Japanese Tales of Mystery & Imagination
Thursday, August 30th, 2007 @ 22:25
by Edogawa Rampo (1956)
A lucidly-translated collection of short mystery stories , Japanese Tales gives English-language readers a spell-binding peek into the works of Edogawa Rampo, “Japan’s most famous mystery writer”. (I first knew about the name from the Indonesian-licensed manga Detektif Conan by Aoyama Gosho, and Febby then acquaint me further to Rampo’s popularity among Japanese readers.)
I’m not particularly comfortable in dichotomizing “Eastern” and “Western” influence, but there is undeniably a peculiarly Japanese feeling in these stories (James B. Harris wrote that readers used to “jet-paced Mickey Spillane, may find Edogawa Rampo’s typically Oriental tempo somewhat slow): a chair-maker burying himself inside an armchair to steal and to enjoy unsolicited “love affairs” of flesh; an assiduous, somewhat Raskolnikov-like student; a quadruple amputee, blinded by his perverse wife; a drama of a woman whose ex-husband was killed by her current husband and ended up killing himself; a man dangerously obsessed with mirrors trapping himself into a sphere of mirrors; a twin planning crimes in the name of the other; a long confession of perfect “psychological” murders, a man who fell in love with a beautiful woman in a rag picture.
Those who enjoy mystery and detective genres, e.g. the works of Poe (whose name was rendered into Rampo’s pseudonym), Simenon, Doyle, as well as various mystery & detective mangas (Gosho’s Conan, of course, but The Caterpillar also reminds me of Junji Ito’s Uzumaki and many others) are likely to enjoy Rampo’s works.
