Japanese Tales of Mystery and Imagination

About

A quadruple amputee and his perverse wife. A man who builds a labyrinthine chair designed to contain a human being. A magician whose tricks may not be tricks at all. Edogawa Rampo's first collection translated into English brings together nine stories that established him as Japan's answer to Edgar Allan Poe — tales written with the pace of Western genre fiction and the atmospheric dread of Japanese ghost stories. These stories, largely unknown to Western readers before this translation, reveal a writer whose imagination operated at the intersection of beauty and horror. Rampo's prose moves with quick, confident strokes, each story building to revelations that are simultaneously logical and deeply disturbing. The collection that introduced English readers to Japan's master of the macabre — stories that prove terror needs no cultural translation to chill the blood.