The Painless Death and Other Stories

A country doctor who has quietly eased his hopeless patients into death for nine years faces the one deathbed where his principle fails him. A young physician on his first house call realizes, too late, what he has injected. A dying society beauty gazes day and night at an indigo demon by Hokusai, determined that her child will carry her revenge into the world.

Kosakai Fuboku (1890-1929) was a professor of physiology and a toxicologist, confined by tuberculosis to his house in Nagoya, and the scientific conscience of Japan's first generation of detective writers. These ten pieces from 1926-1928 are the work of a doctor writing about doctors: euthanasia, abortion and the deathbed camphor injection, a foreign minister shot dead in a darkened ballroom, a poisoner's sickroom duel, a suicide's night of decision, and a magazine causerie of Western ghost stories.

This collection contains The Painless Death, The Death of the Foreign Minister, Impression, A Strange Love, The First House Call, A Cowardly Poisoning, The Physical Examination, Notes of a Suicide, The Man with Two Personalities, and Ghostly Tales, Curious Tales. Each is translated complete and unabridged from the Japanese, with a translator's note, endnotes and source information.