Japanese Literature Summaries
日本語

Dogra Magra — Summary and Characters

A labyrinth of madness

Author
Yumeno Kyūsaku
Published
January 1935
First appeared in
Written for book publication
Form
Novel
Genres
  • Mystery
  • Horror
Setting
  • Fukuoka
Length
424,800 characters
Reading time
About 14 hr 10 min
Orthography
Modern script and kana

About this work

Yumeno Kyūsaku's major novel, counted as one of the "three great oddities" of Japanese detective fiction, published by Shōhakukan in 1935. A young man wakes with no memory in the psychiatric ward of Kyushu Imperial University and sets out to learn the truth of a bizarre case that turns on his own identity; long treatises and records are nested inside the story in an unusual construction. Built around a psychiatric theory holding that "the brain is not where thinking happens" and around "psychological inheritance," by which past crimes repeat themselves through the blood, it unsettles every boundary between madness and sanity, fiction and fact, and stands as a monument of Japanese fantastic literature.

Summary

In a room of the hospital attached to Kyushu Imperial University, "I" wakes, unable to remember even who he is, to the voice of a girl, Moyoko, calling to him from beyond the wall. Wakabayashi Kyōtarō, professor of forensic medicine, tells him that he appears to be a party to a bizarre case and urges him to read the vast body of material left by Masaki Keishi, the late professor of psychiatry: "On the Brain," "On Psychological Inheritance," and the draft of a novel entitled "Dogra Magra." According to those records, an ancestor of the Tang dynasty, Go Seishū, strangled his wife in order to remonstrate with the emperor and painted her corpse as it rotted; the scroll has been handed down in the Go family, and any man who looks upon it loses his reason and kills a woman. To prove the theory of psychological inheritance, Masaki contrived a vast experiment to reproduce that fatal chain in the present day. As "I" reads on, the line between fact and fiction blurs: is he Go Ichirō himself, or no more than a subject of Masaki's experiment? What awaits him when he has read every record is the same striking of the wall clock that he woke to — and the novel leaves the reader, without a solution, inside a vertiginous circle.

Characters

Chapter-by-chapter synopsis

The app covers this work chapter by chapter (full text in the app).

  1. 1. About This Work
  2. 2. Main Characters
  3. 3. Major Supporting Characters
  4. 4. Awakening — “I” in Room Seven
  5. 5. The Specimen Room, and the Manuscript of “Dogra Magra”
  6. 6. Dr. Masaki's Papers — The Heretic's Sutra, the Brain Theory, and The Dream of the Foetus
  7. 7. The Unprecedented Testament — The Open Treatment Ward for the Insane
  8. 8. Go Ichirō's Two Seizures — The Killing of His Mother and His Bride
  9. 9. The Origin of the Scroll — Go Seishū and Lady Tai
  10. 10. Dr. Masaki, Who Should Be Dead — Twenty Years of W and M
  11. 11. Chiyoko's Poem, and the Extra from a Month Before
  12. 12. The Ending — The Circling Sound of the Clock
  13. 13. Key Motifs and Foreshadowing

The opening (original text)

Opening Song Foetus, foetus, why do you leap? Is it that you understand your mother's heart and are afraid? …………Bzzzz————nnnn————nnnnn……………… When I came dimly to myself, this sound like the droning of bees had left the deep and elastic remainder of itself ringing clearly in the hollow of my ear.

Dogra Magra by Yumeno Kyūsaku (Aozora Bunko)

The ending (original text)

……Bzzz…… The girl Asada Shino's shattered skull, bent forward, pouring out black liquid…… ……Bzzz…… Yashiko's blood-covered face, the eyes drawn back…… ……Bzz bzz bzz bzz bzz…… A close-cropped head with its cheek torn open……a girl with her hair down her back and her brow smashed in……a bearded face with the skin ripped from the forehead…… I covered my face with both hands. I leapt from the bed just as I was. ……I ran straight ahead. Then my forehead struck something hard, and everything before my eyes went suddenly bright. ……And at once it was pitch dark again. In that instant a face exactly like my own floated up in the darkness before me, hair and beard sticking out wildly, sunken pupils glittering. And when it had met my eyes it opened its great red mouth at once and laughed aloud……and then—— "……Ah……Go Seishū……" — and before I could finish crying out, it vanished as if wiped away. ……Bzzzz…………nnn…………nnnn………….

Dogra Magra by Yumeno Kyūsaku (Aozora Bunko)

Famous passages

O fetus O fetus why do you leap so do you already know your mother's heart and tremble at it

The eerie verse that opens the entire work. An incantatory question about the memory of the womb opens the door onto a labyrinth, one of the three great strange books of Japanese detective fiction.

Boooo — — — — — — nnnn — — — — — — nnnnn................ As I dimly opened my eyes, this bee-like droning sound still lingered clearly in my ears, its deep, elastic reverberation not yet faded.

The opening of the main text, in which the narrator wakes to the sound of a clock. It is the entrance to a labyrinth, in which an amnesiac “I” begins searching for himself inside a mental hospital.

Read the original

The original Japanese text is available at Aozora Bunko, and the app downloads the same text for its vertical-text reader.

Aozora Bunko library card

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