Usagi Yojimbo DojoBoard

Is anyone here a fan of Edogawa Rampo? (His real name was Tarō Hirai, his pen name came from the Japanese pronunciation of Edgar Allan Poe, who was one of his favorite writers.) I haven't read very much of his stuff yet, just a few of the stories in the book "Japanese Tales of Mystery and Imagination," but I like what I've read so far. Kurodahan Press is planning to release a book of Rampo's essays and stories that have never been translated before (I think), but it's not out yet. I was interested to see that it includes a Rampo story called "The Dancing Dwarf" since I once read a book of short stories by Haruki Murakami called The Elephant Vanishes for a literature class that included a story with the same title.

http://www.kurodahan.com/e/catalog/titles/j0020.html

I'm interested in Rampo's work because several of them are set in Japan around the 1920s, a period of Japanese history that I don't know a lot about. For some reason, the stories that I've read make me think just a little bit of silent German horror movies, and I consider that a good thing since I like them a lot.

I have seen a couple of Japanese movies based on Rampo's work (One of them was Kinji Fukasaku's Black Lizard), and years ago, I watched the movie The Mystery of Rampo on videotape, but I don't remember a lot about it.

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Edogawa_Rampo

If I'm not mistaken, the main character of "Detective Conan", Conan Edogawa, got his name from Edogawa Rampo and Sir Arthur Conan Doyle, creator of Sherlock Holmes.