lively breathing during a period as a popular writer.”

A special feature on “The Golden Mask” will be carried in “Shosetsu Gendai” (Today’s novels) to be published on Thursday.