Hi,
I have a Nintendo Switch and there’s a game that has hundreds of novels inside. There are about 20 or so works by Edogawa Ranpo. I was wondering what level of reading and Kanji would be required. I am about N2 or N3 or so and I’m trying to jump into reading novels. It seems not to bad from what I’m starting with, I just started reading Youkai Hakase.
Also, what are some of his best works? What’s a good work to start with? Also, he writes mostly mystery it seems which I really like, but I’m not super into gore or violence, do his works depict this excessively?
Thanks!
3 comments
I can’t speak to the level of Japanese Ranpo uses precisely, but he’s one of the capital-L Literature people. I suspect his Japanese might be tough for you to get through at your current level.
There is a spreadsheet floating around with the Aozora Bunko stories rated by difficulty. Rampo tends to come in relatively low as he tended to write detective stories and thrillers.
I have read some of his short stories in English and they were all pretty fun.
As a general rule, older works can be trickier just because you’re more likely to run into outdated words and speech patterns, but as far as “classic” authors go, I’d say Ranpo is on the easier side — should definitely be manageable at your level, and less challenging than, say, Akutagawa or Dazai, for example.
Here’s [one list](https://www.meijimura.com/meiji-note/post/rampo-10selections/) in Japanese of recommended/popular works by him — but I don’t imagine you can really go wrong anywhere. (I don’t know what works are in the collection you have, but I imagine they were chosen because they were popular and/or representative stories of his.)
And no, you really don’t need to worry about “excessive gore and violence” with Ranpo, any more than you would reading Sherlock Holmes stories. (Ranpo is basically Japan’s equivalent of Arthur Conan Doyle — and Edgar Allan Poe, which is where his pen name comes from.)