Recent posts tagged Edogawa Rampo
2010
Moju: The Blind Beast (Edogawa Rampo)
I could provide any number of examples of Japanese popular literature whose only real exposure to English-speaking audiences came through adaptations into film. Many of Edogawa Rampo’s mystery / crime / thriller / horror stories fit that category nicely, Blind...
The Edogawa Rampo Reader (Edogawa Rampo)
My theory goes something like this. The more popular an author is in a given country, the greater the odds they will be that much more difficult to bring to audiences in other languages—because their popularity in their original locale...
K-20: Fiend With Twenty Faces
The first five minutes of K-20 feature, get this, the theft of Nikola Tesla’s wireless-power transmission device by the masked-and-cloaked Fiend of Twenty Faces. If that description makes you grin, then you are most likely the right audience for this...
2009
Not On This Side Of The Pacific Dept.
Some bits and pieces from AICN Anime... The smash-hit manga/anime franchise Gin Tama (a favorite of mine) is apparently set to be adapted into a live-action film Over There. Warner Bros. Japan is footing the bill -- which means due...
A Peek Ahead Dept.
I've got a few review-related projects worth mentioning.First, on the Edogawa Rampo front, is a review of both the book and movie of Moju: The Blind Beast, one of Rampo's most widely-adapted and -referenced works. The movie was released on...
Exhale Dept.
Deep breath out … The last few months have been horribly busy -- work, writing, some new projects started and old ones finished -- and one of the consequences of that has been a little less activity here. But some...
2008
Shadow Play Dept.
Now how the hell did this slip past me!? Director Barbet Schroeder has adapted Edogawa Rampo's short novel The Beast in the Shadows (in English; see Black Lizard). It apparently took a beating in the press, but I'm still wildly...
Horrors of Malformed Men
Horrors of Malformed Men isn’t really an adaptation of any one, or even two, or even three stories by Japanese mystery/horror icon Edogawa Rampo. It’s like a movie version of one of those jazz jam sessions where the band somehow...
The NaNo Bookshelf
Because so much of what I'm doing with Tokyo Inferno requires research and documentation, I've been building a bookshelf of titles to keep close at hand while writing the book. Many of the things listed here I've mentioned before, or...
2007
The Mystery of Rampo
The Mystery of Rampo is a rare creature: a truly original movie, blessed with a fearless imagination and a delirious visual style. It helps somewhat to know from where the film has mined its imagery and inspirations, but I don’t...
Black Lizard / Beast in the Shadows (Edogawa Rampo)
When Kōji Suzuki’s novel Ring, the basis for whole franchises of movies on both side of the Pacific, was published in English not long ago, I commented to a friend that English-speaking audiences are now finally seeing the literary side...
Japanese Tales of Mystery and Imagination (Edogawa Rampo)
A man who builds himself a chair inside which he hides, the better to seduce a woman without her ever knowing it; a man who commits the “perfect” crime and discovers all too late he’s been a little too perfect...
2006
Rampo Noir (Rampo Jigoku)
Some movies are about plots and characters and stories, and some movies are about images and sounds and feelings. Rampo Noir starts in the second category—it’s a deliriously beautiful movie—but gradually backs into the first. It does not, however, make...
2000
Gemini
The doctor always wondered, idly, what was obscured by his wife’s faulty memory. Being an ex-army surgeon, and having seen the worst of the Russo-Japanese war, a trauma of the mind was hard for him to fathom. A scarred face,...
