The Apartment Murder and Other Stories

A film actress is found dead in her apartment, and every witness has something to hide. A penniless man hiding in a Tokyo zoo after closing time meets a stranger with a pistol. A wife reads, one by one, the opal-colored letters that arrive for her husband. A scientist announces that he has grown a human being in his laboratory.

Hirabayashi Hatsunosuke (1892-1931) was one of the sharpest critics of 1920s Japan, a pioneer of proletarian literary theory and a close observer of the new detective story of Edogawa Ranpo and the magazine Shinseinen. These eight stories, first published between 1926 and 1930, show what he made of the genre himself: case files told through depositions, interrogations in a magistrate's chambers, jealousy among the blind, and the dark streets of modern Tokyo.

This collection contains The Apartment Murder, A Night at the Zoo, A Summer Night's Adventure, The Opal-Colored Letter: A Woman's Diary, Two Blind Men, The Artificial Man, The Preliminary Hearing Record, and The Fifth-Floor Window, Part Two, Hirabayashi's instalment of a 1926 relay novel begun by Edogawa Ranpo. Each is translated complete and unabridged from Japanese, with a translator's note, brief endnotes, and source information.