“Over my many years of working on the Penguin Modern Classics list one of the most insistently mentioned names recommended for inclusion has been Edogawa Rampo’s. Yet bafflingly he did not even make it into the wonderful PENGUIN BOOK OF JAPANESE SHORT STORIES (2018). Looking back it must surely have been a sort of snobbery (on my part – I can’t blame anyone else). Tarō Hirai (his real name) wrote books for children, he wrote genre fiction, both detective and horror, he was crazily prolific and he chose to give himself a pseudonym which reads in Japanese as Edgar Allen Poe but which—paradoxically!—is almost impossible to pronounce in English. In as much as he was known it was for his two revolting short stories from the 1920s ‘The Human Chair’ and ‘The Caterpillar’. He just didn’t sound like a good stable-mate for Sartre and Hesse.

There used to be an anxiety in Penguin Classics/Penguin Modern Classics that we would run out of people to publish and end up merely helplessly nursing our sales of the Brontës. But as tastes change, new ideas drift into view and the prestige of various genres yoyos, this anxiety has proved to be quite wrong. Just within the context of Japanese literature, the revival of Yukio Mishima and the rediscovery of Seichō Matsumoto are two good recent examples of writers who had, in English at any rate, once fallen on hard times. We have become much more open to the idea that ‘genre’ writing (science-fiction, fantasy, detective fiction) can sometimes elicit a writer’s best or most striking work. Edogawa Rampo’s wonderful novels may involve a Tintin-like sensibility of disguises, trickery, secret panels and chases on various forms of transport, but then Tintin’s own status as a great work of art and imagination has also rocketed upwards in the 21st century.

In the new Penguin Modern Classics: Crime and Espionage series we are kicking off with Rampo’s macabre BEAST IN THE SHADOWS, and following this up later in the year with THE BLACK LIZARD and next spring with the immortal GOLD MASK. It is hard to think of a writer more easy to recommend or more fun to experience.”

— Simon Winder, series editor

"Translating Edogawa Rampo presents challenges on different levels. First, there are all the pitfalls that beset any translator working from Japanese into English. The languages are fundamentally so different. What is the subject of this sentence? Is the noun plural or singular? How do I reflect the many and varied onomatopoeia? Then there is the issue of capturing the tone of early twentieth century Japanese. Still, Edogawa Rampo does not use particularly convoluted or literary language. He is easy to read in the original and remains very accessible for even a younger Japanese audience. What sets Beast in the Shadows apart is the bizarre and macabre atmosphere that gradually accumulates as we turn the pages. The images are dark, intense, erotic. A dead man's face seen in the river beneath an open toilet. A bewigged figure glimpsed at night through a window. The red weal left by a whip on the nape of a beautiful woman's neck. By comparison, the more well-known Black Lizard with its fast-paced tale of a detective tracking down an elusive femme fatale seems like a jaunt through the sunlit uplands."

— Ian Hughes, translator of Beast in the Shadows