The Great Dark Room

The Great Dark Room is a full-length detective novel by Edogawa Rampo, the founder of Japanese detective fiction, featuring the famous detective Kogoro Akechi. This volume is the fourth in The Complete Young Detective Works of Edogawa Rampo published by Times Literature and Art Publishing House, translated by Ye Rongding. The story opens on an empty expanse of sea: in a lifeboat, Dr. Ariake, Osone, and Mikuni scheme against one another at the brink of death, and in the end only one of them returns to Japan, setting in motion a long-standing plot. More than twenty years later, around the old grudge between the Ariake family and another family, inheritance, wills, and buried enormous wealth become entangled, and a series of seemingly unrelated clues gradually converge. Meanwhile, the arch-villain the Fiend with Twenty Faces runs an underground treasure vault called the Great Dark Room: it displays treasures stolen from around the world, and its maze-like structure, traps, and light-and-shadow snares seal the entrance, making it hard for intruders to survive. Facing layer upon layer of deception, the true-and-false confusion of impostors, and a string of kidnappings, Kogoro Akechi must reconstruct the truth from trivial details, find the path to the Great Dark Room, and uncover the true identity of the opponent who always wears a mask. The book continues the bizarre atmosphere and fast pace typical of Rampo's work, balancing scientific deduction with popular adventure, and is a representative text for understanding the early honkaku detective fiction of Japan.