A Mystery Solved - Rampo Edogawa and Hanns Heinz Ewers

I have been reading "50 Mystery and Detective works you should read." This nearly 10,000 page book is 162 Japanese yen or about 1.5 US dollars (as of the date of this post) and contains dozens of mystery and suspense stories around the world translated into English. It is good for reading before bed. Last week, I started to read one of them, "The Spider (1915)" by Hanns Heinz Ewers. I didn't know the author. Starting to read for a few minutes, however, I felt like deja vu and realized that a long time ago I had read a very similar story by Rampo Edogawa (1894 - 1965), "Doctor Mera's Mysterious Crimes (1931)." Rampo Edogawa, the father of the Japanese modern mystery, is one of the most famous Japanese suspense and mystery authors. He admired Edgar Allan Poe so much that he made his pseudonym sound like Poe. For details, please go to: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Edogawa_Ranpo. 

The plot of these two stories is almost the same, but the tone and mood of the two stories is different. A psychological entanglement in "The Spider" between a man and a woman does not exist in this Rampo's story. Instead, the fear of imitation is more emphasized. Rampo admitted that it had been based on The Spider. There is no secret about it. But I am still amazed at this discovery and understood why I, who was a child being interested only in western mysteries, was so thrilled by the story. A mystery has been solved.