The Bronze Devil: Boy Detectives Club, #2

By Ranpo Edogawa

A thief is on the loose in Tokyo, a smash and grab artist that targets high-end jewelry stores and steals only rare and valuable watches and timepieces. The identity of the burglar is no mystery. It's a metal robot, dubbed the "Bronze Devil" by the press. Nothing is safe from this mighty machine. One night the Bronze Devil even carts away an entire clock tower.

Now it has set its sights on the estate of Ryunosuke Tezuka and the "Royal Luminous Watch."

The police know the Bronze Devil's next victim because the robot brazenly told them the time and the place. Except with its almost magical ability to appear and disappear out of nowhere, the police are powerless to stop one theft after the other. That can only mean it's time to put master sleuth Kogoro Akechi and the Boy Detectives Club on the case.

Ranpo Edogawa's first Boy Detectives Club novel since 1939 features the debut of the "Street Gang Irregulars," a motley crew of war orphans inspired by Arthur Conan Doyle's Baker Street Irregulars. Against such a formidable foe, these clever kids will have their work cut out for them.

But let there be no doubt that Edogawa's new and improved crime-fighting crew will come through in the end.

• Language: English
• Publisher: Peaks Island Press
• Release date: Aug 1, 2020
• ISBN: 9781005422875

Ranpo Edogawa

Edogawa Ranpo is the pen name (derived from Edgar Allan Poe) of Taro Hirai (1894–1965), a tireless promoter of the mystery genre in Japan. He is best remembered for the Kogoro Akechi and Boy Detectives Club novels, published between 1925 and 1962. The Boy Detectives Club stories also intersect with Edogawa's Fiend with Twenty Faces series, the Fiend being a master of disguise and Detective Akechi's nemesis.

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Introduction

Published in 1949, The Bronze Devil was Ranpo Edogawa’s first Boy Detectives Club novel since 1939 (note Detective Akechi’s sly reference to this decade-long leave of absence in chapter six), when censorship and wartime sumptuary laws (Extravagance is the Enemy) put the series—inspired in no small part by British author Arthur Conan Doyle—on hold.

Over that ten-year span, Edogawa published only one novel, a standalone mystery, in 1943.

During the war, Edogawa wrote short stories more in line with the war effort (similar to how Hollywood Sherlock Holmes movies of the era had Holmes fighting the Nazis). However, he did so under various pseudonyms in order to disassociate these stories from his well-established and popular Detective Akechi and Boy Detectives Club mysteries.

The end of the war in 1945 brought General Douglas MacArthur and the Occupation to Japan. Accompanying the conservative MacArthur (who briefly ran in the 1948 Republican Party presidential primary) was a small army of New Deal idealists determined to reform Japanese society along democratic lines. New press freedoms soon followed.

The enthusiastic embrace of those press freedoms produced a tidal change in the Japanese mass media. Driven by a hunger to speak, the number of publishers increased six-fold over the next six years. Film production prospered as well.

Akira Kurosawa made nine movies during the Occupation, beginning with No Regrets for Our Youth in 1946 and One Wonderful Sunday in 1947.

In 1946, Ranpo Edogawa co-founded Jewels, a journal dedicated to mystery fiction, and went on to publish four novels between 1949 and 1952.

Sazae-san, Machiko Hasegawa’s family-centered newspaper comic, debuted in 1946. An anime series based on the comic has been in production since 1969, making it the world’s longest running animated television series.

Shizuko Ohashi co-founded Notebook for Living in 1948, a home improvement magazine for women still in print.

In 1949 alone, 45,000 manuscripts were submitted to Occupation censors for approval. Ah, and there was a rich irony in this. As Supreme Commander Allied Powers (SCAP), MacArthur was in a real sense Japan’s last shogun. The idealistic goals promulgated by the Occupation planners notwithstanding, the reputation of his office took precedence.

When it came to what freedoms the press enjoyed, SCAP had the final word. In 1948, Lindesay Parrott, Tokyo bureau chief for the New York Times, observed that all major policy still is made by the Occupation authorities and even the most minor detail is checked and counterchecked on local levels by military government teams.

Perhaps the even richer irony was that MacArthur’s super-government running Japan relied heavily on the existing Japanese bureaucracy, meaning that for the most part, Japan’s wartime censors simply changed the nameplates on their offices and went to work for the new boss. And in Japan, the first rule of the Occupation was: You do not talk about the Occupation.

As a result, The Bronze Devil contains not a single mention of the Occupation or the approximately 200,000 soldiers and civilians deployed throughout Japan under the command of SCAP and the British Commonwealth Occupation Force.

For a writer like Edogawa, discretion proved the better part of valor. Not that censorship is a good thing, but by skirting the obvious topical references, Edogawa imbued The Bronze Devil with a timeless quality, such that it could have taken place practically anytime between the end of the war and the early 1960s.

There is one important exception that does pin down the time frame for those familiar with the social conditions of the period—the war orphans that Yoshio Kobayashi recruits to form the Street Gang Irregulars.

A 1948 Ministry of Health and Welfare report put the number of orphaned and homeless children in Japan at 123,510. The majority were placed with relatives or sent to orphanages. But thousands still fell through the holes in Japan’s shattered social safety net. Yoshio’s recruitment pitch makes clear the hard lives the war orphans were living.

All right, gentlemen—by which I mean all of you here—the gang bosses have you picking up cigarette butts. I don’t have a problem with that. But some of you are stealing as well. Don’t think you can fool me. I know what you’re up to. I also know that it’s not like you gentlemen want to become pickpockets and thieves. You don’t have a choice, right? You lost your fathers and your mothers. There aren’t any adults around to take care of you. But I’m telling you, if you keep going down that road, it’s not going to end well. So I’ve got an offer for you. I’d like you to join my Boy Detectives Club.

In Embracing Defeat: Japan in the Wake of World War II, historian John Dower provides a few more details in a short description that is remarkably congruent with Edogawa’s.

Many of these children lived in railroad stations, under trestles and railway overpasses, in abandoned ruins. They survived by their wits—shining shoes, selling newspapers, stealing, recycling cigarette butts, illegally selling food coupons, and begging.

Having found a home in the black market, more than a few of the war orphans went on to become foot soldiers and lieutenants in the burgeoning yakuza.

But at least in The Bronze Devil, thanks to the efforts of Detective Kogoro Akechi and Yoshio Kobayashi, the Street Gang Irregulars could look forward to something other than a life of crime. For Edogawa’s readers (the same age as the Irregulars), they could even be said to symbolize the hopeful future Japan would be racing toward less than a decade hence.

Chapter 1

The Grinding of Gears

The moon shone bright and clear on that winter night. A solitary police officer stood watch outside the police box adjacent to the bridge abutment near Ginza Avenue. It was the dead of night, past one o’clock in the morning.

During the daylight hours, buses and cars and electric trams crowded this major thoroughfare. Now it was as deserted as a fallow field in the countryside. Aside from the glittering moonlight dancing off the two pairs of steel rails, there were no other signs of life. The entirety of Tokyo at that moment seemed as lonely as a graveyard.

The policeman stood beneath the red light that adorned the police box, attentively scanning his surroundings. With each breath, his mouth puffed out a cloud of white fog from beneath a dark moustache, his exhalations freezing in the cold.

What appeared to be a drunkard walked down the tracks between the shining steel rails, a big man wearing a blue suit and a blue felt hat. Despite the brisk weather, he wasn’t wearing an overcoat.

Hoh, the officer muttered. This chap must have tied on one too many.

There was something odd about the man’s gait. The officer’s assumption about the man being drunk was altogether reasonable. But on closer examination, inebriation could not explain his manner of locomotion. The man didn’t sway from left to right but walked like he was wearing artificial legs. And not the kind of artificial legs commonly associated with amputees.

More like machine-powered legs.

Shadowed by the brim of his hat, the man’s swarthy face showed no distinct features. He stared straight ahead, as if staggering along in a somnolent daze.

But, no, that wasn’t the strangest thing about him. What resembled glowing tufts of silver hung from his hands, swinging back and forth as he walked along, sparkling like jewelry in the moonlight. Not only from his hands—more of the silvery items dangled from the pockets of the man’s blue suit, such that his whole body glimmered with light.

The man was still too far away for the police officer to make out what the objects were. Maybe strips of silver paper or strings of glass beads. In any case, he didn’t have any reason to arrest the chap and let him pass by. But as the man drew closer, the officer was in for a shocking realization.

The glowing objects were pocket watches, dozens of watches swinging on their chains from his hands and pockets.

Who was this man strolling past the police box in the middle of the night with nary a care in the world, bundles of watches hanging off his body? Was he a fool? Was he mad? Or possessed of a condition more frightening than mere madness?

The officer was later struck by a curious thought. Those were indeed bundles of watches. And I’m pretty sure I could hear the whirring of gears. Yet even a whole bunch of watches couldn’t produce a loud sound like that.

The only reasonable explanation was that the humming sound came from the watches. If so, the ticking of the second hands should have been overwhelming. Except the police officer was sure the unsettling sound he heard was closer to that of a big man grinding his teeth.

Chapter 2

The Iron Finger

Earlier that evening, an alarming incident took place at Hakuhodo, a famous watch store on Ginza Avenue.

The store closed its doors at ten o’clock. After the owner shuttered the show window, he and his employees called it a day. They all lived on the premises. Because the proprietor of Hakuhodo was only temporarily leasing the space, it didn’t have steel security shutters but ordinary wooden rain shutters.

Around midnight, a racket erupted from out front. The teenage employee who slept in the store jumped to his feet and pointed a small flashlight—the only thing in reach—in the direction of the noise. Too startled to shout, he stood there like a stone, staring at the blue appendage rummaging inside the show window.

At first, he thought it was a big blue caterpillar. It was in fact a person’s arm. The arm of a person wearing a blue suit swept every one of the prized pocket watches from the glass shelves.

The arm had first broken through the shutters and then punched a big hole in the thick glass of the show window. The noise he heard came from the shattering of wood and glass.

Thief! The cry spontaneously welled up in his throat.

Thief! An older employee, who’d awakened a short while before, joined in. Emboldened by the boy’s shouts, he bellowed in a loud enough voice to make sure the miscreant heard him too. A thief is breaking in!

A big commotion erupted. Starting with the owner, the rest of the employees jumped out of bed