Hirai Taro: Master of Mystification

In October of 1894, a child was born within the city of Nabira, a city tucked into the Mie Prefecture in southern Japan. His name was Hirai Tarō, and he would change the face of Japanese literature. When he published his first short story, “The Two Sen Coin” in 1923 he published it under the name of Edogawa Ranpo. This was the name that would follow him for the rest of his life. And this is the name that holds the fame and admiration he gathered for his work, even now that he is gone.

The name Edogawa Ranpo holds a lot of significance, not just for the Japanese and American admirers of his work, but because it holds another name within itself. Edogawa Ranpo. Edgar Allan Poe. Edogawa Ranpo, Edgar Allan Poe. While not exactly the same—as most Western critics seem to think—the name Edogawa Ranpo is a Japanization of Poe’s name as well as a Japanese writer’s joke. A large part of this choice of pseudonym had to do with Tarō’s love of Poe. In college, Tarō first came across the works of Poe and fell in love. While he tried to publish translations of his favorite works first, it was ultimately his own short story that gave him his debut.

Tarō, who from now on I will refer to as his pseudonym, Ranpo, was the first Japanese writer to gain traction publishing detective fiction. While American and English detective fiction works were wildly popular in Japan, no Japanese writer had grown famous until Ranpo. Driven by his love of Poe, Ranpo’s works closely resemble Poe’s in tone and in style even while they play upon the themes Poe established. Ranpo’s works are drenched in a fascination with point of view and the eye, often playing upon space and what the eye can and cannot see. In his stories this altered point of view, this turning of our world on its head, is what makes the slightly disturbing become terrifying, the certain become uncertain, the beautiful become hideous.

Imagine this: You step up to the front of a building, drop a few coins into the hand of the cashier. There is a long hallway ahead of you, the light dim enough you can only just see to walk forward without stumbling. The people ahead of you walk slowly along, and there is a slight tension in the air: fear, excitement, wonder. You come to a spiraling staircase, leading it seems almost infinitely into the air. You climb and climb, eyes squinted and hands tight upon the railing, everyone quiet in the anticipation. There is a laugh from the bottom of the staircase, and in the anticipation you and the person in front of you flinch at the harsh noise against the silence.

And then suddenly you all walk into a massive open space, transported to a world that is distinctly not your own. It could be anywhere; a battlefield, a tale of myth, a serene landscape. In all honesty, it doesn’t matter. All you know is that you are no longer stuck in the world you were before. The tension shatters, pulls back together to form a fascinated wonder, a voiceless joy. And so you stand there, in your other world, amongst a crowd of similarly wondering beings, and feel the sensation for just a moment of being free.

When I first began my research on Ranpo, I had never heard of panoramas before. Oh, I knew of them in modern terms, as the wide view images that can be captured on everything from sleek photographer’s equipment to a child’s cellphone. But I didn’t know panoramas as they were in Ranpo’s time, as he knew them—as a certain kind of magic. As I dove into his writings, into his obsession with the creation of new and sometimes disturbing worlds, I stumbled across his love for these historical panoramas and found myself similarly fascinated.

The craze started in 1787, when a man named Robert Barker decided to create a large building to encapsulate a massive panoramic painting. Using skillful lighting and eventually even 3D objects and people to make a more effective illusion of reality, panoramas became a sensation all across Europe and the United States and many years later, Japan. Realizing the demand for these works of art were high, creators began to make their art transportable, much like a traveling circus. These panoramas were at the time considered sophisticated technology. There were no televisions, no cellphones, and photography was just beginning to gain traction. One of the reasons panoramas became so popular, it has been theorized, is that they were the only way for many people to see other portions of the world. For those who couldn’t travel, panoramas were a way to experience other places like they were actually there, and the wonder of that didn’t fade away easily. Ranpo’s love of panoramas is a perfect example of this.

Although Japan fell in love with panoramas just as the Western world did, their love came years later. Their first two panorama halls weren’t built until 1890, practically a century after the first panorama was revealed in Europe. Panoramas took root as a breath of fresh air for the people of Japan. Surrounded by a rapidly modernizing and industrializing country, walking into a panorama could be an almost religious experience, an escape from the world outside. It was the second hall of panoramas, named the Panorama Hall of Asakusa Park, that would shape Ranpo’s young imagination. He reminisces multiple times in his writings on going into the Panorama Hall as a child, at viewing the many misemono (simply translated as ‘shows’) that were presented inside. These shows were often depictions of dramatic battles throughout Japanese history, presented against the background of the panorama. Sometimes gory and violent, often dramatic and glorified, these scenes of theater were a source of joy for Ranpo. Many critics of his work see the impression these misemono left upon him in the drama and sometimes shockingly gory endings of his short fiction. He even refers to his view of art as “panoramism,” meaning that he wanted through his work to create other worlds as beautiful and flawless and fascinating for the youth of Japan as the panoramas and misemono he encountered in his own youth.

You are in a boat, travelling to an island you cannot escape from, with a man you both love and fear. With a man you are almost certain, in your heart, is not your husband. You cannot be sure, for he looks identical to him except for the smallest things, but his heart is not the same. And yet…

And yet you are fascinated.

You follow him as he shows you his masterpieces, are brought to tears by wonder and then terror at the illusions he’s created. Even as he explains their secrets to you, you can’t help but sink back into the illusions. You feel sick from all the things you’ve seen, exhausted mentally and physically from the wonder and the fear. And so when he offers you respite, a hot spring to sink into and to rest in, you climb in without a thought.

Some time later, his final creation streaks across the sky, the beginning of the end. Face glowing from the light of the fireworks, he asks you a simple question.

You buckle under his gaze, suddenly sure in your insane notion that he is not the man you married. He couldn’t have created all that you have seen if he was that man. And because you are not wrong, the man who is not the one you married and who never wished to hurt you knows he can procrastinate no longer. He knows he must follow through with his plan, the very reason he brought you to the island in the first place.

And so, under the fireworks, while you scream and cry and tear at the man you both love and hate, you are strangled. His merciless fingers close around your throat with a precision that cannot be escaped. Eventually, your gasping stops even as the fireworks fade away in the background. As the people of the island sleep and laugh within their barracks, he lifts your lifeless body with careful hands and places it at the center of his art. Hidden and rotting behind a wall of concrete, you stare out over his work. In that moment, you see it all.

The most obvious example of his obsession with point of view is Ranpo’s first long work, “The Strange Tale of Panorama Island”. Beyond the indication in the title, this work not only embraces the magic of panoramas, but plays upon that magic and twists it into true horror. Through the eyes of the young, innocent Chiyoko, we are pulled into the bizarre creation that is Panorama Island and we feel as she does: terrified, thrilled, desperate to leave and yet too enthralled to do anything but stay. Point of view is a thread that sings throughout the piece, from the scheming eye of Hirosuke, to the loving but suspicious eye of Chiyoko, to the mind-boggling illusions that drape the island Hirosuke creates. Point of view is even what ultimately destroys Hirosuke in the end, when Kogoro Kitami, a detective investigating Chiyoko’s disappearance, discovers Chiyoko’s hair protruding from the column in the center of the island. Kitami knows even before he finds the hair that the column is Chiyoko’s final resting place, because Hirosuke would want his most prized piece of art to be given a place of honor.

It is not hard to find other examples of Ranpo’s obsession with point of view. In the story “The Daydream”, we are placed in the horrified eyes of a man wandering a local market, only to find a shopkeeper’s murdered wife placed in his display window, recreated as a mannequin. Even as the shopkeeper demands for the crowd gathered round him to believe that he murdered his wife, they laugh and call him a fool. Even a policeman stands in the audience, smirking at the crazed idiot. Only our nameless narrator dares look close enough to see the truth, harshly showing the reader that the eye sees only as much as we allow it to. It is both a cautionary tale and a suggestion: look too closely and you will see things you never wanted to see; look too lightly and you will miss the knowledge that could save you.

When the man looks you in the eye you know it is over. He lays your every crime out before you; cold, amused, relentlessly intelligent. And so you give up, you bow your head, you ask, “Can you please let me remain free for a little time longer? All I need is half an hour.” And the man nods, sure in his ability to catch you if you run.

As you walk up the hills, across the landscapes you have created, your perfect works of art, the other man—the detective—slides into the warm waters of the spring that was to be your meeting place. The naked women you hired long ago frolic still in the water, their bodies brushing against the detective’s as he tilts his head back and watches the night sky. You stand, shivering but resolute, in front of the cannons from which the fireworks are shot. They are loaded with every ounce of powder you had left, five times the normal amount. It is your moment, your last hurrah, and when you finally coax your body to move the slow, cool slide to the bottom of the cannon feels almost a relief. You cup a box of matches in your hand, and in one swift movement the world ends.

One of the most common ways the media in Japan referred to Ranpo’s work was “eroguro nansensu” or erotic, grotesque nonsense. Especially in his early, shorter works, this description holds true. Ranpo was fascinated with sexuality, the forbidden, and the casting off of the mandates of everyday life. Through exploring the realms of the horrifying and the ridiculous and the intersection between the two, he catches the reader’s attention in the manner of morbid curiosity. In stories such as “The Strange Tale of Panorama Island” and “The Appearance of Osei” (a short story where a faithless wife listens to her husband suffocate to death in a wooden box) we are horrified, but unable to look away. Some of his stories have effected me so deeply I have wanted to turn away from the page and stop reading, but the suspense is so well done you can’t help but keep going.

In the end: this erotic, grotesque nonsense is best exemplified in the end of the villain and main character of “The Strange Tale of Panorama Island.” While throughout the piece there are moment of horror and hilarity, notably the scene where Chiyoko is strangled under the fireworks with Hirosuke and their silhouettes are lit up like a pair of lovers, it is Hirosuke’s end that truly takes the breath away. Somehow Ranpo makes his choice both ridiculous and poetic, with Panorama Island’s fever dream of a story drifting to a close with all the gentleness of a gunshot.

The detective’s head lolls against the spring’s edge when the fireworks go off. There is something different about them, about the way the light reflects of the embers as they fall. They spread out across the sky, red as the sun that has just drifted below the horizon, and form a mist that makes the air heavy. The women in the pool start to freeze in place, bodies still but eyes wild as thick red droplets pelt their skin. The detective reaches a hand to his face, wiping away the blood rolling down his cheek. There is a splash, and in the center of the spring a hand floats to the surface, palm outstretched, each finger as red and beseeching as the petals of a flower.