Strange Tale of Panorama Island

書籍

Strange Tale of Panorama Island
　Edogawa Ranpo
　訳：Elaine Kazu Gerbert
　平成25・2013年　University of Hawaii Press（Honolulu）
　21.5センチ×13.5センチ　──　23＋113ページ　17ドル

Acknowledgments
　p.vii
Introduction
　p.ix－xxiii
Strange Tale of Panorama Island
　p1－106
Note
　p107－113
About the Translator

Introduction

　Modern Japanese literature has traditionally been divided between "pure" or high literature, grounded in literary referentiality and "seriousness," and popular literature, which appeals to more immediate sensory experience and incorporates elements such as mystery, suspense, and dramatic suprise. With the rise of mass culture in the 1920s, this distinction between high literature and popular culture began to blur. The era saw many works by "serious" writers that played upon readers' love of suspense. Doubles and doppelgängers, visual illusions and deceptions, trickery and crime, and mental derangement and obsessions, brought to effect through the ingenious use of vision technologies, began to appear in stories by well-established writers such us Tanizaki Jun'ichirō, Satō Haruo, Akutagawa Ryūnosuke, Miyazawa Kenji, Uno Kōji, and others. Edogawa Ranpo, whose work was heavily influenced by Tanizaki, Satō, and Uno, incorporated all of these themes into his stories, and in a way that was more sustained and radical than those of any of his contemporaries.

Strange Tale of Panorama Island

　1

　Few residents M Prefecture may know of its existence. Located at the southernmost point of S Country in M Prefecture, the island measure scarcely five miles in diameter and floats like a green manjū turned upside down, far from the other islands where I Bay opens out into the Pacific Ocean. It's deserted nowadays. Nobody takes note of it, save for occasional fisherman who go ashore there on a whim. It stands alone in the wild sea at the tip of the cape, and unless the sea is calm, it's risky for small fishing boats to approach it. What's more, it's hardly a place that one would hazard danger to go near.

　▼University of Hawaii Press：Strange Tale of Panorama Island