It was around April of 1916, as I recall, that I first conceived the idea of writing the Hanshichi Casebook. I had been reading Conan Doyle’s Sherlock Holmes stories here and there for some time but had never read them straight through from beginning to end. One day, having occasion to visit the Maruzen bookshop, I bought three volumes — the Adventures, the Memoirs, and the Return — and read all three at a single sitting. A keen interest in detective fiction welled up in me at once, and I found myself seized by the desire to try my hand at the form. I had read Hume and others before, of course, but it was Doyle who truly struck the spark.
I was not yet free to begin, however. I went on hunting down more of Doyle’s writings and set about reading The Last Galley, The Green Flag, The Captain of the Polestar, the Round the Fire Stories, and various other collections of his short fiction, one after another. But I had my own work to attend to: I was preparing a serial novel for the Jiji Shinpō at the time, and my reading did not progress as quickly as I would have liked. From when I had started it took roughly a month, and it was late May before I finished the lot.
When at last I sat down to write, what struck me was this: no one had ever written detective fiction set in the Edo period. The tales of Ōoka and Itakura were fundamentally adjudication records, concerned with trials and judgments rather than with investigation, and it seemed to me that a story built around detection itself would make for something fresh. There was a further consideration. Writing detective fiction set in the present day carried the constant risk of lapsing into imitation of Western models, whereas committing to a purely Edo-period mode might yield something with a flavor all its own. I was fortunate in possessing a reasonable working knowledge of Edo customs, manners, and statutes, as well as the world of the city magistrates, their constables and inspectors, and the network of private thief-takers.
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