Yumeno Kyūsaku: Life and Major Works

Born in Fukuoka City in 1889; his real name was Sugiyama Naoki, and after taking Buddhist vows he was known as Taidō. He was raised under the influence of his father, Sugiyama Shigemaru, a black-curtain figure of the Gen'yōsha ultranationalist society, and, while a student at Keio University, was commissioned as an army second lieutenant. After a varied career that included taking Buddhist vows at a Zen temple, farm management, newspaper reporting, and serving as a postmaster, he made his literary debut in 1926 with "Ayakashi no Tsuzumi" ("The Ghostly Drum"), a prizewinner in a "Shinseinen" contest. He went on to publish one work after another steeped in the grotesque and the fantastic, drawing on the folklore and landscape of Kyushu, and with the epic "Dogura Magura" (1935), the fruit of more than a decade of planning, he established his place alongside Oguri Mushitarō's "Kokushikan Satsujin Jiken" ("The Case of the Black Death Mansion") and Nakai Hideo's "Kyomu e no Kumotsu" ("Offering to Nothingness") as one of the "three great strange books" of Japanese detective fiction. He died suddenly of a cerebral hemorrhage in 1936 at the age of 47, having left behind, in a writing career of barely ten years, some two hundred works.