Japanese Literature Summaries
日本語

Kotō no oni — Summary and Characters

Grotesquerie on a lonely island

Author
Edogawa Ranpo
Published
January 1929
First appeared in
Asahi
Form
Novel
Genres
  • Mystery
  • Horror
Setting
  • Tokyo
Length
181,869 characters
Reading time
About 6 hr 4 min
Orthography
Modern script and kana

About this work

Edogawa Ranpo's first novel, serialized in the magazine Asahi from January 1929 to February 1930. Over the orthodox detective puzzles of a locked-room murder and a killing in a crowd in broad daylight, he laid the grotesque and the decadent: deformity, sideshows, and love and hatred with a homoerotic charge. It is his central work of the period, taking the taste for the weird he had built up in short stories and spreading it across the architecture of a novel. Told as the narrator's first-person recollection, with his precarious bond with Moroto Michio, who plays the detective, as another of its axes.

Summary

Minoura, who works at a trading company, loses his sweetheart Kizaki Hatsuyo, stabbed to death by someone in her own house with every entrance locked; and then Miyamagi Kōkichi, the amateur detective he asks to look into it, is killed in broad daylight at a bathing beach before a crowd of witnesses. The truth behind the two impossible crimes turns out to be an unexpected one: a boy acrobat, Tomonosuke, hid inside a cloisonné vase sold at a secondhand shop and slipped up from under the floor to do the work. Joining forces with his friend Moroto Michio, who had loved Hatsuyo without hope, Minoura follows the code hidden in an old genealogy she left behind and the strange diary of a pair of twins, and crosses to Iwayajima, a lonely island in Kishū that is Michio's native place. The master of the island, Moroto Jōgorō, proves to be a fearful man who, hating human beings for his own ugliness, buys up infants and maims them by surgery to sell to sideshows; Tomonosuke is one of his creatures, and the beautiful girl Hide-chan, shut up in the storehouse, is among his victims. Following Jōgorō into the labyrinth beneath the island, Minoura and Michio come near death again and again in the darkness, and learn the astonishing truth about the Higuchi family — that Jōgorō is not in fact Michio's real father, and that Hide-chan is Midori, Hatsuyo's long-lost sister. Jōgorō goes mad with the hidden treasure before his eyes, and Minoura escapes with his life, though the terror of it turns his hair white in a single night. Later, married to Hide-chan, he uses the great treasure with her to found a refuge for those the island had maimed.

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. Supporting Characters
  4. 4. The Opening — A Room With No Way In
  5. 5. Broad-Daylight Tragedy and a Cloisonné Vase
  6. 6. General Nogi's Secret and the Twins' Diary
  7. 7. To the Lonely Island of Iwayajima
  8. 8. The Labyrinth Beneath the Earth and the True Face of the Demon
  9. 9. The Conclusion — A Happy Ending
  10. 10. Key Motifs and Foreshadowing

The opening (original text)

I am not yet thirty, and my thick hair has gone white to the last strand. Can there be another human being like this? A splendid cap of cotton wool, no worse than that of the man they once called the White-Headed Minister, sits on my young head. People who do not know my history turn puzzled eyes on my head the moment they meet me. The blunter ones, before the greetings are well over, ask me straight out about my white hair, wondering. That is the question that plagues me, from men and women alike; but there is one more, which only women on the closest terms with my wife come to ask me quietly. It is a little indelicate, but it concerns the terribly large scar on my wife's left hip, at the top of the thigh. There is a cruel red mark there, of an irregular round shape, that looks like the trace of some great operation.

Kotō no oni by Edogawa Ranpo (Aozora Bunko)

The ending (original text)

I had been looking forward to his coming up to Tokyo, meaning to make him director of my surgical hospital; but within a month of his return to his home he fell ill and became a guest of the other world. Of all the things that went well, this one thing alone I regret. In the notice of his death from his father there was this passage: "To the moment he drew his last breath, Michio called neither his father's name nor his mother's; he only held your letter to him and went on calling your name alone."

Kotō no oni by Edogawa Ranpo (Aozora Bunko)

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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