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darkling_talesLJ-SEC: (ORIGINALLY POSTED BY hellbound_heart)
Edogawa Rampo (taken from the Japanese pronounciation of Edgar Allan Poe, no less) is widely-held to be one of Japan's very first mystery writers, combining his love of the decadent Western imagination and its bloodcurdling horrors, with a distinctly Japanese aesthetic and mode. His Japanese Tales of Mystery and Imagination contains a deeply engaging and alarming series of short stories, evidently influenced by Poe's word-torrents of terror but steadied with a very Eastern grasp on protocol, emotion, and propriety.
Unlike many of Poe's stories, the pace of Rampo's tales builds very slowly, although steadily. This may be because of the much denser interplay between characters: the real horrors of the tales gradually filter through the polite interfacing and respect due to elders/strangers/colleagues, holding back the extremes of emotion and fear until the narrator allows just enough of the ghastly to emerge. Notably, it is the intricacy of polite response which is used to test a murder suspect by testing the time he takes to answer questions in an exam ('The Psychological Test') and to trick people, by presupposing they will act a certain way out of politeness, into their own destruction ('The Red Chamber'):
Actually, of course, I was innocent, for I had only committed a blunder. But then, I asked myself, what if I had purposely given the wrong directions? Needless to say, in that case I would have been guilty of murder! ...Gentlemen, have you ever theorised on murder along these lines? I myself thought of it for the first time only after the experience I have just related. If you ponder deeply on the matter, you will find the world is indeed a dangerous place. Who knows when you yourselves may be directed to the wrong doctor - intentionally - criminally - by a man like myself?
There are also fantastic examples of what, if I may call them so, 'body-gothic' tales. 'The Human Chair' takes the form of correspondence between an authoress and a demented, though restrained, fan - with a sickening, invasive twist in the tale. My personal favourite, 'The Caterpillar', is puncuated by human cruelty, sadism, and regret - and can in some ways be seen as Lady Chatterley's Lover on acid (i.e. better). A woman left in sole care of her badly-disfigured husband after the War, whom she refers to as 'the bundle', begins to labour under nightmares and delusions about the man she once loved: in her abject loneliness, she finds it difficult not to indulge a sneaking need to be cruel to him. These are dark nights of the soul indeed, but Tokiyo's descent into desperation and the increasingly ghoulish representation of her husband is throughout tempered with restraint and moments of clear reason.
There are ten short stories in this edition altogether, and they come highly recommended on account of their fascinating development of genres we sometimes take for granted.
hellbound_heart)Edogawa Rampo (taken from the Japanese pronounciation of Edgar Allan Poe, no less) is widely-held to be one of Japan's very first mystery writers, combining his love of the decadent Western imagination and its bloodcurdling horrors, with a distinctly Japanese aesthetic and mode. His Japanese Tales of Mystery and Imagination contains a deeply engaging and alarming series of short stories, evidently influenced by Poe's word-torrents of terror but steadied with a very Eastern grasp on protocol, emotion, and propriety.
Unlike many of Poe's stories, the pace of Rampo's tales builds very slowly, although steadily. This may be because of the much denser interplay between characters: the real horrors of the tales gradually filter through the polite interfacing and respect due to elders/strangers/colleagues, holding back the extremes of emotion and fear until the narrator allows just enough of the ghastly to emerge. Notably, it is the intricacy of polite response which is used to test a murder suspect by testing the time he takes to answer questions in an exam ('The Psychological Test') and to trick people, by presupposing they will act a certain way out of politeness, into their own destruction ('The Red Chamber'):
Actually, of course, I was innocent, for I had only committed a blunder. But then, I asked myself, what if I had purposely given the wrong directions? Needless to say, in that case I would have been guilty of murder! ...Gentlemen, have you ever theorised on murder along these lines? I myself thought of it for the first time only after the experience I have just related. If you ponder deeply on the matter, you will find the world is indeed a dangerous place. Who knows when you yourselves may be directed to the wrong doctor - intentionally - criminally - by a man like myself?
There are also fantastic examples of what, if I may call them so, 'body-gothic' tales. 'The Human Chair' takes the form of correspondence between an authoress and a demented, though restrained, fan - with a sickening, invasive twist in the tale. My personal favourite, 'The Caterpillar', is puncuated by human cruelty, sadism, and regret - and can in some ways be seen as Lady Chatterley's Lover on acid (i.e. better). A woman left in sole care of her badly-disfigured husband after the War, whom she refers to as 'the bundle', begins to labour under nightmares and delusions about the man she once loved: in her abject loneliness, she finds it difficult not to indulge a sneaking need to be cruel to him. These are dark nights of the soul indeed, but Tokiyo's descent into desperation and the increasingly ghoulish representation of her husband is throughout tempered with restraint and moments of clear reason.
There are ten short stories in this edition altogether, and they come highly recommended on account of their fascinating development of genres we sometimes take for granted.
