One of my all-time favorite creepy stories is “The Human Chair” by Edogawa Rampo. It’s about a man who builds a special kind of chair for his kinky pleasure. Over the years I’ve become a big fan of the author and his tales of mystery and imagination. And I’m always thrilled when a new book of his gets translated into English.
Moju: The Blind Beast (Shinbaku Books, $13.95 USA) is the story of a blind serial killer with an odd artistic bent. The novel was turned into an excellent movie back in 1969, but it only captured the first story arc of Rampo’s surreal tale of sexual torture, sadism, and murder. The novel is seven times more grotesque and perverse than the movie.
Admittedly, this sort of stuff isn’t for everybody. And it’s even more remarkable that Rampo (Taro Hirai) wrote it back in 1932. I can only imagine what community standards were like back then.
If you haven’t seen the movie, I recommend that you buy it (or place it in your Netflix queue). And if the film piques your interest in Rampo’s “erotic grotesque nonsense,” then I highly recommend the original source material too.
