一人二役Hitoriniyaku — A Man of Two Parts

Contents

1. A Bored Husband's Strange DisguiseThe narrator introduces T, an idle man of leisure who, though married to a beautiful wife, keeps chasing other women out of sheer boredom. Curious to see how his wife would behave with another man, T comes home one night in new clothes and a false moustache. In the dark of their bed, the wife feels the moustache and cries out, and T turns away and pretends to snore.
2. A Cigarette Case and a Missing HusbandT slips out of bed while his wife sleeps, leaves the strange silver cigarette case by her pillow, and climbs over the garden wall to spend the night at a teahouse. The next morning his wife finds the case and remembers the moustache from the night before, and when T comes home looking sheepish, he pretends to know nothing about it. He coaxes her into telling him everything, cites a drinking companion as his alibi, and enjoys frightening her with talk of a ghostly 'soul-splitting sickness' and hints that she has a secret lover.
3. The Wife Falls for the Phantom LoverT repeats his night-time masquerade again and again. His wife comes to believe the mysterious moustached visitor is a real man, starts hiding his tokens from her husband and whispers guilty endearments to him. T has got exactly what he planned, yet he finds himself truly jealous of a rival who is nobody but himself.
4. Caught in His Own TrapT, who now finds his wife irreplaceable, grows jealous of the imaginary lover he played and for whom she now longs. Unwilling to confess or to kill off his invented rival, he resolves to become that other man for good. He alters his face, sends a separation letter from Kyūshū, and returns as a stranger, whom his bewildered wife comes to accept as someone quite different from her husband.
5. The Trickster Who Was TrickedT and his wife move house and start living together as a new couple, and T gives up his wild ways for good. Some time later the narrator meets them by chance, and T cheerfully admits that his wife saw through his disguise from the very start and only pretended to be fooled. The narrator, who had half suspected this, quietly wishes the happy couple well.

Before you read

• The narrator speaks to a listener in casual plain style. Sentence-final ね, よ and だよ mark asides and comments, not plot events, so read them as the voice of someone telling an anecdote.
• Learn the grammar of guessing and certainty early, because the narrator constantly speculates about what T and his wife are thinking: 〜に相違ない (must be), 〜か知れたものではない (who knows what), 〜(よ)う筈もない (cannot possibly), 〜ないでもあるまい (it is not impossible that).
• Expect old spellings and kanji: 丈け for だけ, 相 in 相違, 鹽梅 (あんばい, 'state of things'). The colloquial negative 〜やしない (= 〜はしない) also appears often.
• Speech styles help you tell the speakers apart. The wife uses soft, polite feminine forms such as 妾 (わたし), いらっしった and お帰りなすった. T speaks casually to her, but in the last part he switches to polite です/ます with the narrator.
• Narrative 〜たものだ describes T's habitual behaviour ('he would often…'), and 〜ようものなら introduces a feared consequence ('if he were to…, then…'). Recognising both makes the repeated night-time visits in Parts 2–3 much easier to follow.

Words to know

The most useful words from the notes across the story.

Plot summary

About the author

His pen name is a Japanese rendering of the name of Edgar Allan Poe, whom he admired. He began with detective stories such as 二銭銅貨 and went on to create the detective Akechi Kogorō. He also wrote many tales of the grotesque and the perverse, of which 人間椅子 is a famous example. Later he wrote the popular Boy Detectives series for young readers and promoted the mystery genre as an editor and critic. Japan's Edogawa Rampo Prize for mystery fiction is named after him.

More stories by Edogawa Ranpo →