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A review by tombomp
Japanese Tales of Mystery & Imagination by Edogawa Rampo
3.0
3.5? Maybe higher, I'm terrible at rating anthologies. The best story here is absolutely the first, The Chair, about a guy who lives in a chair and the incredibly described erotic, intimate feelings he gets when people sit on him, unknowingly. It's really unique and fascinating and weird. The way he "reciprocates" by adjusting his chair-body to better suit the person sitting on him... It's repulsive and sexual, it's great.
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.
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.