Original language:
Japanese Translated from: Japanese
Authors: Rampo, Edogawa
Translated by: Bajarūnas, Romualdas
Full translated source bibliographical description:
Rampo E. Pabaisa tamsoje: [Apysaka] /E. Rampo; Iš jap. k. vertė R. Bajarūnas. Vilnius: Vyturys, 1992.
ISBN: 5-7900-0780-2
Published in: Vilnius
Published on: 1992
Publisher: Vyturys
„Beast in the Shadows“ is written in the form of a first-person. It deals with a crime novelist who starts flirting with a married woman, only to find that she is being menaced by a figure out of her past. The story ostensibly pits two mysteries writers against each other. The narrator comes to the defense of a beautiful married woman who claims that a former lover is threatening her. That former lover is another acclaimed mystery writer who seemingly disappeared several months earlier. …But is he really the “beast in the shadows” spying on and threatening this unfortunate woman? This story is chock-full of unexpected twists, all of them processed through the mind of an imaginative mystery writer who ends up solving this particular crime more than once. Rampo succeeds masterfully at keeping a complicated story from unraveling prematurely at any point. The book „Beast in the Shadows“ combines violence, mystery, and tainted love to create an interesting tale unlike modern mysteries.
Hirai Taro (1894-1965) adopted the pseudonym Edogawa Rampo because it sounded like a Japanese mispronunciation of “Edgar Allan Poe”. Edogawa Rampo is the acknowledged grand master of Japan’s golden age of mystery fiction. For decades he was the most famous and influential mystery author in Japan. Today, every Japanese mystery writer’s ultimate goal is to win the Edogawa Rampo Prize for the year’s best novel. In E. Rampo‘s story „Beast in the Shadows“ it is showed how logical thinking helps to reveal a crime.