Pomegranate and The Devouring Insects by Edogawa RanpoMy rating: 4 of 5 stars
It was a pleasant surprise to find this self-published volume with translations by Alexis Brown of two short stories by Edogawa Ranpo on Amazon (as a Kindle-only book, for a very attractive price) – just yesterday I wrote that these two stories, “The Devouring Insects” (Maggots) and “Pomegranate” had not yet been translated into English, so I hurry to introduce them!
The book starts with "Pomegranate" (Zakuro) which was published in 1934 in the famous literary magazine “Chuo Koron,” the first time Ranpo published one of his works in this intellectual bulwark. Unfortunately, the story was so heavily criticized by the literary establishment that it severely demotivated Ranpo. As the sad result, he gave up most of his creative work and instead from this time on concentrated on essays, adaptations of foreign novels and juvenile fiction (to be more precise: over the next 25 years, until 1960, Ranpo would now and then still write a short story, but only to a total of ten over this whole period).
But “Pomegranate” is not at all bad – on the contrary, it is one of Ranpo’s best stories in the “pure” detective genre (called “honkaku” in Japan)! Interestingly, as in Ranpo’s very first story, “The Two-Sen Copper Coin” (see Modanizumu: Modernist Fiction from Japan, 1913-1938), this (more or less) last story is also a coming-to-grips with Western detective fiction. While that first story used elements of Poe and turned the traditional puzzle story on its head, here Ranpo borrows from Trent's Last Case, usually considered as the first novel belonging to England’s Golden Age of puzzle detective fiction. In that novel, we find a trick which Ranpo copies, but also deeply changes: in Bentley’s novel the murderer pretends that the (murdered) husband is still alive by speaking a few words to the wife who is already lying down. Thus, he establishes an alibi. In Ranpo’s story, about the rivalry between two traditional confectionery stores in Nagoya, one of the owners kills his rival; he then goes to the bedroom of the wife of the killed man and sleeps with her (the only “ero-guro” element), leaving early the next morning. Ranpo’s additional trick is that the other man has in fact been killed, and the man who sleeps with the freshly widowed wife is not the owner of the rival store, but her own husband “who pretends to be the owner of the rival store” “who in his turn is supposedly pretending to be her husband.”
The “pomegranate” of the title refers to the face of the murdered man, which is disfigured by sulfuric acid during the murder, and also to the perpetrator who in the end kills himself by jumping into a deep ravine – his bloody remains spreading over the surface of the river down below like the sight of a cross-sectioned pomegranate.
Mark Silver discusses this story in his excellent Purloined Letters: Cultural Borrowing and Japanese Crime Literature, 1868-1937 and asks attention for the fact that the story can be seen as an elaborate meditation on the differences between imitations and originals - the Japanese at the time that Ranpo wrote the story (and Ranpo himself in the first place) were rather uncomfortable with writing in a genre that had originated in the West, and tried to define their own identity. The story contains many mirrorings, such as the two confectionery shops making identical sweets, the two owners who are rather alike, etc. Ranpo also calls attention to the problems of assumed identity, as the murderer has had plastic surgery in Shanghai and doesn’t look like his old self anymore.
In contrast, “The Devouring Insects” (Mushi) from 1929 is a pure “ero-guro” story. A misanthropic man murders a beautiful woman who has spurned him. He then becomes so enamored of her dead body that he can’t bring himself to dispose of it, even when it is devoured by maggots...
The protagonist (Masaki Aizo) is a well-off bachelor who spends most of his time in his storehouse filled with old books and antiques (note that also Ranpo used a storehouse as his room for study and writing!). When he meets an old flame from school who is now a famous actress (Kinoshita Fuyo), his love for her is rekindled, but she rejects his advances. She has become the girlfriend of another former classmate (Ikeuchi Kotaro) and Masaki stalks them for several months around Tokyo to spy on their lovemaking. His peeping is helped by the fact that it is easy to make a small hole in shoji partitions papered with washi, but he even bores holes in the soft and thin walls between the rooms. When he observes the couple’s ecstasy (and especially when Fuyo makes some denigrating remarks about himself), his anger reaches a dangerous boiling point. He learns to drive a car and then poses as a taxi driver to kidnap Fuyo. He strangles the actress and takes her corpse to his storehouse, planning to throw it into the empty well in the garden.
But the doll-like corpse yields an array of unexpected pleasures when he embraces it, so Masaki keeps it in his storehouse. When the corpse starts decomposing as it is slowly devoured by maggots, Masaki anxiously looks for ways of preservation. He tries to inject embalming fluid into the veins, but fails doing that properly. Next he uses flashy make-up to hide the death-spots on the corpse... This is really the utmost of “ero-guro” – Ranpo serves up a rather sickening dose of necrophilia. In the end Masaki commits suicide and is finally discovered embracing the now unidentifiable remains of Fuyo...
This story formed the basis of the fourth episode in the anthology movie “Rampo Noir” (Ranpo Jigoku, 2005), filmed by Kaneko Atsushi. The infatuated man was played by Asano Tadanobu, and the actress by Ogawa Tamaki. As a manga artist, the director filled this segment with lush visuals and pop colors.
I fully recommend this book; the translation is fine, the only small blemish I noted is that the name of the actress is spelled as “Fuyuo,” which should be “Fuyou” (in the spelling the author uses) – with a long “o”.
Four stars for two excellent Edogawa Ranpo stories (which inexplicably had evaded translation so far).
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