Yoru no Yume
The waking world is a dream. Only the dreams of night are real.
Edogawa Ranpo’s motto, which he would write out for anyone who asked for his autograph.
English translations of Japanese fiction from 1917 to 1935: stories of doubles and madness, told by people you shouldn’t trust. Each book comes as an EPUB and a PDF, and you can read its opening here before you buy.
The books
1917
Two letters reach a chief of police, one in February and one in March. Their writer, a university man named Sasaki, begs to be believed sane before he says anything else. Then he sets out, with citations, the three occasions on which he and his wife Fusako have met their own doubles.
1935
A young man wakes on the stone floor of a locked cell in the psychiatric ward of Kyūshū Imperial University, with no memory of anything, not even his own name. Dr Wakabayashi of the forensic medicine department tells him that he is the key to an unsolved crime, and to the life’s work of the late Professor Masaki Keishi.