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[book post] Japanese Tales of Mystery and Imagination by Edogawa Rampo
First off, this little quoted bit from the book's introduction seemed so 100% ![[personal profile]](https://www.dreamwidth.org/img/silk/identity/user.png)
kradeelav's jam that I'm quoting it here too:
...admittedly, that was a bit more of an edgy introduction than I was expecting from this collection! See, I picked this book on a whim, after finding out that Rampo's "The Psychological Test" was one of the principal inspirations for the original Phoenix Wright game. And boy is the influence obvious once you read it.
But, as it turns out, that that's the only story in the collection which is a whodunnit tale. Half the collection is just straight horror; the other half are mysteries more in the vein of Poe than Doyle—the mysteries are more about the atmosphere and a sense of impending doom, rather than being about cleverness and sussing out the impending twist. (The Poe vibe here is likely deliberate; Rampo picked his pen name precisely because it sounds like Edgar Allen Poe, rendered in Japanese syllabary.)
I'm not much of a mystery/horror reader in general, so I'm probably not the best to judge this collection—they seemed solid throughout but didn't floor me. "The Red Chamber" was probably my favorite of the bunch, eerie in a way that stuck with me for a while; "The Human Chair" was also pretty clutch. ("The Caterpillar" was a lowlight, for me—I appreciate what the author was going for, in terms of body horror and the screwed-up relationship between the husband and wife, but it just... gave me a big dose of ugh ableism from this modern vantage point. Won't say much else here so as not to spoil.)
Final note (gosh, the forward/introduction was full of neat tidbits): the method of translation for this book sounds quite unique. Edogawa Rampo was able to read and understand English, but could not write or speak it. The translator, an English-Japanese man, was fluent in spoken Japanese but could not read or write it. So the two of them met up weekly for five years; Rampo would read each line in Japanese several times, the translator would write a sentence in English, the author would read it and decide if it was right... Super-quirky way of doing it; I'd love to know more about what motivated the translator to toil on with such a time-intensive project. Dude must've been a big fan.
kradeelav's jam that I'm quoting it here too:Erotic-grotesque cultural performance functioned as an indirect form of resistance against the totalitarian tendencies exhibited by the Japanese state during the 1920s and 1930s . . . [Such] works were produced and consumed at a historical moment when Japanese citizens were bombarded by propaganda urging them to devote themselves to such "productive" goals as nation building and mobilization. In this context, the sexually charged, unapologetically "bizarre" subject matter associated with erotic-grotesque cultural products is reconstituted as a transgressive gesture against state-endorsed notions of "constructive" morality, identity, and sexuality.
— Jim Reichert, "Deviance and Social Darwinism in Edogawa Rampo's Erotic-Grotesque Thriller Kotoo no oni"
...admittedly, that was a bit more of an edgy introduction than I was expecting from this collection! See, I picked this book on a whim, after finding out that Rampo's "The Psychological Test" was one of the principal inspirations for the original Phoenix Wright game. And boy is the influence obvious once you read it.
But, as it turns out, that that's the only story in the collection which is a whodunnit tale. Half the collection is just straight horror; the other half are mysteries more in the vein of Poe than Doyle—the mysteries are more about the atmosphere and a sense of impending doom, rather than being about cleverness and sussing out the impending twist. (The Poe vibe here is likely deliberate; Rampo picked his pen name precisely because it sounds like Edgar Allen Poe, rendered in Japanese syllabary.)
I'm not much of a mystery/horror reader in general, so I'm probably not the best to judge this collection—they seemed solid throughout but didn't floor me. "The Red Chamber" was probably my favorite of the bunch, eerie in a way that stuck with me for a while; "The Human Chair" was also pretty clutch. ("The Caterpillar" was a lowlight, for me—I appreciate what the author was going for, in terms of body horror and the screwed-up relationship between the husband and wife, but it just... gave me a big dose of ugh ableism from this modern vantage point. Won't say much else here so as not to spoil.)
Final note (gosh, the forward/introduction was full of neat tidbits): the method of translation for this book sounds quite unique. Edogawa Rampo was able to read and understand English, but could not write or speak it. The translator, an English-Japanese man, was fluent in spoken Japanese but could not read or write it. So the two of them met up weekly for five years; Rampo would read each line in Japanese several times, the translator would write a sentence in English, the author would read it and decide if it was right... Super-quirky way of doing it; I'd love to know more about what motivated the translator to toil on with such a time-intensive project. Dude must've been a big fan.