THE DEEP ONES: "The Hell of Mirrors" by Edogawa Rampo

"The Hell of Mirrors" by Edogawa Rampo

Discussion begins July 23.

First published in Japanese Tales of Mystery and Imagination (1926).



ONLINE VERSIONS

None found to date.

BIBLIOGRAPHY

http://www.isfdb.org/cgi-bin/title.cgi?874969

SELECTED PRINT VERSIONS

Japanese Tales of Mystery and Imagination
Everyman's Book of Classic Horror Stories
Oriental Tales of Terror

MISCELLANY

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Edogawa_Rampo
https://tinyurl.com/m823nmq

Could this be the most obscure one yet for The Deep Ones!? I interlibrary-loaned a copy of Japanese Tales of Mystery and Imagination.

I thought Rampo's name sounded familiar. Turns out I've seen his work adapted in the kinky 1969 film Blind Beast, directed by the great Yasuzô Masumura. It's well worth tracking down. I believe Netflix has it.

http://www.imdb.com/title/tt0140384/
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=SG34PFaQJgE (probably NWS!)

Rampo's work (including a lot of noir stuff) has actually been filmed pretty extensively:

http://www.imdb.com/name/nm0708835/?ref_=ttfc_fc_wr1

I'll be buying the Kindle version of Japanese Tales of Mystery and Imagination.

Not in my personal library + not in my local public library's collection + not available online = probably sitting this one out

I planned ahead and ordered a copy of Japanese Tales of Mystery and Imagination.

Arrgh. I have not planned ahead, and no online versions. Recently inherited my dad's nook and may see if I can pick it up there, I really wanted to read this one based on the voting description.

My public library had the 2012 Tuttle edition of Japanese Tales of Mystery and Imagination, to my pleased surprise.

I read the story this morning.

Missed this the first time round: the author's pseudonym is a phoneticization of Edgar Allan Poe, if pronounced by a Japanese native. Think I would have found that borderline stereotyping if I didn't know it was the author's own choice.

(And then I ask myself: why should that make a difference?)

>8 elenchus:

Thanks for mentioning the pseudonymous reference to Poe - I totally missed it too.

This tale seems very precise in the telling. I enjoyed the details of Tanuma's strange mirror-obsession and Rampo certainly doesn't shy away from suggesting the sexual possibilities that some of the mirrored constructions offer!

"Assuredly, never before had anyone shut himself up within the confines of a mirror-lined sphere." I have to wonder about that.

What did Tanuma see? I suspect that the reflection is the equivalent of the unimaginably vast reaches of space and time - complete with the feelings of cosmic fear and horror that they can induce in insignificant man - that so concerned Lovecraft and others. Maybe it's contained in a kind of meta-Tanuma, though, existing both inside and outside of himself at the same time.

What you would see inside the mirror-lined sphere is evidently a frequent question. I remember it showing up as a thought puzzle in one of Spider Robinson's Callahan Bar stories.

Here are a bunch of sites and videos purporting to show the answer: https://www.google.com/?gws_rd=ssl#q=light+inside+mirror+sphere.

I agree that this is a very clear story, a grotesque.

Though, I'm told, a mirror is amongst the symbols of the Japanese emperor and the Japanese themselves, as alluded to in the story, had no glass mirrors before the Edo period, I don't think there is much particularly Japanese in the tale. I suppose, if you stretched it, you could see a technology descended from foreigners as somehow being corrupting to Tanuma, but I don't think the text really supports that.

Apart from the surface details, I think you could argue there is a theme of dangerous narcissism and solipsism.

While the narrator is repulsed by his reflection in a concave mirror, Tanuma wants to, in effect, dive twice as deep into this strange world, see even more of his distorted self.

I think there is solipsism too. We are told how Tanuma's circle of acquaintances shrinks. He doesn't seem to leave his house much, has only the narrator, workmen, and his servants as human contact. Eventually, he decides to enter a world that, while not exactly molded by his every whim, is still covered by only his image and contains only him.

I was reminded of J. G. Ballard again when I read this story (NOT, I should stress, because of his time in a Japanese internment camp during WWII). Ballard's theme from the '60's onwards was the psychological pressures and deformations caused by modern Western society - Patricia Welch's foreword to the 2012 reissue of Japanese Tales of Mystery and Imagination discusses the changes that modernity brought to Japanese society and also to the physical environment especially the expanding urban centres. she outlines the movements in popular culture and the intelligentsia that actively sought out he new as curiosities (still a feature of Japanese society I would guess from the media etc. (I've never visited the country, so any knowledge I have is second- or third-hand)). Rampo's detective stories and weird tales certainly make sense placed in this context: investigating, making sense of things, but also examples of strangenesses that perhaps can't be made sense of.

I'd mentioned Ballard earlier in the context of a Poe story, and suggested Poe stood at one end of a tradition that included Ballard as a modern representative. I would have to concede Rampo's self-identification in the same tradition may be sufficient explanation for the commonalities in all three writers' work. Tanuma certainly looks backwards to Poe's unbalanced characters as much as he looks forward to Ballard's alienated Moderns (one thing that links this story to Ballard is the calm, rather bland voice of the narrator (at least as it emerges in this translation) - very unlike Poe's hectic and assertive voice.

I wondered too, about the effect of being inside a reflective sphere. To be honest I didn't think one would actually see that much (I haven't clicked on the link in >10 RandyStafford: yet) but Rampo has prepared the ground for a horrifying experience with the stereopticon projecting the giant image of Tanuma's face. Maybe it also suggests a shamanic rite-of-passage?

And, I was wondering if it would be just inherently more startling to see one's own image in 1920's Japan than it would be today, given Skype, selfies, CCTV, and all the rest.

On the possible Lovecraftian pre-echoes, apparently Rampo was one of the first to translate some of HPL's stories into Japanese. This would have been around 1947, if I remember correctly and the information was correct (I found it on a blog).

I'm looking forward to reading the rest of the stories in the book. A good choice for The Deep Ones, and an interesting one.

After looking at the piece on YouTube about the image inside a reflective sphere, I wonder if what drove Tanuma mad was his own, huge face staring back at him like a massive accusing God or Father figure? His peeping on the servants and squandering his fortune gives him something to feel ashamed of.

>11 housefulofpaper: The first edition of H. P. Lovecraft: An annotated bibliography gives the first Japanese translation of Lovecraft as being of "The Quest of Iranon" in August 1967, by Hiroshi Aramata. Unless Joshi missed something, there was no publication of Lovecraft in Japan in his lifetime, which doesn't rule the translation and private distribution, I guess.

>13 prosfilaes:

The blog is called 'Tokyo Scum Brigade' (not all of it Safe For Work, I imagine!). I'd misremembered the story it told, a little.

Apparently, the first overtly HPL-influenced Japanese Weird Tale was Nishio Tadashi's 'Grave', a close retelling of 'The Statement of Randolph Carter'. This was published in 1947.

Copies of post-war pulps were being circulated within a tight-knit group within Japan at this time and Rampo was deeply involved in this.

It evidently led him to include HPL stories in a list of 'Essential Weird Tales' published in his magazine Jewel, in the issue for June 1948 (Jewel is described as a 'Mystery anthology' in the blog. Possibly this means it published mainly reprints?)

The first HPL story translated into Japanese was apparently 'The Rats in the Walls', in July 1955. This was by Kajima Yozo.

The blogpost is credited to a 'Dr Senbei'.

>11 housefulofpaper: You've reminded me of a possible Poe inspiration for the tale: Poe's "The Sphinx". It involves horrors generated by optic phenomena. There it's the enlarged image of a moth.

I believe Vincent Price performs it on the An Evening with Poe.

Although the expected comparanda--prescribed by the author himself for the stories in this volume--are the work of Edgar Allan Poe and Arthur Conan Doyle, I found myself relating this particular tale to Against Nature by Huysmans. I'm afraid it suffered from the comparison.

The themes of decadence and alienation were there, complete with a negative protagonist whose fragile sanity and ample material resources were expressed in radical engineering of his domestic situation. Tanuma seemed like a more vulgar version of Des Essientes, and "The Hell of Mirrors" was more cursory and lacking in the sort of details that made Against Nature so engaging.