Published in 1935 after more than 10 years of planning and writing, it is noted as one of Japan's "three great mysterious novels", alongside Oguri Mushitaro's The Black Death Mansion Murders and Nakai Hideo's An Offering to Nothingness.
In the story, the original meaning of "Dogura Magura" is explained as a dialect of the Nagasaki region, referring to the magic of Christians, priests, or as a corrupted version of "confused, taken aback" or "dōmawari, mekurami," but the details are unclear.
In 1926, the year he made his debut as a writer, Yumeno Kyusaku began writing a novel about the mentally ill, Madman's Release Treatment.
The story (or so it seems) is about a young, amnesiac mental patient who is locked in a cell in the Department of Psychiatry at Kyushu University's School of Medicine in 1926 (Taisho 15), and is told by him in the first person.
[2] The murder itself is rather simple, but the structure is complex, with a nested structure of academic papers such as "The Dream of a Fetus" (based on Ernst Haeckel's theory of repetition), a grandiose treatise about the billion-year long evolutionary nightmare that a fetus experiences during the 10 months it is developing inside the womb, "The Brain Theory," which claims that "the brain is not the place for thinking," and "The Hellish Prayer of the Crazy One," which describes the horror of mental hospitals where you cannot leave until you die.