Japanese tales of mystery & imagination
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The Japanese writer Rampo Edogawa has taken hints from Poe, Wells, Chesterton and M. R. James and melded them into something all his own: spherical mirrors and human chairs; inversed fingerprints and rubber bladders of blood. His prose and plotting are deft and economical, his premises and their solutions ingenious, his sleuths wear wooden clogs and drink jasmine tea. And in contrast to the cerebral mode usually favoured by writers in this genre, many of Edogawa’s stories are notable for their psychological and emotional impact. I read the book in two sittings but some of its images will stay with me forever. Servants with lanterns scouring a weedgrown field in search of the quadruple amputee who has scurried into it on his stumps; identical twins in silk kimonos grappling before an empty well; the hundred-yard stare of an elderly man on a train who has just learned the spiritual perils of gazing through the wrong ends of telescopes.
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