Chapter 47 Chaotic changes

This time, the detective novels of the old and good times are collected in the rare form of complete works in the library version.Today's mystery novels have shown a diversified trend, and the scope is too wide to be easily sorted out, but its fundamental charm is undoubtedly exuded by the works collected in this series.Until now, the bright red blood in the story is still flowing out, and the dark curtain is even more unexplorable.Readers who love reasoning may be able to hear the inaudible breathing of the murderers between the lines in these libraries, and be keenly aware of their humble aura.

Edogawa Ranpo once ruled the world as a demon king of another dimension, but his essence is different from the appearance, hidden in the deepest part of the soul, and ordinary people have nowhere to find his trace.This masterpiece of Luanpo stacked together has the unique purity of a teenager who is condensed by loneliness and shame, as well as the unrestrained fantasy of Luanpo.At this moment, the dark sailboat is about to slowly embark on a new voyage... From the 29th to 30th years of the Showa era, senior detective novel fans got an unexpected surprise: after Ranpo Edogawa stepped into his sixties, he actually serialized "Human Fantasy" in "Gems" and "Fun Club" respectively. " and "Shadow Man".What a blessing to be able to read Ranpo's new novel!When the booklet was published, part of it was deleted. The beginning of "Human Illusion" was originally:

Where does this weird serial murder case start?The author clearly branded every clue and every subtle thread of the case in his mind, but he was confused and couldn't find the starting point... Well, let's start there.Takehiko Shoji, one of the important characters in the story, entered the former Marquis's house as a secretary and became a member of the Hitokawara family. Let's start with this. What follows is the text of the current version, so if this paragraph of text is redundant, it is indeed redundant.But this kind of hesitation, or the unique tone of leisurely and unhurried, is a full-fledged chaotic style, which can make readers get goosebumps when they are teased.

Another difference from the current version is the ending of "But, in hindsight".It was written in the magazine "Gem" when it was serialized: ... He was involved in unusual crimes, suffered from unspeakable fear, and even faced the misfortune of losing his life. In other words, Ranpo wanted to take the young man's life at the beginning, but as readers can see, Takehiko Shoji blinked in the darkness of the air-raid shelter, and finally survived.Regarding this point, Ranpo criticized mercilessly in the creation notes of the Taoyuanshe edition of the complete works: ... "The Illusion of Human Transformation" should be the work that I put the most effort into, but after all, I am not good at conceiving novels, and there are too many details of psychological and behavioral contradictions in the creation process.As always, I worked hard to compensate for the subterfuge, which, despite my painful monthly struggles, was almost uninventive, and the criminal motives were novel but lacked convincing inevitability.Like all my novels, this was another failure.

This criticism is so severe that readers want to say: "Teacher, that's not the case, we read it with great interest every month." Ranbu's criticism of his own works has been merciless since "Master One Inch".Randomly analyze in detail: ... I even included another impossible selling point "secret room" into the article, but it became the weakness of the work instead. Indeed, in addition to the boring explanation of the secret room, there are tape recorders, clocks, etc., tricks that are difficult to realize in theory, but in terms of length, there are many shortcomings.However, Ranpo put the huge air-raid shelter in front of the town to the end, and until the end, he tirelessly missed the wish of the cave, that is, the wish in the womb. Now it seems gratifying, whether it is the boyhood curled up between the cabinet and the wall, Or the youth who hid in the cupboard and worked hard to practice writing, the chaotic soul is always a fetus floating in the amniotic fluid of sorrow.And the underground kingdom of "Shadow Boy" is also a replay of the old tune of "The Strange Tale of Panorama Island", which makes people feel like fried rice.However, Ranpo's consistent anti-ground and anti-reality stubbornness is applauded. Ranpo, the long nightmare of a fetus throughout his life, is no different from the charm of detective novels themselves.What the current mystery novels have lost is the author's deep fears and dreams, as well as the extraordinary expressiveness of the articles.Readers should be more picky, and don't give up the right to crude instant food—now that crudely processed products are so rife.

Regardless of how Ranpo evaluates his long-form works, the main feature of short stories is that not only the storyline is meticulous, but the articles are also exquisitely hand-woven, sometimes like elegant embroidery, so that every detail of the enchanting forest can be seen at a glance no more."The Man Traveling with Stickers" in the fourth year of the Showa era and "Dr. Muluo" in the sixth year are excellent examples. The mirage wonders of the former and the moonlight magic of the latter seem to call readers to enter the beautiful world. Different dimension world.Importantly, the pathos that runs through it perfectly wraps these bizarre stories.

The mirage of Uojin can also be seen during the daytime in April and May.I heard that when this peculiar natural landscape appears, the city government will notify with an alarm.It seems to be rare even locally though, my old friends who live in Uozu only saw it once in high school. According to the chronicle records, in the second year of the Showa era, out of a deep aversion to "One Inch Master", Ranpo closed his pen again and wandered along the coast of Japan. Imagine how lonely and lonely it is.Is the dim electric light responding to the depression in my heart?The wheels sounded monotonously.However, it is precisely because of the support of such anguish that this masterpiece was born, so Ranpo also thinks that "this is my favorite short story".

In fact, Ranpo did not seem to have witnessed the mirage in this wandering journey, but with his astonishing imagination and brilliant writing skills, he used the magic of words to present the real scene of the mirage to the readers. The mirage is like a giant movie played in the air, and it is also like dripping ink on the surface of a milky white film, which will naturally bleed, and after drying, it will be enlarged several times and then projected into the air. The frightening panic in the depths of my heart suddenly exploded, just like when a distant thunder exploded, the people who heard it must have tinnitus.Something poured into his chest, and he couldn't help but spit it out on the breast paper to see, it might be a puddle of blood like a small physalis.Because of this, the mirage perfectly echoes the old twelve steps and the peephole mechanism in the second half of the plot, fully showing the small world in the slide show.And the ending of the story is really memorable for a long time: the old man is the existence of the other side of time, and will never appear in the hustle and bustle of the city and under the neon lights.

As for "The Unbelievable Crime of Dr. Muluo", Ranpo once felt that this rare title was too long, so he changed it to "Dr. He shouted loudly: No, that's putting the cart before the horse!This short story, which vividly depicts the magic of moonlight and the loneliness of the building and valley, still needs a title that is too long but has a hazy charm, and Ranpo himself knows it very well.I really want to call on those who are willing to launch a movement to change the original title (a digression, and it is not appropriate to mention it here, but I sadly remembered that a joint farewell ceremony for the remains was held for the inspection of the Mejiro Department a few days ago. When questioning passers-by The young man who was unfortunately assassinated and promoted to the police department, also surnamed Mi Liang, will no longer be able to bathe in the moonlight to his heart's content. But it is strange to say that the moonlight ten years ago in the Showa era seemed to be different from the rich brilliance it is today. It seems to be able to hear its whispering. This is not just because of the bright city lighting. There must have been a so-called "silent moonlight". This concept is more acceptable than it is now, and people can quite understand the word lunatic. Uchida Momobu's "moonlight bath" is a bitter trick to delay aging, but the beauty of the vocabulary itself makes people feel the hidden It has different meanings. Perhaps, as the head of the Kakinuma Circus said, cleaning the swimming pool late at night will feel the moonlight burning the skin. These are the pranks of the magical moon.

"The Unbelievable Crime of Dr. Mu Luo" is exactly such a work bathed in moonlight, and it has been read by a few readers who love moonlight so far.In the window opposite the building, there stood Muluo Liaozhai, an ophthalmologist with an evil smile on his sallow face.The little old man turned into an ape under the moonlight and fell from the valley of the building.In the end, the youth of the narrator subtly retreats into the other side of time, just like "The Man Traveling with Stickers", never to appear again. From to "Mirror Hell", the early short stories written and published during the Taisho period, compared with the above two works, are composed of rationality and wit as the main axis. The same goes for "Walking on the Ceiling" and "The Chair in the World". Although they describe abnormal psychology on the surface, they both end in unexpected endings.Even so, the former hangs down the rope of the boxer pants (there used to be such a thing in the old days, if the rope was accidentally pulled out or fell into the pants, it was difficult to restore it to its original shape, and it took a lot of work. I really don’t know how Goda put it back.) It's funny, and the latter enjoys the wonderful sensuality of the great buttocks of Westerners through a layer of leather, which is always unforgettable to me.It's just that the "Psychological Test" is useless to show off, and I have never appreciated it very much.However, in any case, these works laid the foundation for the creation of detective novels in Japan. Thinking of how readers at that time enjoyed new forms of novels, and how dazzling the appearance of up-and-coming writers such as Ranpo, I am envious from the bottom of my heart.Because the vast majority of readers are high-class vagrants who only appear in novels, always panicking from boredom, biting their long little fingernails, and wholeheartedly expecting bloody cases to happen.

One more thing to add, Ranpo said in the preface to the "Complete Works of Popular Literature" published in the second year of Showa that among the five selected articles, the first two are pure detective novels like "A Receipt", and the remaining three are pure detective stories. Titles such as "The Red Room" are "the so-called metamorphosis detective novels I wrote driven by my eccentric hobbies", and the post-war debate on original and metamorphosis probably originated from this.This discussion may have some meaning at first, but in the history of Japanese detective stories, there is no more nutritious and futile debate than this discussion.It's as irreverent as accusing "The Smoke Bug" of being an anti-war novel, which I find irrelevant. In "Smoke Bugs", it describes the story of a heavily disabled soldier and his wife living in a remote country house.The creaking kerosene lamp, the ancient well buried in deep grass, and the reptile crawling to the edge of the well in the last scene of the story, all interweave into the nightmare of the last scene of the movie "Freak", so the question is whether it can resonate.Ranpo's explanation of this work is very awe-inspiring. I quote the end part: …I don’t feel happy when I am recognized by the left, and I don’t feel anything when I am disgusted by the right.I love the character of talking about dreams, so that no matter how I am treated in the real world, I don't feel pain or itching. That's right, Ranpo's life is just a dark dream woven in the depths of his heart.The source of the dream was fear, a sharp shame, a great shyness.How can such a lonely Ranbu not create some companions when he deeply feels that he is a "outsider", a sad creature of right and wrong?The protagonists in the works of Ranpo Biange are exactly the same kind of Ranpo, the clone of Ranpo, that is, Ranpo itself.The more extreme Ranpo's melancholy is, the more vividly they penetrate the reader's heart.Sometimes, it even makes readers feel that they are the few who can understand them. Of course, only superb techniques can achieve such an effect.In this sense, none of the short stories included here is worthy of the title of "masterpiece", the only exception is "Horikoshi Searching Section 1 Chief Junqi".I originally thought that the boringness of this work was due to the fact that after the war, Ranpo was too rigid in the classification of tricks, so I lamented that apart from "Shadow Man", Ranpo rarely roamed freely in creation, but later I He found that this was not the case. After growing up, the shame and shyness in his heart became deeper and deeper, which finally made him lock his heart and even stop creating clones.In his own commentary, Ranpo said that "Horikoshi's investigation first class chief Jun Qi" "is the same trick of one person and two characters, nothing new, and a failed work".However, the most serious failure is that you can't see Ranpo's burning desire to transform-at least this story is boring.Surprisingly, during this period, Ranpo relied on the Twenty Faces of the Phantom Thief series to express himself, but this issue will be discussed later. Having said that, the dream of Luanbu's uninterrupted career is too gorgeous.In order to realize these dreams, he hopes for colorful tricks.One person with two characters, and the two characters who can be said to be one with two sides, that is, the desire to transform, as well as the hobbies of living dolls, the preference for lenses, the love of small animals, madness, homosexuality, sleepwalking, shadow world, mirrors and mazes.The world of Ranbu is decorated with a wide variety of heresies and mysteries, which can be called the fantasy school. Speaking of living dolls, in the space of writing this commentary, in order to pay homage to Ranpo, I went to visit the Duane Hanson exhibition held in a department store in Shinjuku, but I was quite disappointed when I entered the venue.The author seems to be very pleased with the new sculptures made of polyester resin, but they are not works of art at all, and wax figures are more like.Every sculpture has an indescribable unnaturalness and unhealthiness. Even the "Football Player" touted in newspaper advertisements, in reality, whether it is the sweat on the forehead or the fine hair on the arms, there is no such thing as rigidity. It's dynamic but loses interest, which is really a test of one's technical level. In the final analysis, Han Sen is too flattering, and it is absurd to exaggerate too much in words.At this point, Ranpo is just pointing to the end, and never describes ghosts other than haunted houses.The chaotic living puppet hobby and the role of two people are most vividly used in the slightly messy long series "The End of the Hunting" in the fifth year of the Showa era. In the underground factory of the crazy doctor, the prime minister was detained until the police The director is a person, but active in the real world is indeed a fake that has been swapped.The daughter acted like a baby to the fake rich father, and the embarrassment that collided in the upside-down scene was wonderful.In addition, it is the first time that the wide-angle shooting method fully presents another utopian wish and underground dream of Ranpo, which is "The Strange Story of Panorama Island". Putting too many twins and lookalikes in detective stories is now considered taboo, but that's only for those who are stubborn about the so-called basics.In the early days, Ranpo did not hesitate to let these characters appear in the works.They are exactly the same but somewhat different. This kind of horror is also inherited by science fiction. In the movie "Alien Invasion", plant seeds drifting from outer space to the earth gradually grow into humans.At first, the daughter insisted that there was an indescribable weirdness about her parents, which was fake, but she gradually realized that it was nothing, and changed her words to say that she was supercilious.The description of this passage is very interesting, because the daughter herself is replaced. Similarly, in "The Strange Tales of Panorama Island", after hearing Hirosuke Hirosuke's confession of the truth, Chiyoko also revealed that she actually... Although it can be arranged like this, it becomes an old-fashioned short story plot.The most important thing in this novel is to savor the night of fireworks carefully, when the big golden spider descends from the sky, and experience the madness and loneliness of Chaos in the tragic ending of the garden, beauties, and mermaids being splashed with human blood.Hitomi Hirosuke is just in disorder, and Kitami Kogoro, who exposed the crime one by one, is a "man of the day" who represents secular justice. The underwater scenery that I can’t wait to describe, the slimy seaweed and poisonous fish, the smile of the ama distorted by pain, the touch of the swan boat and the steep white stone steps, make people feel like they are in the ancient and lonely forest. Swamps, camellias and naked women, the green wilderness that spreads out in front of you after a thousand miles - the scenery of Panorama Island is so magical.Of course, there should be quite a few people who have visited the Panorama Pavilion in the Meiji era, but Ranpo is the only one who can make the wonder of his childhood so vivid on paper. A young man in a chaotic heart, repeatedly hurt by the shame and self-loathing that hit his heart, he can only revel in shyness and loneliness.He strongly longed for the beauty outside the world, but he couldn't find one or two from reality.This rare dreamer had to rent out houses as a sideline until Showa 6.The loneliness of only being able to murmur with Edgar Allan Poe and Junichiro Tanizaki that "the night dream is real" is probably heart-wrenching. However, it is precisely because of this that the twenty-face series of Kaitou, which continued to be written in the 37th year of the Showa era, received overwhelming support from the boy.The chaotic boy and the reader's boy call each other deep in their hearts, and they know that the "companion" has appeared.I would like to quote the ending of "Shin Edogawa Ranpo" which talked about this part about seven years ago. "Because of being too lonely, Ranpo is actually the phantom thief with twenty faces that 'existence itself is a shame' who involuntarily keeps appearing in disguise in front of the boy." Finally, although "Yin Beast" has always been regarded as a representative work of Ranbu, for me, the ambiguity of the murderer really can't stand my aftertaste, and the strong love description is not to my liking, and I still can't like it now .However, because it is a new work that Ranpo has been brewing for a long time after he stopped writing for two years, the sales volume of the serialized magazine has skyrocketed unprecedentedly, and even reprinted and third editions have received rave reviews.Ranpo said in the creation notes that Yin Beast refers to a cat-like ghostly beast, and this atmosphere is also vividly expressed, and the description of Negishi, Yanaka Hatsune Town, Nippori Jinsugi and Old Street is also due to the The land I am familiar with excites me.I am proud of my steps (but I don’t get carried away, and I haven’t found anything extraordinary after re-reading it now), and published other long and short masterpieces in succession in the second year. Therefore, "Yin Beast" undoubtedly brought a huge turning point and is worth commemorating masterpiece. In Showa 52, "Yin Beast" was adapted into a movie, and Henggou's official history was also included in the preview. However, after the screening, I was completely disappointed with the adaptation method that completely replaced Ranpo's unique charm with a modern style. To nitpick: Before the war, it was impossible for a writer to lock up in a hotel and catch up on a manuscript.The same is true for the films of Henggou's works. Isn't there no director or producer who can use the aesthetics of the original work as a benchmark and produce avant-garde works with the help of shooting skills?I think "Panorama Island" is an excellent subject. Leaving aside the movies, it is the illustrations of Eitaro Takenaka that are included in this complete collection for the first time that make "Yin Beast" shine from another angle.That is simply the perfect embodiment of the world of Ranpo, and I can't help but marvel that someone can perform to such a degree.It should be a charcoal drawing, but all the characters are like aliens wriggling on the other side of the darkness, especially the eyes of the clown in the pointed hat, which is really wonderful.Of course, readers also supported it with enthusiastic cheers, and Eitaro Takenaka became the darling of the illustration industry, and his unique style of painting became popular among the public. In addition to "Yin Beast", Eitaro also has many masterpieces, such as the "Dajiang Chunni Painting Book" in the 10th Showa era and the official history of Henggou, which are the best among the best. In eight volumes.The former deliberately changed the title of each of Ranpo's works to something like "Game on the Ceiling" to distinguish it from "Yin Beast".The technique is extremely strange and imaginative.The latter draws a woman who is as beautiful as a fairy, the blood drops on the white skin, the wriggling toes, etc., which people will never tire of seeing. However, Eitaro criticized himself in the 10th year of the Showa era: "Can I continue to draw such erotic and ugly illustrations? Can I die without regret?" He left his brush and traveled to Manchuria.In the 14th year of the Showa era, Eitaro was forcibly repatriated from Harbin, and later stayed behind closed doors in Kofu, so not many people know his name now, but in fact Eitaro is 80 years old (1984) and is still alive. It is said that for the sake of his son Takenaka, he picked up the brush again. Although it is a private matter, I recently received a painting from Eitaro as a gift.I wrote the commentary in the "Complete Collection of Illustrations of Masterpieces" mentioned earlier, and I sent the collection of essays containing that article, and Eitaro, who was pleased with the reappraisal after fifty years, specially sent me this painting through the publishing house .At the bottom left of the picture is a painted praying mantis, and on the right is written "resentment" in black, that font seems to be written drip by drip with blood-soaked fingertips.I was terrified when I thought that this was the authentic work of the painter embellishing the masterpieces of Ranpo, Masashi, Yumeno Hisaku and so on.Because of this, I am extremely happy to be able to realize the plan to include illustrations in this complete set of works.In my opinion, Eitaro's painting style is by no means erotic or ugly. One day, when "Eitaro Takenaka Painting Book" is published, he will become Japan's Beardsley and be welcomed all over the world. In the fourth year of the Showa era, when I was in the first grade of elementary school, I greedily read "Spider Man" serialized in the magazine behind my parents' back. It has been fifty-five years since then.Ranpo, who used to be the devil king of a different dimension, unknowingly grew into a shy boy, a vulnerable youth, and will always stand in my heart...