![]() ![]() And, as noted above, it reads like a dream. And if the notion of a woman acting in this context “like a baby falling into a mother’s embrace, or a girl surrendering herself into the arms of her lover” doesn’t set you all a-shiver then there’s surely nothing more Rampo can do to unsettle even as he reassures in the final, clever revelation. It’s a clever little conceit, and one that toys with dehumanisation without ever tipping into demonisation despite its many weirdnesses. ![]() Even the writer of this missive is subject to these contrasts - an ugly man whose looks and attitude find him isolated from the world around him, drawn by his own actions into a “weird world of sensuous pleasure” that brings him physically close to people in a way that is both shocking and quite moving. Throughout, Rampo plays with contrasts cleverly: the author Yoshiko receiving an impersonal letter which creeps ever closer into her personal life, an ordinary occurrence that promises events so “grotesquely out of the ordinary human words seem utterly inadequate to sketch all the details”. This serves as a good introduction to this volume, since it starts off with simple quotidian concerns, steadily escalating to something akin to domestic horror before its delightful payoff. First up, the very first I ever heard of Rampo and ‘The Human Chair’ (1925). ![]()
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