Kyūsaku Yumeno, which translates roughly to “a field where dreams are always growing,” was the pen name of the Japanese writer Taidō Sugiyama (b. 1889). Notorious in Japan for unusual, often downright bizarre detective stories, Yumeno is famous as one of Japan’s first avant-garde writers and as a product of the rapid modernization and westernization of the Taishō era (1912–26). His magnum opus, the experimental mystery Dogura Magura, was adapted for film in the late 1980s. He died suddenly at the age of forty-seven in 1936.