Anagrams are so obvious!) tried to kill me. He was trying to make the authorities think that Edgar Allen Poe was the culprit. If you can live as someone else then you have created the perfect alibi. Murder is a chili with the right amount of seasonings. It's like how all of the long and short cons of today are the same old long and short cons of yesteryear with a few tweaks here and there. The getting away with it the appeal rather than the murder (wouldn't anything else work just as well?). It's essentially the same perfect murder in a lot of the stories. No civil suits, no karmic payback! No coming back as a roach in the next life, that's right.
Japanese Tales of Mystery & Imagination, or, as it should have been called, How to do the bloody deed and get away with it without facing criminal charges or the accusing finger of society (the bird, probably). Read it if you read nothing else of Rampo's. It is one of the most memorable pieces of short fiction I have ever read, containing an extraordinary first-person monologue which is pathetic, disgusting and horrifying at the same time. Indeed, I think Rampo's stories may be equal to Borges-which is a high compliment indeed-but I cannot be sure, for this translation often lacks the verbal elegance that would best communicate the formal beauty of these tales and give them the extra polish a first class work requires.Īll the nine tales here are very good, and "The Caterpillar," "The Hell of Mirrors," The Red Chamber" and "The Traveler with the Pasted Rag Picture" are excellent, but I must single out "The Human Chair" for special mention. Borges is more philosophical, Rampo more psychological Borges teems with puzzle and paradox, Rampo with obsession and ratiocination, and yet each celebrates man's inventiveness while still being woefully aware of his limitations. In this Rampo resembles Borges, and yet the two writers are very different.
His stories, structured as popular "entertainments," are designed to convey all the pleasures of genre, and yet they possess an elegance and intellectual complexity greater than mere popular works. Edogowa Rampo-just say his pen name quickly three times to discover how much he loved Edgar Allen Poe-is considered the first and foremost writer of Japanese mystery fiction.
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