The Cup of Blood

Kosakai Fuboku was a professor of forensic medicine who caught tuberculosis, lost the chair, and spent the rest of a short life writing detective and horror fiction — and discovering Edogawa Ranpo. His medicine is real. The physiology is the physiology of 1926, the eye surgery is described the way a professor would describe it, and the horror is a by-product of the precision.

Twelve works, complete: ten stories — a police inspector's "special degree" of interrogation (The Accursed House), a Murder Club debating methods (An Idiot's Revenge), a clerk's confession after Poe (The Dog God), a wedding gift made of a heartbeat (The Love Curve), a young physician's obsession with building a heart (The Artificial Heart), a Buddhist tale of retribution (The Cup of Blood), a mark on a cheek (Three Marks), a temple in a storm (The Corpse Candle), a medical student's summer (The Head of Medusa) and the newspaper advertisement that unlocks a professor's death (Struggle) — plus a serial for young readers about a boy science detective (Dust Speaks) and a four-part essay on poisons and the superstitions that grew around them. New English translations, with the author's own errors kept and noted.