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Loading... Japanese Tales of Mystery & Imagination (Tuttle Classics) (original 1956; edition 1989)by Edogawa Rampo, James B. Harris
Work InformationJapanese Tales of Mystery and Imagination by Edogawa Rampo (1956)
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Sign up for LibraryThing to find out whether you'll like this book. No current Talk conversations about this book. Apparently Japanese horror is just it for me. I loved this anthology. The body horror element to many of these stories is so high that I got the creepy crawlies under my skin. "The Caterpillar" in particular has really stuck in my head - I don't even want to write anything about it because I could never do it justice and you really just have to read it yourself. Edogawa Rampo derived his pen name from the classic American thriller writer Edgar Allan Poe. And as such, [b:Japanese Tales of Mystery and Imagination Paperback|196150|Japanese Tales of Mystery and Imagination|Edogawa Rampo|http://photo.goodreads.com/books/1172599521s/196150.jpg|189711] is a collection of short stories that emote the same sense of foreboding that his American counter-part did. Set primarily in the phantasmagoric culture of early 20th century Japan, each story captures the reader's imagination as it blurs the line between what is real and what is not. Prepare to question even what YOU think is true in this story of a story of a story. no reviews | add a review
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This collection of mystery and horror stories is regarded as Japan's answer to Edgar Allan Poe. Japanese Tales of Mystery & Imagination, the first volume of its kind translated into English, is written with the quick tempo of the West but rich with the fantasy of the East. These nine bloodcurdling, chilling tales present a genre of literature largely unknown to readers outside Japan, including the strange story of a quadruple amputee and his perverse wife; the record of a man who creates a mysterious chamber of mirrors and discovers hidden pleasures within; the morbid confession of a maniac who envisions a career of foolproof "psychological" murders; and the bizarre tale of a chair-maker who buries himself inside an armchair and enjoys the sordid "loves" of the women who sit on his handiwork. Lucid and packed with suspense, Edogawa Rampo's stories found in Japanese Tales of Mystery & Imagination have enthralled Japanese readers for over half a century. Mystery stories include: - The Human Chair - The Caterpillar - Two Crippled Men - The Traveler with the Pasted Rag Picture. No library descriptions found. |
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There's another story focusing on a similar combination of emotions about a woman and her severely disabled husband who had a quadruple amputation after a war injury and also can't talk/hear. I had pretty mixed feelings because it's both grossly ableist in terms of focusing on how weird and gross he is now... But also again there's the same focus on how the wife finds this incredibly erotic and hot and loves getting to "play" with him in his present state. The combination of eroticism and repulsion is unpleasant to read and the whole story is pretty horrible in those ways but it's still a really interesting work to read.
The other stories are a combination of weird tales, horror and stuff more in a mystery vein. The worst story here features his incredibly popular series detective solving a murder that we see from the perspective of the murderer but it's incredibly weak - the "gotcha" type way the detective catches the murderer would be so easy to get out of by just saying "oh I must have misremembered". Really disappointing given how popular his mysteries were!
The other stories don't reach the fascination the first two I mentioned do but all of them are effectively creepy and uncomfortable and leave you a little unsettled in the end. Definitely an entertaining read. ( )