Sometime in 2004 (yes, more than 20 years ago) I commented in a post on this forum :
"Mr. Nakamura, an art dealer associated with Olivia Corey, was played by Japanese born actor Sho Onodera.
"Incidentally, I discovered the inspiration for this character a few years ago, but I've lost the specific information. A little-known series of occult-supernatural novels featured a Japanese art dealer/detective named Mr. Nakamura."
Despite years of searching I was never able to come up with anything. I remember for certain that the book was hardcover and I remember it as a dark blue and rather nondescript -- nothing to really draw one's attention. I can pinpoint the approximate time frame (late 1980s) and the bookstore where I saw the book in Minneapolis. The bookstore had an extensive Occult or "Alternative Spirituality" section. Most of the books were non-fiction paperbacks. So a hardcover fictional book was a bit different than the others. My memory, as my 2004 post shows, was that the book I came across was perhaps one of a series of novels featuring an occult detective and Japanese art dealer named Mr. Nakamura. The book seemed to be an older book that was surprisingly still to be found in a bookstore.
It turns out that my memory was very close but not exact. My discovery today (using the same Google search terms that I have used for many decades in trying to track this down) shows the main difference is that this was not a series of novels but a series of short stories published together in one book featuring detective and rare art dealer named Mr. Nakamura. I had a brief flash of insight when I began searching today that "maybe it was a series of short stories" rather than a novel, the first variation in my memory about this since 2004. And that flash of distant memory was the right one. Amazingly, though, I didn't use "short stories" in my string of search terms. Another difference is that I thought this was a hardcover with no dust jacket, but photos of the book that I found today show that it did have a dust cover in the colors and general description that I remembered.
The main thing I misremembered -- which through me off -- is that I thought this was translated from Japanese, and that it might date from an earlier decade of the 1900s, perhaps from the 1950s.
There is no doubt that I have finally found this series of stories, as even the detective's name, "Mr. K. Nakamura," is an additional detail that jogs my memory. The book was by esoteric researcher Manly P. Hall (not a Japanese author), who I may not have been familiar with at the time, and was published by the "Philosophic Research Society" he was associated with. The book was hardcover and images of the cover show it to have been a very plain cover, half dark blue and half grayish blue. The title is " 'Very Unusual': The Wonderful World of Mr. K. Nakamura." A description of the book is as follows:
A book of choice for the lover of mystical tales and mysteries, this series of related short stories is a work in which fiction and fact combine to give insights to spiritual paths and fantastical events. Mr. K. Nakamura is a fictionalized dealer in artwork and antiquities in Kyoto, well-schooled in the legendry and lore of his country. He has the shrewdness of a successful businessman combined with a magical air. Each story presents a situation in which there is no clear demarcation between the commonplace and the supernatural, where strange happenings and powers appear to be taken for granted. Published 1976.
Where I was really wrong in my conclusions, though, was that this book must have been the inspiration for DS's Mr. Nakamura. Since the book was published in 1976, that couldn't have been the case (unless by chance the stories had been published somewhere earlier and collected in book form in 1976). It could have been the other way around -- Mr. Manly Hall might have based his detective on DS's Mr. Nakamura!
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This gives me hope that some day, some how, I will find the answer to a question that has been even more pressing for me. In Junior High somewhere around 1972 - 1974 in the "Language Arts Resource Center" at my school, I read a story which at the time I was not sure whether it was fictional or true. It purported to be the last pages of a diary kept by Edgar Allan Poe as he descended into madness. This story made such a great impression on me that I have been trying to track it down ever since -- nearly 50 years now. It was in one of those weekly or semi-weekly digest-size magazines for students that I think may have been "Read," which was published by Xerox (according to my research in recent years). Another possibility might be "Scope" published by Scholastic. There was also a "Junior Scholastic" and possibly others, but the one that meets the description that I'm sure about as far as size (small, not a "magazine" size) and the type of content is "Read" magazine. If anyone has a clue to this or remembers the story I would be very grateful to hear!
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To try to make this long post more relevant to possible discussion -- does anyone have any comments or thoughts about Mr. Nakamura or his brief role in DS? I'm tempted to take out my DVD(s) with this storyline, which I don't think is one that's discussed as often as several others . . .
-Philippe
August 1, 2025
