Takayuki Tatsumi & Edogawa Rampo
Yesterday I had the rare pleasure of attending a lecture by Professor Takayuki Tatsumi, who was visiting Swarthmore College. Dr. Tatsumi is the author of, among others, American Cyberpunk, which was the first critical study undertaken of cyberpunk (1988), and Full Metal Apache: Transactions Between Cyberpunk Japan and Avant-Pop America.
He spoke about the writer Edogawa Rampo, whose "Stalker in the Attic" is the precursor of Sakate Yoji's play "The Attic". For those unfamiliar with Rampo, he was a Japanese author in the early to mid-twentieth century who wrote some wonderful "tales of suspense and imagination" in the tradition of Poe, Hawthorne and Hoffman. His nom de guerre is in fact a stylized variation of the Japanese pronunciation of "Edgar Allan Poe."
Dr. Tatsumi's talk covered the background of Rampo including the relationship of his fictions to the Japan of the 1920s and '30s, noting that the stories in a sense predict modern globalism. The main focus of the talk was Rampo's "Stalker in the Attic", wherein Rampo blends the detective figure, Kogoro Akechi, (the literary offspring of C. Auguste Dupin), with an attic-dwelling poisoner in such a way that it's apparent the villain is carrying out the secret desires of detective himself. Thus, detective and poisoner become two sides of a persona. The detective, in solving the mystery, is in effect arresting himself. The talk was much more expansive and interesting than my brief description can suggest. But what excited me most was learning from him that there are two more books of Rampo's fiction than I was aware of in print: Black Lizard & Beast in the Shadows and The Rampo Reader, both from Kurodahan Press and available through Amazon.com.
Both Dr. Tatsumi and his wife will be on hand for the International Conference on the Fantastic in the Arts this coming weekend in Orlando, FL, and now I am truly regretting that I was unable to attend it this year myself, because we had barely enough time to chat after the talk. If you're at ICFA--and are a fan of Rampo, cyberpunk, or fantasy literature--you want to seek them out.
-gf out
He spoke about the writer Edogawa Rampo, whose "Stalker in the Attic" is the precursor of Sakate Yoji's play "The Attic". For those unfamiliar with Rampo, he was a Japanese author in the early to mid-twentieth century who wrote some wonderful "tales of suspense and imagination" in the tradition of Poe, Hawthorne and Hoffman. His nom de guerre is in fact a stylized variation of the Japanese pronunciation of "Edgar Allan Poe."
Dr. Tatsumi's talk covered the background of Rampo including the relationship of his fictions to the Japan of the 1920s and '30s, noting that the stories in a sense predict modern globalism. The main focus of the talk was Rampo's "Stalker in the Attic", wherein Rampo blends the detective figure, Kogoro Akechi, (the literary offspring of C. Auguste Dupin), with an attic-dwelling poisoner in such a way that it's apparent the villain is carrying out the secret desires of detective himself. Thus, detective and poisoner become two sides of a persona. The detective, in solving the mystery, is in effect arresting himself. The talk was much more expansive and interesting than my brief description can suggest. But what excited me most was learning from him that there are two more books of Rampo's fiction than I was aware of in print: Black Lizard & Beast in the Shadows and The Rampo Reader, both from Kurodahan Press and available through Amazon.com.
Both Dr. Tatsumi and his wife will be on hand for the International Conference on the Fantastic in the Arts this coming weekend in Orlando, FL, and now I am truly regretting that I was unable to attend it this year myself, because we had barely enough time to chat after the talk. If you're at ICFA--and are a fan of Rampo, cyberpunk, or fantasy literature--you want to seek them out.
-gf out