Edogawa Rampo and Edgar Allan Poe

Abstract

Taro Hirai (1894-1965), a Poe enthusiast who appeared as a detective in the late Taisho era with "The Two-Sen Copper Coin" (Shin Seinen, 1923.4) and took the pen name "Edogawa Rampo" after Edgar Allan Poe, first discovered Poe in the fall of 1914. It was a year after the outbreak of the First World War. At the time, Rampo was a second-year student (21 years old) in the Department of Political Science and Economics in the Faculty of Waseda University. He was busy with his professional studies and had little time for general education, but he still found time to read literary books in his spare time. During this period, Rampo wrote in his "Chronological Table" that he "read Poe and Doyle for the first time and discovered the delights of short detective stories. " His discovery of Poe and Conan Doyle was a milestone in Rampo's reading career, and he was "first fascinated by Poe, and three or four years later, I was astonished to come across Dostoevsky. ".