Despite having read all of Ranpo's collected works a long time ago, I ended up with a copy of this on my desk and out of nostalgia, I ended up reading it. Man, unlike Ranpo's horror stories, the Akechi series had a much rougher beginning as these four short stories in the anthology are all over the place in terms of narrative style. Without going into spoilers, the first two stories are told in first person perspective from a nameless character who serves as the typical Watson character. The latter two are in third person either from an omniscient narrator or by just jumping from various character perspectives. The first two stories are also more traditional Golden Age detective stories (locked room murder and phantom thevies), whilst the latter have horror/supernatural elements infused which Akechi must debunk using his powers of reasoning.
Anyways, what interested me more was the translation itself. As I read it, I couldn't help but feel I was reading a Sherlock Holmes novel or something. And by the end I realised why - despite being translated in 2014, for some reason the translator really tried to capture the time period feel of Japan by using a Victorian-esque style of writing. Things like "gay" appears a lot throughout the book in its original meaning as well as other... not anachronisms, but I can't think of the right word. It was really weird, but once you got used to it then it wasn't too bad.
But whatever, it was a decent time waster for a few hours and while I would recommend other works by Ranpo more, sadly a lot of his work simply isn't available in English. Also Seishi Yokomizo is the best writer of JPN detective fiction and you can fite me on that. :tongue:
