Hatsunosuke Hirabayashi: 2 works in the original Japanese, with translation

Refers to the detective Dupin in the American writer Edgar Allan Poe's "The Murders in the Rue Morgue" (1841), one of the earliest famous detectives in the history of detective fiction. The remark here about him darkening his room during the day to create a nighttime atmosphere comes from Poe's story.

After the Great Kantō Earthquake of 1923, the Japanese government established the Imperial Capital Reconstruction Institute (later renamed the Reconstruction Bureau) to oversee the rebuilding of Tokyo. The red lines and radial roads on the map in this story belong to the post-earthquake Greater Tokyo urban plan, which remade Tokyo with radial and ring roads, and large numbers of old residential plots were compulsorily acquired and cut up.