As a boy, Edogawa Rampo was, as he relates in one of the essays included in this collection, a devotee of popular fiction. Entering the fantastic twists and turns of his stories we are soon lost in them just as, when boys and girls ourselves, we became the characters in the romances and adventures we devoured.

To fully grasp Rampo's achievement, however, we need to read both his stories and essays. Kurodahan Press, in making available this exquisitely translated and edited collection of both fiction and nonfiction, has, therefore, done readers a tremendous service.

The essays, in giving us a glimpse of the mind behind the fiction, help us to understand what it is that makes the stories more than escapist ephemera. Rampo reveals, for example, in a 1926 piece, that motion pictures seemed to him "the dreams of an opium addict," "a weird, gloomy world from which, struggle as you might, you can never awaken." That he later found (in a 1927 piece) the "disembodied voices" emanating from phonographs, radios, and telephones equally unsettling reveals a sensibility alarmed by aspects of modernity that most of his urban contemporaries surely took for granted.