Description
Ranpo's panorama island is filled with cleverly designed optical illusions: a staircase rises into the sky; white feathered "birds" speak in women's voices and offer to serve as vehicles; clusters of naked men and women romp on slopes carpeted with rainbow-colored flowers. His fantastical utopia is filled with entrancing music and strange sweet odours, and nothing is ordinary, predictable, or boring. The novella reflected the new culture of mechanically produced simulated realities (movies, photographs, advertisements, stereoscopic and panoramic images) and focused on themes of the doppelganger and appropriated identities: its main character steals the identity of an acquaintance. The novella's utopian vision, argues translator Elaine Gerbert, mirrors the expansionist dreams that fed Japan's colonisation of the Asian continent, its ending an eerie harbinger of the collapse of those dreams.
Today just as a new generation of technologies is transforming the way we think-and becoming ever more invasive and pervasive-Ranpo's work is attracting a new generation of readers. In the past few decades his writing has inspired films, anime, plays, and manga, and many translations of his stories, essays, and novels have appeared, but to date no English-language translation of Panoramato kidan has been available. This volume, which includes a critical introduction and notes, fills that gap and uncovers for English-language readers an important new dimension of an ever stimulating, provocative talent.
About the Author
Elaine Kazu Gerbert teaches Japanese literature in the Department of East Asian Languages and Cultures at the University of Kansas. She is a recipient the U.S.-Japan Friendship Commission Prize for Translation of Modern Japanese Literature for Love of Mountains, Two Stories by Uno Kji and the Comparative and International Education Society's George Z. Bereday Award for Outstanding Scholarship.
Book Information
ISBN 9780824837037
Author Edogawa Ranpo
Format Paperback
Page Count 160
Imprint University of Hawai'i Press
Publisher University of Hawai'i Press
Weight(grams) 202g