Chapter 3 my resume

In the autumn of the year before last (Showa 29), one month before my 60th birthday, I stayed in Ito Onsen to write a novel. At that time, I saw a travel guide "Izu Shopkeeper", and discovered my ancestors in it. According to the records in the genealogy, my earliest ancestor was "Hirai Juroemon, the hometown of Ito, Mashu, who lived a hundred and thirteen years old and died in the second ugly year of Sadakyo".Every time I go to Ito Onsen, I always want to carefully investigate the ancestral home, but I have never been able to do so.In the travel guide just mentioned, one of my ancestors was a woman named Yuguang Hirai (should be pronounced as O-Mitsu).Her relics are preserved in Tokoji, a village of Lengchuan on the road between Ito and Shuzenji.In addition, the flight attendant also mentioned Mrs. Lengchuan's name in the travel guide.

I immediately flew to Dongxiang Temple and met with the 30th generation abbot Mr. Hiromichi Sugimoto. The abbot found ancient books passed down from generation to generation in the temple for me to read.Among them is "Ms. Lengchuan's Brief Calendar", which was completed in the early Meiji period.Although the text is naive, it details my ancestor Yuguang Hirai's brave wife, and I will copy it below. During the Genroku period, the lord of Ise Kunitsu, Todo and Izumi Mamoru Takahisa, went to Atami Hot Spring in the country for recuperation.During the recuperation period, when I was spending my spare time and roaming around, I saw a woman (an ugly woman) washing dirty clothes in Sichuan, so she molested her.The girl was so angry that she splashed water on Gao Jiugong, and ran away without a trace.Gao Jiugong was greatly moved, praised this brave and beautiful woman, and ordered people to find her whereabouts.Hearing that this girl is the younger sister of Kahei Hirai, Lengchuan Village, Hemao County, the country, her name is Yu Guang, and she was hired by a household in Rehai as a maidservant, so she sent envoys to ask her to be a concubine.In the eleventh year of Yuanlu (1698), in the Yin year, Jiabingwei sent Yu Guang into the Fujitang family as a concubine.This is the original book of Mrs. Leng Chuan, who is a virtuous wife of the Goto family, chaste, virtuous, gentle and compassionate. Although she is a maid, she has both intelligence and ability, and she is flexible in power.In the fifteenth year of Yuanlu (1702), Mrs. Lengchuan, in order to repay her parents' great kindness, enshrined her parents' spiritual seats in Dongxiang Temple in her hometown, Bodhisattva, and built a statue of Zhengguanyin made by Xingji Bodhisattva in the same temple, and donated scriptures Treasures.

Comparing the genealogy of my family and the Todo family, there are many errors in this account.The first generation of the Fujido family is Gao Hu, the second generation is Gao Ci, the third generation is Gao Jiu, and the fourth generation is Gao Mu.According to my family's genealogy, Yu Guang served the second-generation Gao Ci and was the biological mother of the fourth-generation Gao Mu Gong (this is the same as recorded in the ancient temple books).The fourth-generation Gao Mugong is the son of the second-generation Gao Cigong, so Yu Guang must serve not the third-generation Gao Jiugong, but the second-generation Gaocigong.In addition, there is also the question of age. Yu Guang’s younger brother Hirai Youyi became Gao Cigong’s imperial acupuncturist because of his sister in the ninth year of Kanbun (1669). Not before this.

Yu Guang's younger brother, Youyi, was an acupuncture doctor with a meager salary, but his son Hirai Chenjiu, after his death in the fourth year of Baoyong (1707), skyrocketed and had a salary of a thousand stones.It should be that Yu Guang's son Gao Mugong of the fourth generation increased Chen Jiu's salary in order to take care of his biological mother.From then on, the Hirai family served as samurai from generation to generation, and received a salary of a thousand stones, until the seventh generation of Hirai Suemon Chen went out of office and lived in seclusion in the fourth year of Meiji.Hirai Senoemon-Chan was my grandfather.

My grandfather served the Ise Todo family and lived in Tsu City, Mie Prefecture for generations, where my father Shigeo Hirai was born.But there was a dude among my uncles, who lost all his family property after his grandfather died, and his father graduated from the law department of Kansai University in Osaka by working part-time. He was the first graduate.A few years after graduation, he wrote an 800-page masterpiece "Detailed Explanation of Japanese Commercial Law", which was published by Osaka Kaidodo.At first, he worked in the Naga County government department in Nabari Town (now restructured into a city) in Mie Prefecture. Later, he was transferred to Kameyama in the same prefecture, and then to Nagoya City. Consultant, manager of Masaka Okuda, a chaebol in the same city.However, my father became independent in the late Meiji 1930s and opened a store selling various imported machinery and coal. There were more than a dozen shop assistants in the store, and the business was very prosperous for a while.It's a pity that this store went bankrupt in the 45th year of Meiji. My father traveled to Mashan, North Korea to engage in land reclamation business, and later returned to the mainland.He did a lot of work in his life. When he died at the age of 59 in the 14th year of Taisho, he was a nominal cadre of a cotton cloth wholesaler in Osaka.

My father married my mother during his first job as secretary of the Nabari Town Government in Mie Prefecture, and I was born there in the 27th year of the Meiji era.I was four years old when I moved to Nagoya City, and I was nineteen years old when my father went bankrupt, the year I graduated from junior high school.In the past, I lived a well-to-do life with adequate food and clothing, and my grandmother was still alive. She brought me up when I was a child, and I was spoiled and spoiled. I heard that when I was two or three years old, I was very talkative and good at imitating, but as I got older, the sensible me stopped talking, and I became more and more fond of being alone and fantasizing.I used to walk the streets of the town at dusk talking out loud my fantasies.I don't like to talk to people, and since I was a child, I like to let my thoughts run wild by myself.To put it bluntly, it means thinking, but to put it bluntly, it means delusional.After growing up, this habit has not changed.

I was brought up by my grandmother, and I was spoiled since I was a child, and I was also the bully of the family, so after entering elementary school, when I first came into contact with strangers, I became a coward.I only dared to stand alone under the cherry blossom tree in the corner of the campus, watching everyone running and playing in a daze.But I was quite savvy. During the four years of ordinary elementary school at that time, I was either the monitor or the deputy monitor. According to the regulations at the time, after finishing ordinary elementary school, one had to attend higher elementary school for two more years before taking the middle school entrance examination.After I entered the higher primary school, there were domineering classmates who bullied me, which made me suffer mentally and physically, and hated going to school.After I went to middle school, I was also bullied by my classmates again, and school was like hell to me.In fact, it's not that the other party is bad, I think I was born a "child who is bullied", so my aversion to social life and my liking to think wildly by myself have intensified.When I was in middle school, I often pretended to be sick and asked for leave. In fact, I was indeed a weak child.In the five years of middle school, I only attended about half of the required class hours, and my grades fell in the middle because of this.Of course I don't play sports, I'm a sick kid who can't play horizontal bars or jumping horses.Physical education is the class I hate the most, especially gymnastics and running, which make my scalp tingle the most.

In this way, I hated school not for the coursework itself, but for completely unrelated reasons, and my studies got worse and worse as a result.I went to Shirakawa Hsoma Elementary School in Minamiisecho, Nagoya City, then entered the nearby Municipal Third Higher Elementary School, and I was the first graduate of Aichi Prefectural Fifth Junior High School (later renamed Atsuta Junior High School). After my father went bankrupt, he went to North Korea, and I went with him when I had nothing to do, and lived in Mashan for a while.Since I didn't want to give up my studies after finishing middle school, I asked my father to let me continue my education, saying that it would be fine even if I didn't subsidize my tuition fees. I would work and study on my own, and then went to Tokyo alone.It was an astonishingly brave decision for a cowardly and bullied kid, and it turns out that adventurousness runs in my veins.My father's bankruptcy didn't hit me too hard, but it aroused my great interest in the work-study method.

In the summer of the 45th year of Meiji (the first year of Taisho), I passed the preparatory entrance examination at Waseda University and entered the school. I chose the Department of Political Economy in the University Department, majoring in economics.As for part-time jobs, I first worked as odd jobs in a small printing factory in Tenjin-cho, Yushima, and then worked as a copyist. Soon after, I met Mr. Kawasaki Katsura, a fellow politician (father of former Minister of Health and Welfare Shuji Kawasaki), and helped edit Mr. Kawasaki’s publication. political magazine, and then lived in Mr. home.Under the introduction of my husband, I joined the Tokyo City Library as an administrator, and also served as an English tutor for securities practitioners.

In this way, I hardly experienced the fun of the so-called student life, and the student days just passed away.I have no pocket money, so reading in the library has become my only pleasure.In addition to the university library, I often go to libraries in Ueno, Hibiya, and Ohashi.I don't go to class very often, and I read books like economics in the library.I was tantamount to a "library graduate".In addition to professional books, I was obsessed with English detective novels by Edgar Allan Poe and Conan Doyle at that time. When I was a teenager, I read all the works of Heiyanleixiang. The plots of the works are old-fashioned, and the style is similar to those of Gaborio, Collins and others, even worse than them. In short, they are not very satisfying.In contrast, the short stories of Edgar Allan Poe, Conan Doyle, and Chesterton seem to condense the essence of mystery and reasoning, without redundant impurities, which refreshed me and fell in love with them ever since.In addition, works such as "The Gold Bug" and "Cryptography" by Edgar Allan Poe aroused my interest in Western cryptography, and I even searched the library for books on the history of cryptography.The knowledge accumulated at that time became the basis for my debut work in the future.

I graduated from Waseda in the summer of the fifth year of Taisho, when Konsu was twenty-three years old.When I was about to graduate, I dreamed of going to the United States.I plan to wash dishes and work in the United States, learn English writing, and become a detective writer in the United States.At that time, there were no detective magazines in Japan, and detective novels were not taken seriously at all. At that time, the works in American detective magazines were all boring stuff. I was confident that I could write more exciting works.But at that time, going to the United States required a huge "guarantee deposit" in addition to the travel expenses. I couldn't make up the money, so it became a pure dream. After graduation, I joined Nanyang Trading Company in Osaka under the introduction of Mr. Katsura Kawasaki.The work was fun at first, and I made pretty good grades, but within a year I got bored.The most terrible thing is that I have to live in the same room with my colleagues when I work in that company, and I have no time to be alone at all. Therefore, the habit of thinking alone mentioned above is not satisfied at all, which makes me uncomfortable more than anything else.Because of this, I unknowingly became lazy, started to drink too much, learned to play with women, and finally made mistakes at work.I left the company without permission and embarked on a vagabond tour—which became one of my lifelong hobbies—travelling and staying at hot springs in Izu while I still had some money on my hands.At that time, I read Tanizaki Junichiro's novel for the first time. From graduating from Waseda in the fifth year of Taisho to the fourteenth year of Taisho when I became a professional detective novel writer, I have done as many as fourteen or five kinds of occupations during these eight years.If you add the part-time job in my student days, I have worked in nearly twenty kinds of occupations.Moving house is more frequent than changing jobs. I moved 40 times during the period from my childhood home to the present Ikebukuro when I was 40 years old.It is rare that more than twenty years have passed since I settled in Ikebukuro.But before that, whether it was career or home, I kept changing like a bum. During the eight years of work, the longest one was one and a half years, and the shortest was only half a month. On average, one job was done for about half a year.I ran away from the trading company in Osaka mentioned earlier after one year of operation.Later, when I was wandering in the Izu Peninsula, I encountered Tanizaki Junichiro's novel for the first time. It was a short story called "Golden Death", which was similar in content to Edgar Allan Poe's "Arnheim Paradise" (The Domain of Paradise). Arnheim) or Landor's Cottage.I thought Japan only had naturalistic novels, but I was surprised that there were such writers.From then on, as long as it was Tanizaki's novel, I must read it, and then I fell in love with Sato Haruo, Akutagawa Ryunosuke, and Uno Koji. After this wandering, I was unemployed for half a year, and then worked in a portable typewriter firm for about two months.Later, under the introduction of my father's friend, I joined the general affairs department of the electrical department of the Toba Shipyard in Mie Prefecture, and lived in the current Toba City for more than a year.However, during this period, I became more and more lazy to go to work every day. I spread a bedding on the upper shelf of the closet in the single dormitory room, and hid in it to sleep during the day.Because the cabinet door was closed, my colleagues thought I had gone to work.I just stared at the ceiling of the closet in a daze, satisfying my whimsy.The experience at this time is not unrelated to the creation of the later novel "The Walker on the Ceiling".In addition, I have also had some strange behaviors, such as disappearing in the middle of the night, scaring everyone to their knees, and then sitting in the hall of the Zen temple in the town until the morning. "Why do people exist?" "Why do people live?" At that time, I was thinking about such questions. While working at the Toba Shipyard, I read Dostoevsky's Andy in Japanese for the first time and was deeply moved.I have read a lot of novels since I was a boy, but the ones that moved me the most in my life were, I think, Poe, Junichiro Tanizaki, and Dostoyevsky. Later, I couldn't stay in Toba anymore, so I went to Tokyo. With a mere thousand yen of funds, I opened a second-hand bookstore called "Three People's Study Room" on the street of Tuanzizaka with my two younger brothers. The experience of this period was later reflected in the novel.While running this shop, I married a wife I met at the Toba Shipyard.At that time, the finances were already tight enough, but I also set up a support club for the famous singer of the Asakusa Opera, Tagani Rizo, and spent a lot of money.Finally, he had no choice but to take over the part-time editorial job of the manga magazine "Tokyo PACK", but due to various factors, it lasted less than three months; in the end, he was at the end of his rope and started to play the bagpipes, set up a stall, and open a Chinese magazine. Here comes the ramen stand.This is a hard business that operates late at night. I made a lot of money, but my body couldn't bear it, so I gave up after only half a month. I once again had the cheek to ask Mr. Kawasaki for help, and asked him to arrange for me to work in the Tokyo Municipal Government, but I still couldn’t do it. I was often absent from work for no reason, and was fired within half a year.Then I fled to Osaka and became a reporter for "Osaka Jiji Shinpo" under the introduction of my father and friend, but I only worked there for half a year. When I returned to Tokyo again, under the introduction of my seniors, I became the Secretary-General of the Technician Union of the Japanese Workers' Club and edited the union's magazine. I did this job for a year and a half.Among the trade union committee members was Nozu Haruta, with whom I had a good affinity. He was Saburo Koga, who later got involved in the creation of detective novels almost at the same time as me. Afterwards, I joined the company that my senior introduced me to the Workers' Club, a hair oil manufacturer called Subukakita Chemical Research Institute, and I worked there as a manager for half a year before fleeing to Osaka.But this time I couldn't find a job quickly. From the summer to autumn of the 11th year of Taisho, I had nothing to do at my father's house for about half a year.At that time, I already had a child, and the family of three was living in a poor father's house, and it was really like sitting on pins and needles.In order to relieve boredom, I turned the cardboard box upside down as a desk, wrote two short detective stories, and sent them to Mr. Morishita Umura, the editor-in-chief of "New Youth". "New Youth" often published translated foreign detective stories, which stimulated me.I sent "A Receipt" and Mr. Morishita was full of praise for these two works, and even attached a promotional article saying that there were detective novelists in Japan who were not inferior to foreign writers. In April of the 12th year of Taisho The issue was published first, and "A Receipt" was published two or three months later.Judging from the current point of view, those two works are really worth mentioning, but because no one wrote detective novels at that time, they were able to win the first place, and I have benefited from them until later. But if you think about it, the manuscript fee is one yuan per page. Even if you can write one hundred pages a month, you will only earn one hundred yuan. This is not enough to attract me to become a professional detective novelist.Soon after writing these two manuscripts, I was hired by a law firm in Osaka to help out. I worked there for about half a year, and then I was introduced to the advertising department of the Osaka Mainichi Shimbun.Even new recruits there have bonuses in addition to their monthly salary, and they can receive an extra five or six hundred yuan a month (five or six times the monthly salary).So the manuscript fee of one yuan per page really couldn't impress me, and made me decide to change careers.Therefore, in the two years after the first novel was published, I only wrote after work, and only published five short stories. But at the end of the 13th year of Taisho, when I wrote "Psychological Test" (published the next year), the manuscript fee had risen to about two yuan, and other magazines began to ask me for manuscripts. During this period, the price even rose to four or five yuan per page. .I thought it would be no problem to maintain my life with such an income, so I quit my job at Mainichi Shimbun and moved to Tokyo in the first month of the 14th year of Taisho to become a professional writer. Therefore, in the next two years between the 14th and 15th years of Taisho, I published a total of 29 short stories and four serialized long stories, but the serialization of "One Inch Master" on "Asahi Shimbun" on the east and west ends And after the serialization of "New Youth", I printed postcards and distributed them to my relatives and friends, telling everyone that I would stop writing for a while.At the same time, he arranged for his wife to rent out the student dormitory in front of Waseda University, so that he could support himself, and then embarked on a wandering journey without destination.Because in the past two years, I have used up all the inspiration, and the content of "One Inch Master" in "Asahi Shimbun" is useless, which makes me fall into a strong self-loathing. This time I stopped writing for a year and a half. In fact, I even thought about not continuing to write, but I was defeated by Kodansha’s enthusiastic draft invitation and the temptation of high manuscript fees. Porridge.Because of this reason, as long as I have spare time, I want to take a break, announce to stop writing from time to time, and give myself a period of time without writing anything.The second time I stopped writing was in March of Showa 7, which lasted one year and eight months; the third time was in May of Showa 10, which lasted eight months; the fourth time was because of the policy of the War Intelligence Bureau, which prevented me from Published detective stories; I was also unable to write fiction for nearly ten years after the end of the war, so all told, I stopped writing for about seventeen years. It has been more than 31 years since I became a professional writer in the 14th year of Taisho, but I stopped writing for 17 years, which means that I have only worked for more than 14 years.Compared with writing, the rest time is longer, so the amount of creativity is quite small.If the works written after the war are included, there are 22 novels in total, 46 medium and short stories, 12 juvenile novels, 1 short story, and 8 volumes of essays and reviews. To 20,000 sheets of 400-character manuscript paper.It has been thirty-five years since I wrote my first novel. However, including all the essays, there are only 20,000 manuscript papers. This record is considered small, but the number of published volumes is quite a lot.There are several editions of the same work by several publishing houses, and the complete works have been published four times. Counting together the library edition, I have published 273 volumes of works now. (By May of the 35th year of the Showa era, there were 365 volumes.) From after the war to my 60th birthday in October of Showa 29, I hardly wrote novels. I was obsessed with British and American detective novels, published a lot of related introductions and comments, and even compiled the notes of these works into a book. This "Category Trick Integration".Before the war, I only published two collections of essays, "Wicked Man's Volunteer" and "Words of Ghosts". The first half of "Thirty Years of Detective Fiction", which is serialized in "Gem", was published as a book.In addition, the explanatory texts of the Hayakawa Pocket Reasoning Series have accumulated more than one volume and will be published in the near future.Adding up before and after the war, I have written a total of eight volumes of essay reviews. (Two more collections of essays were published later.) In October of Showa 29, the Detective Writers Club, the Predator Writers Club and the 27th Tokyo Writers Club held grand celebrations for my 60th birthday.At the banquet, I announced that I would take Yijiazi as an opportunity to start writing novels again. Thirty years after the next year, I have fulfilled my promise to some extent.In addition, at the same event, I announced the establishment of the Edogawa Ranpo Award and donated a million yen to the Detective Writers Club.The prize is a Sherlock Holmes statue (bronze statue with a height of 24 cm) made by Mr. Hori Shinji and a bonus of 50,000 yen.Last year, it was awarded by Kawataro Nakajima, the author of "Detective Storybook". Since I started writing, Japanese detective fiction has gone through four rounds of ups and downs.The first round of upsurge period is Showa four to seven years.During this period, the four publishing houses of Reform Society, Bowenguan, Pingfan Society and Chunyangtang simultaneously published the complete works of detective stories at home and abroad (twenty or twenty-four volumes each), and the personal complete works included "The Complete Works of Arsen Robin" ", "The Complete Works of Kosai Fuki", "The Complete Works of Edogawa Ranpo" and so on. In the second upsurge, the debate on "detective novels" was launched by Oguri Chongtaro, Mugi Takataro and Koga Saburo.Two writers spawned.Spring and Autumn Society, Black and White Study Room, Nippon Koronsha, and Liuxiang Academy have published many anthologies of domestic and foreign detective stories; as for personal complete works, there are revised editions of my complete works in Pingfan Society, "The Complete Works of Koga, Oshita, and Mu Mu" 20 The four volumes (Chunqiusha) and the ten volumes of "Edogawa Ranpo Anthology" (Shinchosha) were released during this period. The third upsurge was around the 21st to 24th year of the Showa era after the war. Publishing houses sprung up, but most of them were relatively amateur small publishing houses, which published countless old works of detective writers.The complete works of Japanese writers include "Mystery Fiction Series" by Yujisha. Among the translated works, there are "Black Selection" and "Rooster Reasoning Series". The Complete Works of Sherlock Holmes, The Complete Works of Arson Robin.During this period, five newcomers known as the "Post-war Five" also appeared: Shigeru Kayama, Kazuo Shimada, Fuutaro Yamada, Binguang Takagi, and Sando Otsubo. At the moment of the fourth upsurge, the Hayakawa Pocket Reasoning Series has published 150 books, far exceeding the previous record.Taking this as an opportunity, major publishing houses with strong strength planned to publish the complete works at home and abroad.It is a pity that there are no talented newcomers to emerge during the fourth upsurge, but under the influence of such a strong wave, I think the time when epoch-making newcomers will appear is not too far away. (Subsequently, there was a small whirlwind in the Japanese detective literary world, led by Matsumoto Seicho, Arima Laiyi, Kikumura and other writers in the mystery literary world. won the Naoki Award), Fumiko Shinzhang and others also attracted a lot of attention. Some of the single volumes of the above-mentioned authors have become bestsellers with sales of more than 100,000 copies. The world of mystery novels is unprecedented. Hiroshi Sano, who won the prize in the essay competition co-sponsored by "Gem", Haruhiko Ohyabu, who was born in "Gem", and others are also enthusiastic about writing mystery novels. The more special ones are the drama critic Yasuji Ito, and the doctor of engineering Shigeo Okiya. Amateur is actually very prominent. (Mr. Toban won the Naoki Award for "Veteran Actor Gagaku Detective Talk Series".)) , The Frog Room "Random Walk Essay")