Posts tagged japan
One if my favorite stories from the fantastic Saya in Underworld. If you’re not familiar with it, she translates lots of urban legends and creepy stories from forums and such (though sadly there haven’t been many updates as of late because of the earthquake). And incidentally, the gyatei link on the first page was basically the best thing on tumblr and I miss it like a lost love. Does anyone out there know if the person who ran it has another site I can get my fix at?:
While on a mountain rumoured to be haunted I caught a glimpse of something shaped like a human body floating in the bushes.
A ghost!? I thought, and fearfully went closer to it to make certain of what I was seeing; it turned out to be not a ghost but a body of a man who had hanged himself.
I felt sorry for the unfortunate man and thought I couldn’t just leave him as he was and I could at least take his body off the rope.
It was then I heard something drop with a thud. I was startled but it seemed his shoe just fell off.
I thought anyway I had to do this and tried to reach the rope but it was difficult. I then went round to the front of his body to work at the knot. I tried to undo it again and again but without success.
A while later I heard something drop with a thud again. I thought that was strange and looked down but there was nothing on the ground and when I looked at the body it was still wearing shoes.
That creeped me out, and I decided to leave it and started walking away. But then I realized something; I got round to the front of the body so many times but I couldn’t remember the man’s face at all, and I always saw only his back.
book by Masami Akita (merzbow)
“Nihon Kinbaku Shashin-shi” (The History of Japanese Bondage Photography)
Kiken buto no ryakuke by Yoshu Chikamatsu, 1888 Japan
Click to see a bigger version
This is Edogawa Rampo.
Looks like a nice, little old Japanese man, right?
Well, he certainly is. He brought the detective novel to Japan and gained widespread notoriety for doing so, as well as writing a large amount of adolescent fiction, researching homosexuality in Japan, and generally being a pretty sweet dude.
In addition to this, he also lead the literary side of the Ero Guro Nansensu movement, which, as one might suppose, focused on the erotic, grotesque, and nonsensical. Any of you freaks that follows me has probably been on the wikipedia page for it, because that is what comes up when one searches for “guro.”
I am going to make a presentation on him in class tomorrow, because my class is awesome. I read two of his short stories:
THE HUMAN CHAIR in which an UGLY GUY who makes chairs for a living makes and armchair with room inside of it to live in, and proceeds to creepily have people SIT ON HIM and get his rocks off on HOT CHICKS doing so. His chair then gets sold to a guy whose wife sits in it all the time. He sneaks out and sends her a CREEPY LETTER DETAILING HOW CREEPY HE IS and then another one saying “loljk I was joking that was just a story” BUT I AM PRETTY SURE HE IS STILL IN HER CHAIR.
and also
THE CATERPILLAR in which AN QUADRUPLE AMPUTEE WAR VETERAN who cannot hear or speak is continuously used by his wife for CRAZY ACROBATIC SEX and is generally miserable aside from the sex, then gets his eyes stabbed out because she is a CRAZY SADIST and then forgives her and painstakingly drags himself to a well and falls down it.
In other words, my class is awesome.
17 notes (via giantpanda)
