Japanese Tales of Mystery and Imagination

by Edogawa Rampo. Tanslated by James B. Harris, 1956. Charles E. Tuttle Company.

7 March 2007; Up to page 88 of 222.

I found out about Edogawa Rampo by watching a movie based on four of his short stories. The movie is called Rampo Noir, and is so disturbing and perverse at its heart that it’s almost beyond the limit of what I can take. Still, I had to be curious about the man who created these stories, a man described as the Japanese Edgar Allen Poe. (The name he wrote under isn’t actually his real name, but rather a transliteration to Japanese of “Edgar Allen Poe.” Neat trivia, huh?)
What I’ve found so far is that Rampo’s stories are not nearly so dark as the films that have been made from them. For instance, in adapting The Caterpillar, the filmmakers took the story of a woman who tortures her husband, who was severely wounded on the battlefield, and makes it much more brutal. Where the wife in Rampo’s story blinds her husband in a fit of rage and frustration, the film shows and act of deliberate, premeditated sadism.
Really, this is a lot like Poe, who was a man who principally succeeded in putting ideas out there into circulation, ideas that captivate the imagination without necessarily pleasing it. Whereas Rampo’s detective fiction is nothing to rave about (nor is Poe’s, I think) his ability to wander into the grotesque is somehow admirable, because it’s honest to the nightmarish way the human imagination can work. Rampo strikes me as a man who wasn’t interested neither the sort of artistic tropes nor gratuitous violence that are so prominent in the film adaptations of his work, but I imagine that he would be quite happy to find that a new generation of storytellers has taken his ideas and decided to “ratchet them up.”

14 March 2007; p. 88 to end.

I was never really impressed by the stories in this collection. Maybe they’re not representative of Mr. Rampo’s talent. Maybe they're poor translations. But all in all, I think he might have been a little too enamored of his idol Edgar Allen Poe. The more Poe wrote, the more he seemed infatuated by his own cleverness. Over and over we are told how clever his detective Daupin is, and Poe seems almost to gloat over the fact that people would fall for his balloon hoax.
In the same way, Rampo seems far more impressed with the ingeniousness of his characters than we as an audience ever are. Watching one of his murderers gloat over the perfection of his or her master crime, we’re as likely to be impressed as we would be to watch someone win a hand of poker after stacking the deck. Rampo's supposedly fiendish criminals have all been dropped into a world of morons who seem to be just waiting for someone to come along and fool them.
Still, it’s interesting to watch Rampo’s fascination with mirrors and optical devices, and the last story in the book, “The Traveler with the Rag Painting” evokes a somewhat dreamlike quality as it tells the story of a man who goes through the wrong side of a pair of binoculars into the picture of a woman he’s fallen in love with.
Maybe the reason why mirrors and optical devices work for Rampo is that, as with Poe, he has a talent for writing a story about people who are dangerously obsessed. I wonder if this is the direction his other work goes in, or does it just remain smug?