Journal articles on the topic 'Edogawa Ranpo'

It is well known that the editor of Modern Japan (Modan Nippon), published by Bungei Shunju, was Ma Haesong, a native of the Korean peninsula. Although Modern Japan fell short of attaining the same level of popularity as Kōdansha’s King (Kingu), it reached a broader range of readers than the rival modern magazine New Youth (Shin seinen), associated with the important writers Edogawa Ranpo and Yokomizo Seishi. Indeed, Modern Japan cultivated a profile somewhere between that of King and New Youth. However, perhaps due to its middling status, the magazine has yet to be the subject of a comprehensive study in any of the fields of literary, cultural, or publishing studies. This paper looks specifically at two special extra editions of Modern Japan, called the Korea Editions, published in 1939 and 1940 respectively. These special editions contained a hybrid of both state propagandistic elements and editor Ma Haesong’s perspective on his homeland. Although there is some extant research on the Korea Editions from several points of view, there is still room for a detailed analysis of how exactly Korean writers and literary works were introduced in their pages, and what type of literature was included. Specifically, this paper examines the literary criticism of Kim Saryang and Han Sik, clarifying their differing appraisals of the contemporary literary situation. Then, it analyzes the style and content of Pak T’aewŏn’s short story, “A Street Darkly” (Michi ha kuraki wo). Through highlighting this combination of perspectives, I hope to illuminate the politicality of Modern Japan realized through a rereading of the Korea Editions.

Penelitian ini merupakan penelitian lanjutan pada cerpem Kagami Jikoku,sebuah cerpen terkenal yang ditulis oleh Edogawa Rampou. Setelah dilakukan penelitian terhadap struktur cerpen tersebut, penelitian lanjutan dilakukan untuk menganalisis proses-proses alih wahana yang terjadi dari cerpen Kagami Jigoku ke dalam film Rampo Noir. Dengan menggunakan metode deskriptif kualitatif analisis proses alih wahana dilakukan pada unsur pembangun ceritanya. Sebagai hasilnya diketahui bahwa proses ekranisasi yang terjadi pada cerpen ke dalam film mencakup seluruh perubahan yang meliputi perubahan bervariasi, penambahan, dan penciutan. Unsur-unsur pembangun cerita yang mengalami seluruh proses ekranisasi adalah unsur tokoh, latar, dan alur. Unsur tokoh dan alur mengalami seluruh proses ekranisasi sementara unsur latar hanya mengalami proses penambahan dan perubahan bervariasi tanpa adanya penciutan. Dari proses tersebut diketahui pula bahwa pendekatan adaptasi yang digunakan dalam proses alih wahana ini adalah loose, karena meskipun cerita pada kedua media tersebut berbeda karena mengalami penyesuaian tetapi ide cerita dari cerita aslinya tetap dijaga.

The purpose of this research is to analyze the intrinsic elements found in the short story Kagami Jigoku by Edogawa Rampo. By using structural methods the analysis process find out the intrinsic elements which builds the Kagami Jikoku short story. As a result it is known that the Kagami Jikoku is a short story with a mystery theme as the hallmark of Rampo as its author. The characteristic of this short story can be seen from the theme which raised the unusual obsession problem of the main characters. With the first person point of view which tells in unusual way from the other short stories, the regression plot in Kagami Jikoku is able to tell the unique phenomenon of Japanese society and its modern technology through elements of place, time and socio-cultural aspects of Japanese society in the modern era

Résumé De fâcheux incidents. Énigmes criminelles du quotidien dans le Japon d'après-guerre Cet article analyse les incidents Glico-Morinaga du milieu des années 1980 et leur relation avec les notions bourgeoises d'ordre social et de criminalité dans le Japon d'après-guerre. Lors des événements, un groupe s'appelant « l'Homme mystère aux 21 visages » harcela sans répit des entreprises d'alimentation, les médias et la police. Ces incidents démontrent que les conventions narratives du roman policier moderniste (établies par l'auteur Edogawa Rampo) ont profondément pénétré la conscience quotidienne des consommateurs japonais. Ces conventions ont contribué à brouiller la frontière entre fiction et réalité dans les représentations des crimes par les médias - notamment lors des incidents GM que l'on appela « le premier crime du 21e siècle » au Japon. La façon dont le groupe des 21 visages a manipulé le lexique moderniste - crime et détection, vérité et fausseté, théâtre guérilla et absurdité situationniste - illustre éloquemment la « stabilité » de cette société souvent présentée comme l'incarnation d'un régime postindustriel stable sans criminalité.

From his debut in 1923, Edogawa Ranpo (1894-1965) acknowledged the influence of Tanizaki Jun’ichirō and often referred to his works. Tanizaki had published several short stories characterised by tantei shumi between 1911 and 1927, yet the link between the two authors lies not only in their choice of the narrative genre. Tanizaki was a great admirer of Edgar Allan Poe and translated many of his stories including “The Domain of Arnheim”. Ranpo, too, was overtly inspired by Poe’s stories “The Domain of Arnheim” and “Landor’s Cottage”, which can be seen in the plot and descriptions of Panoramatō kidan. The aim of my investigation is therefore to examine the path that leads us from Poe’s “The Domain of Arnheim”, to Tanizaki’s Konjiki no shi, and from Poe and Tanizaki to Ranpo’s Panoramatō kidan.

Given that the new advances in technology in the 1980s had a major impact on the carefully constructed myth of authenticity in horror and pornography, ranging from flawless special effects at one extreme to the idea of the handheld voyeur movie at the other, it is rather ironic that the key progenitor to the erotic-grotesque form is a long-established and in some ways basic form: the pen and paper art of manga. This medium can be traced back to pillow books and the illustrated tradition in Japanese culture – a culture where even written language has evolved from drawings rather than alphabetical ciphers. Technological innovation notwithstanding, the 1980s is an extraordinary period for manga and it is perhaps here that we find the most startling hybridisation of porn and horror where, to borrow a phrase from Liz Kotz, “pathology meets pleasure, where what we most fear is what we most desire” (Kotz 188). Many of the most extreme examples of 1980s manga repeatedly confront the reader with tales that intersperse and interlink imagery and narrative sequences of sex, violence and the abject. Suehiro Maruo is in many ways a commercially marginalised but highly renowned manga artist of the erotic-grotesque. His full-length manga novel Mr Arashi’s Amazing Freak Show (1984) is a sweeping tale of carnival freaks redolent with sex and sadism, but in this article I will address his short comic strips from around the same period. The stories collected in Suehiro Maruo’s Ultra-Gash Inferno (2001) present a mortifying vision of sex and horror with stories that draw on the erotically tinged world of classical Japanese theatre and the short fiction of Edogawa Rampo but push them into the domain of extreme pornography. In “Putrid Night” (1981), an abusive man, Todoroki, subjects his teenage wife, Sayoko, to vicious cunnilingus and anal sex. In one sequence, Sayoko gives oral sex while Todoroki runs a samurai sword across her cheek. In her misery, Sayoko finds true love in the teenage boy Michio. Their illicit sexual love is tender and fulfilling and yet the imagery that intersperses it is ominous: when they have sex in a field, their conjoined bodies are juxtaposed with rotting fruit infested with ants and Michio’s erect penis is juxtaposed with a serpent in the grass. Sayoko and Michio plot to murder Todoroki. The result is disastrous, with Todoroki cutting off the arms of his wife and her lover through the elbows, and lancing their eyeballs. In the carnage, Todoroki has sex with Sayoko. The young lovers do not die, and Todoroki keeps them alive in a cell as “pets” (19). In a grotesque triumph of true love, Todoroki, to his horror, spies on his two victims and sees them, their eye sockets and arm stumps pouring blood, tenderly making love. In “Shit Soup” (1982), Maruo produces a comic strip with no story as such and is therefore a highly simplistic pornographic narrative. We witness a menage a trois with a young woman and her two male lovers and the comic presents their various exploits. In their opening bout, the woman squeezes a cow’s eyeball into her vagina and one man sucks it out of her while the other licks her beneath the eyelid. Later, the three excrete onto dinner plates and dine upon their mixed shit. The story ends with the three laughing deliriously as they fall from a cliff, an emblem of their joyful abandon and the intersection of love and death. As epilogue, Maruo describes the taste of excrement and invites us to taste our own. This ending is an ingenious narrative decision, as it turns on the reader and strives to deny us – the viewer/voyeur – any comfortable distance: we are invited, as it were, to eat shit literally and if we refuse, we can eat shit metaphorically. Suehiro Maruo’s work can also be subtle: in what looks like a realistic image at the opening of “A Season in Hell” (1981), a dead teenage girl lies, covered in “gore and faeces” (45), on a grassy path which resembles the hairy opening to female sexual organs. The surrounding field is like a pudenda and the double arch of the nearby bridge resembles breasts. Maruo can thus outwit the censorship tradition in which pubic hair is generally forbidden (it does appear in some of Maruo’s comic strips), although erections, ejaculations and hairless openings and organs would seem to be always graphically permissible. Probably the most excessive vision in Ultra-Gash Inferno is “The Great Masturbator” (1982). In this, Suehiro Maruo presents a family in which the father repeatedly dresses his daughter up as a schoolgirl in order to rape her, even cutting a vagina-sized hole into her abdomen. Eventually, he slices her with numerous openings so that he can penetrate her with his fists as well as his penis. Meanwhile, her brother embarks on an incestuous relationship with his ancient aunt. After her death, he acquires her false teeth and uses them to masturbate. He ejaculates onto her grave, splitting his head open on the tombstone. The excess and debauchery make it a shocking tale, a kind of violent manga reworking of Robert Crumb’s cartoon “The family that lays together, stays together” (91) from Snatch 2 (January 1969). Like Crumb, we could argue that Maruo employs explicit sexual imagery and an ethos of sexual taboo with the same purpose of transgressing and provoking the jargon of particular social norms. The political dimension to Maruo’s work finds its most blatant treatment in “Planet of the Jap” (1985), anthologised in Comics Underground Japan (1996). This manga strip is a devastating historical-political work presented as a history lesson in which Japan won the Second World War, having dropped atomic bombs on Los Angeles and San Francisco. The comic is full of startling iconic imagery such as the Japanese flag being hoisted over the shell-pocked Statue of Liberty and the public execution of General MacArthur. Of course, this being Maruo, there is a pornographic sequence. In a lengthy and graphic episode, an American mother is raped by Japanese soldiers while her son is murdered. As these horrors are committed, the lyrics of a patriotic song about present-day Japan, written by the Ministry of Education, form the textual narrative. Although the story could be seen as a comment on the subjection of Japan at the end of the Second World War – a sustained ironic inversion of history – it seems more likely to be a condemnation of the phase of Japanese history when, tragically, a minority of “atavistic, chauvinistic, racist warmongers” secured for themselves a position of “ideological legitimacy and power” (Lehmann 213). However, Maruo is being deliberately provocative to his contemporary reader: he writes this story in the mid-1980s, the peak of Japan’s post-war prosperity. As Joy Hendry says, Japan’s “tremendous economic success” in this period is not just important for Japan but marks an “important element of world history” (Hendry 18). Maruo ends “Planet of the Jap” with a haunting international message: “Don’t be fooled. Japan is by no means a defeated nation. Japan is still the strongest country in the world” (124). The porn-horror creator Suehiro Maruo follows in the tradition of figures like Octave Mirbeau, Georges Bataille and Robert Crumb who have used explicit pornography and sexual taboo as a forum for political provocation. The sexual horror of Maruo’s erotic-grotesque manga may terrify some readers and titillate others. It may even terrify and titillate at the same time in a disturbing fusion which has social and political implications: all the Maruo works in this essay were produced in the early to mid-1980s, the peak of Japanese economic success. They also coincide with the boom years of the Japanese sex industry, which Akira Suei argues was terminated by the repressive legislation of the New Amusement Business Control and Improvement Act of 1985 (Suei, 10). Suei’s account of the period paints one of frivolity and inventiveness embodied in the phenomenon of “no-panties coffee shops” (10) and the numerous sex clubs which offered extraordinary “role-playing opportunities” (13). The mood is one of triumph for the sexual expression of the customers but also for the extremely well-paid sex workers. Maruo’s stories contemporaneous with this have their own freedom of sexual expression, creating a vision where sexually explicit images comment upon a wide variety of subjects, from the family, scatological taboos, through to national history and Japan’s economic success. At the same time as presenting explicit sex as a feature in his films, Maruo always closely weaves it in with the taboo of death. Martin Heidegger interprets human existence as Sein-zum-Tode (being-towards-death) (Kearney 35): in Maruo’s vision, existence is evidently one of sexual-being-towards-death. Like Suehiro Maruo’s hideously maimed and blind lovers, humanity always returns to the impulse of its sexuality and the desire/will to orgasm: what Maruo calls “the cosmic gash” of physical love, a gash which also reveals, in a Heideggerian sense, the non-being that is the only certainty of existence. And we should remember that even when love is blind, someone will always be watching. References Crumb, Robert. The Complete Crumb, Volume 5: Happy Hippy Comix. Seattle: Fantagraphics, 1990. Hendry, Joy. Understanding Japanese Society. London: Routledge, 1987. Kearney, Richard. Modern Movements in European Philosophy. Manchester: Manchester University Press, 1986. Kotz, Liz. “Complicity: Women Artists Investigating Masculinity” in Paula Church Gibson (ed.) More Dirty Looks: Gender, Pornography and Power (Second Edition). London, BFI, 2004, 188-203. Lehmann, Jean-Pierre. The Roots of Modern Japan. London: Macmillan, 1982. Maruo, Suehiro. “Planet of the Jap” in Quigley, Kevin (ed.). Comics Underground Japan. New York: Blast Books, 1992. —-. Mr Arashi’s Amazing Freak Show. New York: Blast, 1992. —-. Ultra-Gash Inferno. London: Creation, 2001 Mizuki, Shigeru. Youkai Gadan. Tokyo: Iwanami Shoten, 1992. Rampo, Edogawa. Japanese Tales of Mystery and Imagination. New York: Tuttle, 1956. Suei, Akira “The Lucky Hole as the Black Hole” in Nobuyoshi Araki. Araki: Tokyo Lucky Hole. Köln: Taschen, 1997, 10-15. MLA Style Hand, Richard J. "Dissecting the Gash: Sexual Horror in the 1980s and the Manga of Suehiro Maruo." M/C Journal 7.4 (2004). 10 October 2004 <http://www.media-culture.org.au/0410/05_horror.php>. APA Style Hand, R. (2004 Oct 11). Dissecting the Gash: Sexual Horror in the 1980s and the Manga of Suehiro Maruo, M/C Journal, 7(4). Retrieved Oct 10 2004 from <http://www.media-culture.org.au/05_horror.php>