Edogawa Rampo and The Excess of Vision A

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Edogawa Rampo and the Excess of Vision:

An Ocular Critique of Modernity in 1920s Japan
Yoshikuni Igarashi
In recent years, the works and life of the mystery writer Edogawa Rampo
(1894–1965) have generated renewed interest in Japan.1 Commemorating
the centennial of his birth in 1994, magazines carried retrospective and
nostalgic features on Rampo, and special programs on his life and writing
aired on television.2 Discussions of Rampo’s literary fiction have tended to
treat it as a corporeal representation of the liminal space that was excluded
from Tokyo’s emergent modernity. Certainly his stories are illuminated by
the nostalgic scenery of Tokyo, particularly that of the amusement district
of Asakusa before its destruction by the 1923 earthquake, and they seem
to celebrate sensual bodily pleasures. Yet many of them deal centrally with
sight, the sense that has often been privileged to be the rational foundation
of modern subjectivity.
My readings of Rampo’s stories attempt to document the reorganization
of the body in the scopic field of modern Japan. Rampo struggled to make
positions 13:2 © 2005 by Duke University Press
Published by Duke University Press

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this transparent vision—the sign of modernity—visible through his experi-

mentation with the literary imagination. Rampo’s writing continues to hold
literary value for present-day readers not because of its self-induced exoti-
cism, but because of its self-reflective gaze on the nature of modern society
through its literary explorations of bodily senses.
Before turning to Rampo’s own texts, it is necessary to trace the critical his-
tory that has relegated Rampo’s literary imagination to the premodern past.
The writings by Tanaka Yûko, Matsuyama Iwao, and Yumeno Kyûsaku
provide representative responses to his writings. The early modern historian
Tanaka Yûko finds a shared space between Rampo’s literary world and the
Edo (1600–1868) cultural sphere, both of which she defines as liminal spaces
excluded from modernity. After stating that Rampo incorporates in his work
the colorful displays of phantasmagoria, bloodshed, and the grotesque found
in Edo’s carnivalesque displays, she continues:
If [phantasmagoria, bloodshed, and the grotesque] appear nonmodern
(hikindaiteki), that is because there was a style of carnivalesque shows in
the Edo [culture] that satisfied the desire for them, and modern [Japan]
excluded this style of shows from itself. However, that was only a su-
perficial exclusion, and it was impossible to completely erase them. The
“modern” is the surface: Rampo becomes the reverse side. Such a reverse
side will never disappear. This is neither the early modern problem nor
the modern problem: this is the problem of general human desire.3
By juxtaposing Edo culture and Rampo, Tanaka establishes a schematic
dyad of the premodern and the modern, and the boundaries between the
two categories stand rigid. The display of human bodies in Rampo’s work
represents the excess that was excluded from the rational, sanitary space of
modern society. In other words, Tanaka construes Rampo’s writings as the
reservoir of the premodern that was repressed in the urban space of Tokyo.
Matsuyama Iwao’s 1984 book, titled Rampo to Tokyo—1920 Toshino kao
(Rampo and Tokyo—1920 the Face of the City), makes a similar claim about
the relationship between Rampo’s work and the premodern. Matsuyama
argues that the senses play an important role. The emergent rational space
of modern cities brings about the repression of the senses, and Rampo’s ex-
cessively sensual writings excavate the repressed premodern layer of urban

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Igarashi Edogawa Rampo and the Excess of Vision 301
life. Matsuyama’s book is an attempt to historicize and situate Rampo’s sto-

ries in 1920s Tokyo; Matsuyama claims that Rampo’s obsession with the
senses resonates with the historical conditions of the time. During the 1920s,
particularly in urban areas such as Tokyo and Osaka, people experienced a
fundamental reworking of human relationships due to the rapid transforma-
tion in the material conditions of daily life. In this process, sight emerged as
a privileged sense since it helped to construct a rational, modern urban space.
Matsuyama does not specifically explicate the nature of the relationship be-
tween vision and urbanization, yet his thesis is supported by the notion of
panoptic vision, which not only regulates space but also produces modern
subjectivity. Within this modern urban space, vision became the preferred
trope of rationality while the other senses were relegated to a secondary sta-
tus, confined to the private realm.4 Detective stories bear the special mark of
urbanity and modern subjectivity in their emphasis on the scientific meth-
ods used to probe the visible body in the process of establishing identity.
Against this characterization of the early Shôwa period (1926–1989), Mat-
suyama identifies Rampo’s project as an excavation of the senses that are
buried underneath the scopic field.
Although Matsuyama’s claim is better substantiated than Tanaka’s and
his attempt to historicize the senses is intriguing, in his attempt to historicize
Rampo, he also relies on a rigid binarism of premodern and modern. In Mat-
suyama’s scheme, vision is associated not only with modernity but also with
the West. Thus, Rampo’s efforts to resurrect the other senses become equated
with an exploration of the base senses, which were a deeply ingrained part of
daily life “prior to Westernization.”5 Hence, Rampo falls into the premod-
ern category. If we were to accept Matsuyama’s (and Tanaka’s) binarism,
we would have to conclude that Rampo’s literary imagination, rendered in
corporeal forms, is no more than a return of the repressed memories of the
preurbanized, indigenous senses. By relegating the senses (excluding vision)
to the premodern period, Matsuyama ironically ends up confirming the pri-
macy of reason and vision. He also romanticizes premodern or indigenous
Japan as a place where the other senses were available. Matsuyama’s frame
confines Rampo’s imagination to 1920s Tokyo and a nostalgic vision of the
past.

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These readings of Rampo, published in the 1980s, are part of a larger “retro
boom” in Japan during this period, which found Rampo a favorable subject.
Yet his writing had already been subjected to the nostalgic gaze of his con-
temporaries in the 1920s, a gaze that located an inherent absence in Rampo’s
literary texts.6 Seeing Rampo’s writing as part of the newly emerging genre
of detective fiction, many regarded it as a mere copy of Western originals:
there was always already something missing in his work. Critics considered
his name—which was intended as a tribute to Edgar Allan Poe, the writer
from whom he received his literary inspiration—to be typically representa-
tive of this lack of originality.7 Comments on Rampo’s name and his works
written by one of his contemporaries, mystery writer Yumeno Kyûsaku, re-
veal that the West/Japan binary, along with the modern/premodern binary,
is instrumental in capturing Rampo in a nostalgic gaze.
The young mystery writer Hirai Tarô began using the name Edogawa
Rampo in 1922, when he first published his acclaimed story “Nisen dôka”
(“Two-sen Copper Coin”) in the journal Shin seinen (New Youth). Yumeno
Kyûsaku expressed his initial disappointment in the name as well as in
Rampo’s work “Shinri Shiken” (“The Psychological Test”) in a short essay
written in 1929. He describes his disappointment as follows:
I clearly remember even now, thinking that “the Japanese always copy
westerners.” I repeated in my mind “Edgar Allan Poe,” “Edogawa Ram-
po,” and felt a vague dissatisfaction. I was drawn by his ability and read his
stories, one after another, like “D-zaka no satsujin jiken” (“A Murder at
D-zaka”) and “Nisen dôka.” Yet I never felt like reading them twice, since
every design and the crafted lines seemed like copies of the westerners.8
Despite his initial impression that Rampo was simply mimicking Western
art, Yumeno soon discovered the irresistible power of Rampo’s imagina-
tion. In “Hakuchûmu” (“Daydreaming”), he took delight in Rampo’s “pure
Japanese” imagination (though he was not explicit about what that meant).
After this discovery, Yumeno “forgot the cheapness of his [Rampo’s] pen
name.”9
Yumeno’s discovery of the Japanese quality in Rampo’s work is a narrative
device that reduces the lack of originality Rampo was condemned to carry
as a writer, or that, to be more precise, turns Rampo’s deficit into an asset. As

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the founder of the “Japanese mystery,” Edogawa Rampo had been compared
to the original, that is, to European and American writers; Yumeno had
identified him as a mere copy of the original. In repealing Rampo’s status of
being a mere copy, Yumeno (and later Matsuyama and Tanaka) resorted to
the interrelated dyads of Japan/the West and premodern/modern. In these
dyads, Rampo is relegated to the categories of Japan and the premodern.
Thus Rampo’s literary merit is safely absorbed into the hackneyed narrative
of “Japan encounters/overcomes the West”; his lack of originality is converted
to a virtue by his uniquely Japanese qualities.
My reading of Rampo is an attempt to complicate the binary categories
of copy/original, Japan/the West, and premodern/modern that have been
widely deployed in evaluating his fiction. Rampo’s work does not, in fact,
force the reader to make the decision to remain on one side or the other of
these binaries; rather, it traverses the terrains of both Japan and the West
as well as those of the premodern and the modern. His stories witness
the transformation of the body within its newly defined relations with the
material world that surrounds it. In this context, his name, Edogawa Rampo,
should be read as a testimony to the problem of modernity rather than as a
sign of the antimodern. In the following reading of Rampo’s work, I will use
the psychoanalytic tools afforded by the early work of Jacques Lacan (and,
to a lesser extent, the work of Gilles Deleuze) to explore the contradictory
forces within the scopic field of modernity that Rampo tenaciously probes.
My choice of Lacan derives less from a colonial intent to privilege European
theories than from a desire to demonstrate the contemporaneousness of
Rampo’s and Lacan’s coeval concerns for subject formation in the scopic
field. Lacan articulated the fictive nature of modern subjectivity through
the fable of the “mirror stage.” He offered his visual theory to critique the
ocularcentrism of the scopic field.
The Hell of Similitude
Against the background of the drastically changing material and social con-
ditions of modern Japan, Rampo tells anxiety-ridden stories of city dwellers,
foregrounding the shifting boundaries between self and other. As the ur-
ban centers of economic and industrial activities grew, millions of people

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relocated themselves from the countryside to cities, seeking new educational

and vocational opportunities. The residents of cities such as Tokyo were
forced to redefine their relationship to their new environment. It was not
simply these external relations but also their identities that were negotiated
as they were inundated with new sensory experiences. Rampo’s stories re-
mind his readers of the centrality of the body and its senses in these modern
experiences; in particular, vision constitutes the central trope in his early liter-
ary production. The diverse material outcome of modernization—modern
architecture, railroads, electricity, and film—brought a new set of visual ex-
periences to early-twentieth-century Japan. His stories serve as laboratories
in which individual elements of the senses are isolated and identified, while
the protagonists and detectives function as scientific observers.
Among Rampo’s numerous stories that take visual experiences in modern
Japan as their theme, the 1926 work “Kagami jigoku” (“The Hell of Mir-
rors”) is the most experimental and psychoanalytic in its setting. Vision is
magnified to the extreme. Here I offer my own experiment with Rampo’s
work by reading it as a psychoanalytic text. Rampo’s experiment produced
results strikingly similar to those of the efforts by Lacan, who was working
on the visual theory of modern ego-formation almost contemporaneously.
Analyzing Lacan’s theory of visuality foregrounds the primacy of vision
in Rampo’s fiction as well as Rampo’s desire to reveal underlying tensions
within the constitution of modern subjectivity. Rampo’s fiction demonstrates
that vision cannot satisfactorily integrate fragmentary bodily senses.
The protagonist of “Kagami jigoku,” Tanuma, develops a peculiar ob-
session with optical devices and mirrors. Rather than seeking employment
with his high school diploma, he builds a laboratory in the yard with the
money his parents generously supply. After his parents’ death, he dedicates
his time to experimenting with optical devices. One morning, the narrator
of the story, Tanuma’s only remaining friend, is alarmed by a message he
receives from Tanuma’s lover asking him to come to Tanuma’s laboratory
immediately. The narrator encounters a strange scene inside the laboratory.
He witnesses “a large spherical object reposing in the center of the room.”
According to his description:
This sphere was about twice as large as the ball on which circus clowns
often balance themselves. The exterior was completely covered with white

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cloth. What terrified me was the fantastic way this sphere kept rolling
slowly and haphazardly, as if it were alive. Far more terrible, however,
was the strange noise that echoed faintly from the interior of the ball—it
was a laugh, a spine-chilling laugh that seemed to come from the throat
of a creature from some other world.10
This spherical-shaped object turns out to be a mirrored ball, which Tanuma
has entered in order to immerse himself in the total image produced by the
mirror. Once he is inside the mirror, the handle on the door breaks off; hence
it becomes impossible for him to exit. After the narrator destroys the sphere
with a hammer, Tanuma finally emerges out of it as a madman. Tanuma’s
terror from the images the mirror induces can only be imagined, yet the
effect is represented as a complete disintegration of the self.
This association of the mirror with the destruction of personality takes the
Lacanian psychoanalytic theory of subject formation to an extreme form. La-
can’s well-known thesis of the mirror stage informs us that an infant between
the ages of six and eighteen months attains an integrated ego by identifying
with the projected ideal image of itself. Because of “a specific prematurity
of birth in man,” the infant does not possess coherent cognitive ties with
the exterior world or with its own corporeal reality.11 These ties have to be
forged through an identification with its bodily image, as a totality, projected
onto a mirror. It is this externalized image that functions as the basis of ego-
construction. The irony of this process is that the concept of identity becomes
possible only by the externalization of the ego image. Lacan describes the
process as follows: “The mirror stage is a drama whose internal thrust is pre-
cipitated from insufficiency to anticipation—and which manufactures for
the subject, caught up in the lure of spatial identification, the succession of
fantasies that extends from a fragmented body-image to a form of its totality
that I shall call orthopaedic—and, lastly, to the assumption of the armour of
an alienating identity, which will mark with its rigid structure the subject’s
entire mental development.”12 The protagonist’s fixation with mirrors in
“Kagami jigoku” signifies his obsession with his own bodily image. There,
integrated ego images are absent, ironically, because his identification with
the externalized image is complete: once in the ball, there is no longer an
exterior to the ego. By following the fiction of ego-integration too faithfully,
Tanuma loses the foundation of that integration.

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Tanuma crawls out of the debris of the mirror insane, and this insanity is,
ironically, the crisis of identity brought on by his solipsistic desire to capture
the entirety of his image. Tanuma follows the Lacanian formula, which
claims that prior to the socialization of the ego, it must be constituted in visual
space. It is only in this space that the ego discovers its own “double,” the ideal
ego. The self is split into two in order to make the dialectical construction
of ego possible. Thus, the ideal ego exists as part self and part nonself.
The paradox is that one’s self-identity is constituted by this introduction
of the nonself into the visual space. Rampo’s protagonist attempts to attain
an ultimate identification with this double. In the self-enclosed space of the
globe, his otherness is completely erased from vision. This erasure of the
other is the ultimate goal of identity. However, Tanuma’s attempt inevitably
fails precisely because self-identity is untenable without the nonself.
Thus, in the story, Tanuma emerges as a narcissist, or, in Deleuze’s term,
a pervert, whose self-love destroys him. In his discussion of perversion,
Deleuze articulates an insight similar to the one that Rampo offers through
his fiction. Deleuze equates perversion with the killing of the Other: “All
perversion is an ‘Other-cide,’ and ‘altrucide,’ and therefore a murder of the
possible. But altrucide is not committed through perverse behavior, it is
presupposed in the perverse structure.”13 Deleuze defines the Other as “the
structure which conditions the entire field [of perception] and its function-
ing, by rendering possible the constitution and application of the preceding
categories.”14 We may give other names to this structure—the social order
and the law. Just as in Lacan’s claim, the structure-Other introduces the ele-
ment of radical indeterminacy, or what Deleuze calls “the possible,” into the
construction of the ego and the field of perception. In Deleuze’s definition,
one becomes a pervert in effacing this indeterminacy. Tanuma deserves this
designation since he eradicates the Other in his sphere of the mirror. What
Rampo demonstrates in “Kagami jigoku” is the fictitiousness and perversity
of the ego constructed in the scopic field of modernity. The primacy of vision,
which is central to the binarism of modern and premodern, is thoroughly
problematized in Rampo’s story (as in Lacan’s theorization of vision and
Deleuze’s thesis of Other-cide): it investigates the role of vision in creating a
modern self yet undermines vision’s rational grounding.

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Panorama as Self
One of Rampo’s best-known stories, “Panorama tô kitan” (“A Strange Tale

of Panorama Island”), portrays a project of Other-cide that meets a similarly
catastrophic end. Rampo began to serialize the story in Shin seinen in 1926,
the same year that “Kagami jigoku” was published. The story is told against
the backdrop of the new visual experiences of the Meiji period (1868–1912),
particularly the popularity of panorama displays.15 Meiji urbanites gained
access to new perspectives that previous generations had not had: newly
erected towers and an expanding railroad network provided them with
novel visual experiences.16 By the time Rampo wrote “Panorama tô kitan,”
these experiences had completely lost their novelty; yet this only means that
they had simply become basic components of urban experience. Despite its
reminiscent tone, “Panorama tô kitan” asks its readers to examine the nature
of the visual experience that they inherited from the late Meiji period.
The protagonist, Hitomi Kôsuke, manages to assume the identity of a
man named Komoda, whom he closely resembles, after Komoda’s natural
death. Despite their striking resemblance, the division of roles between the
two is obvious. Hitomi dreams of the creation of a utopia through a new
art form, which later turns out to be a spectacular panorama on a desolate
island, whereas Komoda appears in the story as the first-born son of one of
the wealthiest families in the fictitious M-prefecture. The pair embodies the
division between the inner self, which lacks totality, and the exterior self,
which represents the ideal image of totality: socially dysfunctional Hitomi
and socially well-established Komoda.
One day a journalist friend informs Hitomi that his college classmate
Komoda Genzaburô has died from epilepsy. This piece of news triggers
a chain of thought in Hitomi’s mind that leads to his plan to resurrect
Komoda and assume his identity. Hitomi reasons that there have been many
cases in which those who die of epilepsy are revived after their burial. Since
cremation is not a general practice in the area where Komoda resides, it is
possible for Hitomi to resurrect Komoda’s identity. After careful planning
and execution, Hitomi succeeds in posing as Komoda. In the process, he
erases the traces of his own life by staging his own suicide in such a way that
nobody can recover his “body,” and thus become suspicious. He chooses to

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jump into the sea from a passenger boat in the middle of the night and swim
back to shore, leaving evidence on the boat of his “suicide.” Once his bodily
existence is wiped out, Hitomi heads for Komoda’s hometown, where he
digs up Komoda’s body and buries it elsewhere in the graveyard.
His effort to identify with his own double is made possible by erasing
his own body and the body of his other. Once the distance separating him
from his ideal-ego is collapsed, Hitomi uses Komoda’s wealth to launch
his solipsistic project—constructing a utopia on a deserted island. Hitomi’s
objective is to reproduce the ocular and spectacular world of a panorama
pavilion on a grander scale than any other. Once Komoda’s/Hitomi’s wife
becomes suspicious of his identity, Hitomi takes her to the island and gives
her an explanation of panoramas. After passing through the spectacular
landscapes of the island, he explains them to her:
They are a kind of display show that was very popular in Japan around the
time I was in elementary school. You first have to go through a pitch-dark
path to get to the display. Once you are out of the path, a vision opens
in front of you: there lies a world. A complete world, which is totally
different from the one the spectator lives in, spreads as far as your sight
can reach.
What a deception it is. Outside of the panorama pavilion, trains run,
cart venders and shops line up. There, townsfolk continuously pass by left
and right, in the same way, yesterday and today. I can see my own house
too at the extension of the shop row. But, once you enter the panorama
pavilion, all these things have disappeared, and the vast field of Manchuria
spreads to the horizon. And a bloody battle, horrible even to look at, is
taking place.17
The panorama represents a self-enclosed space that serves as an allegory for
Hitomi’s own identity that has eradicated all signs of the other or the exterior
world within itself. It is in this utopia that the tension between the corpo-
real self and the ideal ego can be dissolved. However, there is an apparent
contradiction in the ocular enjoyment of panoramas. While the panorama
presents the utopian construction of the ego, the viewer’s gaze is fixed on the
ultimate disintegration of human beings—dead and mutilated bodies on the
battlefield. The mutilated bodies and bloodshed are not separate from, but

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already contained within, the spectacle of the panorama. The panorama may
attempt to erase the realm of the social, figured as daily life, but it returns in
the form of bloody bodies.
One may read the scene of the panorama against the specific historical
conditions of the early twentieth century. The scene of the panorama is
from a battle in the Russo-Japanese War, which was instrumental to Japan’s
modernization. Hitomi’s (and Rampo’s) recollections of the panorama point
to memories of violence that are sedimented at the bottom of the popular
imagination of modern Japan. The specific historical reference is absent,
and the violence looms only in a vague fashion; yet it reveals what has
been repressed in the celebration of modern Japan’s achievement. Hitomi’s
description of the panorama suggests a similar violence in his own projects.
By discarding his own body, or corporeality, Hitomi manages to identify
with his ideal ego, Komoda. In other words, by transforming his own body
into the other, he eliminates the elements of otherness from his own identity.
The panoramic world remains infinite as long as there is no presence of
the other, as in the case of an infant that retains its ubiquitous sense of self
without knowledge of the other. Hitomi’s identity and his panorama island
constitute a concentric, self-enclosed structure in harmony.
However, this utopia goes awry once the body, or corporeal reality, returns
to it and reintroduces the split, or the sign, of otherness. In the conclusion,
Hitomi turns himself into a spectacle that he cannot enjoy. The crisis of
Hitomi’s identity and the panorama is triggered by his wife’s discovery of
his body. Although he has been extremely cautious about avoiding physical
contact with his wife, he makes a crucial mistake as the construction of the
panorama nears its end. He lets his guard down and, at a party celebrating
the completion of the work, drinks until he loses consciousness. When he
wakes, he finds that his wife has tended him through the night. Her attitude
has completely changed overnight. By discovering how his physical features
differ from Komoda’s, she discovers Hitomi’s body. The only way for Hitomi
to solve this crisis is to erase this knowledge, along with its holder: Hitomi
lures his wife to the island and kills her. In the conversation between the two
leading up to her murder, he admits the mistake he has made: “I made a big
mistake. I loved a person I shouldn’t have. How hard I have tried to control
it. Yet, at the last minute, I could not stand it any longer. Then, as I was afraid,

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you realized my real identity.”18 The ideal ego cannot fall in love because it
can only be in love with itself. Desire for the other constitutes the introduction
of desire of the Other in Lacanian psychoanalysis. Consequently, his desire
for her, or for the mimesis of the other, leads to the discovery of his own
otherness. He has to kill her to dissolve the crisis of his identity caused by his
love for her.
Although Hitomi manages to resolve this first crisis, his utopian identity
disintegrates when he nearly exhausts Komoda’s wealth, the basis of his om-
nipotent ideal ego. Without money, Komoda ceases to be an ideal ego. When
this happens, the private detective Kitami Kogorô enters the island to make
visible Hitomi’s secret. The detective represents reason, the ultimate other,
which intrudes into the utopia constructed on the exclusion of the other. Yet
his reasoning, which accuses Hitomi of imposture, is not sufficient to break
down Hitomi’s identity. Only after Kitami uncovers the body of Komoda’s
wife, buried in a concrete column, does the split between Hitomi and his ideal
ego become inescapable. The detective thus declares triumphantly: “There-
fore, that you had to kill the woman means you are not Komoda Genzaburô.
You see. This body is the evidence I mentioned a moment ago.”19 It is the
female body that returns and reveals the bodily components of identity.20
The conclusion of this story is also Lacanian: the destruction of the ideal
ego results in a “fragmented body-image.” Lacan maintains: “This frag-
mented body—which term I have also introduced into our system of theo-
retical references—usually manifests itself in dreams when the movement
of the analysis encounters a certain level of aggressive disintegration in the
individual. It then appears in the form of disjointed limbs, or of those organs
represented in exoscopy, growing wings and taking up arms for intestinal
persecutions.”21 The images of the body are closely related to one’s ego—
through the mirror stage, one assembles the fragmented images into the
fictive entity of the ego. Lacan’s description of exoscopic experience, view-
ing one’s own disintegrating body from a separate exterior position, signals
a crisis in ego-construction. Rampo’s “Panorama tô kitan” is Lacanian in
that Hitomi’s “aggressive disintegration” manifests itself through his own
disembodiment.
When Hitomi admits his own guilt, and hence acknowledges the impinge-
ment of the social on his ideal space, he faces the disintegration of himself.

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Turning himself into a spectacle, Hitomi makes a final attempt to complete

his utopia. The detective serves as the spectator. Inside the panorama display,
Kitami calmly soaks in a hot spring with maidens as he waits for Hitomi to
reappear. There he is startled by a single, spectacular firework display, five
times as large as normal ones. Under this dazzling scene, he sees red drops
falling from the sky. He eventually realizes what they are:
At first he did not pay attention to them, thinking they might just be con-
densation of steam reflecting the color of the firework. Soon, red drops
began falling harder and harder. Feeling strange lukewarm drips on his
own forehead and cheeks, feeling them on his own hand, and looking at
them, he realized they were unmistakably pure red drips of human blood.
And, looking carefully at the object floating on the surface of the water in
front of him, he also realized it was a mercilessly torn away human hand,
which had fallen from the sky without his noticing it.
Kitami Kogorô, although he wondered about the unclothed maidens
who did not make a fuss about this bloody scene, did not react to it either.
He laid his head on the bank of the hot spring and absentmindedly stared
at the flowery, red cut end of the severed hand floating around his chest.
Thus, the body of Hitomi Kôsuke was blown to pieces with the fire-
works and fell, as a rain of blood and pieces of flesh, to every corner of the
scenery in the panorama kingdom he had created.22
Hitomi’s project of constructing a spectacular panorama parallels his crime
of assuming Komoda’s identity. They are both attempts to erase an exterior
material reality by creating a self-enclosed ocular realm. Yet, once the body
returns, there is no place for it: it can only return as fragmented parts. By
exploding his body, Hitomi completes his project: he becomes the panorama,
the bloody spectacle. However, a spectator is needed. Kitami, who represents
the social realm, serves as a witness to the completion of Hitomi’s utopian
world. Ironically, Hitomi’s final utopian act depends on precisely what it
desires to exclude: the presence of the other in the figure of the detective. The
story insists that vision cannot finally repress the other senses or the body;
instead, they are present in and necessary to the fiction of the scopic field.
The dream of creating an autonomous self-enclosed subject always fails
since it can exist only in relation to what it excludes. The social, law, or

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“structure-Other” is always a necessary condition for a subject. The detective

Kitami, who serves as the embodiment of the gaze, intrudes on the island of
panoramas as the Law that generates the symbolic order. The rejection of
this order undoes the violent process of modern subject formation, bursting
apart Hitomi’s body at its seams. Rampo presents the self-enclosed, artificial
space of the panorama as an allegory for the precarious hegemony of vision.
Bodies in the Scopic Field
The bodies that Rampo obsessively describes in his stories are always placed
in the scopic field, hence they are in constant peril of disintegration. It is
the surface of the body, not its internal function, that he privileges in his
literary experimentation with vision. Rampo identifies the senses experi-
enced through the body’s surface as an integral part of human identity.
The body exists only as fragments without visionary integration, yet his
stories demonstrate that integration through the privileged sense of vision
is unachievable. Hence we find vision and the body in an impossible loop:
although the fragmented images of the body await synthesis into an inte-
grated bodily image through vision, it is the materiality of the body that
prevents such a synthesis. Rampo presents a dialectics of vision and the body,
but ultimately demonstrates the impossibility of such a project. Later in his
career, he provides a solution to this ontological crisis through the figure of
the private detective Akechi Kogorô. I will return to his detective stories in
the next section, but I will first discuss the two short stories, “Sôseiji” (“The
Twins”) and “Imomushi” (“The Caterpillar”), in which Rampo explores the
fragmentary sense of touch within the scopic field. Rampo’s stories do not
support the dichotomy of rational vision versus the other premodern senses
that Matsuyama assumes in his reading of Rampo. Bodily senses are already
contained in the scopic field; their entangled relations with vision constantly
complicate the narrative of modernity.
In “Sôseiji,” which was first published in 1924, a man assumes his twin
brother’s identity after killing him and disposing of his body in order to gain
material benefits. The narrative begins with his confession to a priest about
the murder of his brother. He prefaces it with a description of his fear of,
and simultaneous fascination with, his own image in mirrors:

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From the moment I cut off my twin’s life, I began to fear all mirrors.
In fact, not only mirrors, but everything that reflected. I removed every
mirror and all the glassware in my house. But what was the use? All the
shops on the streets had show windows, and behind them, more mirrors
glittered. The more I tried not to look at them, the more my eyes were
attracted to them. And, wherever I gazed, his face—his mad, leering
face—stared back at me, full of vengeance: it was, of course, my own
face.23
The fear of his brother’s image is so strong that he even dreads seeing his own
body. His twin brother exists as his ideal ego: because his brother was the
elder of the two, he inherited the majority of their deceased parents’ wealth
and even married the woman the protagonist loves. Once again a complete
identification with the ideal ego can only be attained through destroying
the other’s or his own body. Yet, once the protagonist manages to assume
a unified identity by killing his twin brother, the memories of his brother’s
body return with a vengeful gaze.
The protagonist’s well-executed plan goes awry in the end, when he at-
tempts to switch bodies, so to speak. He assumes the corporeal identity of
his brother in the crimes that he commits: he attributes them to his brother
through the use of the latter’s fingerprints. In order to escape from the
haunting image of his brother, the protagonist frequents pleasure quarters
and accumulates debts that he can never pay off. One day he finds a fin-
gerprint on a page of the diary his twin brother used to keep. Pressed hard
for money and assuming the fingerprint is his brother’s, he decides to use
it to cover up the crimes he is going to commit. He creates a stamp from
the image of the fingerprint, and every time he robs or kills, he leaves his
brother’s fingerprint at the crime scene. He should be free from any charges
since the crimes are attributed to his brother’s body. The protagonist’s own
body is erased through the use of his brother’s fingerprint; however, this time
it is his own body that returns to the crime scene.
It turns out that the fingerprint is the protagonist’s own. He misrecognizes
it because it is a “negative” image of the original. According to his explana-
tion: “The thumbprint which I had believed to have been my brother’s was
actually mine! The mark I had found in the diary was not a direct fingerprint

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but had been pressed there after I had once wiped my ink-stained fingers off.
So it was the ink which remained in the shallow grooves between the ridges
rather than the ridges themselves which had made the mark, producing a
print like the negative of photograph.”24 He correctly recognizes the other-
ness of the negative, or a mirror image of his own body part. Yet he does not
realize that it also belongs to himself. The materiality of his own body comes
back to haunt him, although this materiality manifests itself only through
the visible signs of the body surface.
As fantastic as the theme of the negative fingerprint in “Sôseiji” appears to
be, it has the imprint of an actual historical event. In 1917, the Japanese po-
lice managed to solve the murder case of a German woman with the help of
fingerprints. The prints found at the crime scene turned out to be a negative
image of the originals, left after the criminal wiped blood off of his fingers.25
In Japan, the fingerprinting system was first adopted by the Ministry of Jus-
tice in 1908, in order to improve the record-keeping system for imprisoned
criminal offenders. Although Japanese criminal law, from its inception in
1870, progressively increased penalties for repeat offenders, the court lacked
an effective method for identifying them.26 When the ministry revised the
penal code in 1907 to mandate more rigid penalties for repeat offenders, the
need for an efficient identification system increased. After conducting stud-
ies on various systems of identification, the ministry selected fingerprinting
over other, competing systems for establishing identity: among these com-
peting systems was the Bertillon system, an anthropometric system devised
by a French policeman, Alphonse Bertillon.27
The selection of the fingerprint system over the Bertillon system attests to
the reorganization of the body within the historical conditions of modern
Japan in the early twentieth century. The photojournalist Minato Chihiro
provides a useful conceptualization of this historical transformation. In his
discussion of the tattooing machine in Franz Kafka’s “The Penal Colony,”
Minato notes the transformation of the body from anatomical to topological.
The topological body lacks depth: “information is not transmitted to the
brain from perceptual organs, but understood through the surface of the
body, the skin. The naked body . . . is the skin that exists as the extension
of the brain, and it has no depth.”28 He attributes this transformation into
a topological body as occurring through nonvisual mechanisms (Kafka’s

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tattooing machine), and he attempts to locate a subversive possibility in the

topological body. However, it is clear that this body without depth is already
placed in the visual field from the very beginning of its transformation. As
we shall see in “Imomushi,” the bodies that Rampo portrays demonstrate
that this transformation process posed ontological questions regarding the
constitution of modern self.
The Bertillon measurement system, which was based on the length of
bones—the anatomical structure of the human body—was also a method
to abstract the human body. Yet anthropometry still connoted the three-
dimensional existence, or depth, of the human body. The Bertillon method
was rejected by the Ministry of Justice on the grounds that it was too compli-
cated and too difficult to acquire the skills necessary to apply the method.29
Since the body needed to be reduced to topological signs that were easier
to handle, fingerprinting—more abstract than the Bertillon method—was
chosen. The body under the scopic regime of the law and law enforcement
was reduced to its surface, where the identities of individuals were equated
with the surface patterns on their fingers.30
The fingerprint system, which was first deployed to identify criminal
elements in Japanese society, also became a way to control human bodies
within the scopic field. In this sense, it came closer to its original function
in colonial administration. As Michael Taussig argues: “It should be noted
that fingerprinting as modern State practice owes everything to modern
colonialism, beginning with the use of the sign-manuals of ‘finger-marks’ by
the mid-nineteenth century British colonial administration in India so as to
prevent people from impersonating pensioners after their death.”31 Finger
marks began being used in nineteenth-century British India to establish the
identity of illiterate colonial subjects. It was the readability of fingerprints
that served the British colonial administration well. In Manchukuo, the
fingerprint system was instituted in the 1930s not only as a policing device
but also as a means to control the area’s labor force. In 1938, in order to
control the flow of workers from northern China and reduce criminal and
subversive elements among the work force, the Manchukuo government
mandated fingerprints and photographs of workers who had certain levels
of education and worked in specified industries.32 By 1940, the fingerprints
of about 2 million people had been submitted either to the police or to the

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newly established bureau for fingerprint management.33 Thus the history

of fingerprinting in twentieth-century Japan and Manchukuo reveals the
transformation of the body into the decipherable signs on its surface. This
reconstitution of the body signals a deepening crisis in the scopic field of
modern society; it does not mean a triumph of vision over the other senses in
Rampo’s writing.
Rampo’s 1929 story “Imomushi” portrays a body that has lost all internal
depth and is reduced to its external senses. “Imomushi” was first published in
Shin seinen under another title, “Akumu” (“Nightmare”). Although Rampo
originally wrote the story for the journal Kaizô, its editor declined to publish
it for fear of political repression.34 Kaizô was already a target of political
censorship for its publication of Marxist and socialist writings; “Imomushi”
could easily have been construed as an antiwar story, since it describes the
miserable state of a war hero, even though Rampo insists this was not his
intent. Even when it finally appeared in Shin seinen, a journal that was
supposedly distant from the political trends of the time, Shin seinen’s editor
heavily censored the story because of its association with Kaizô.35 Although
his story reflects the violence of the Russo-Japanese War, Rampo was ap-
palled by the political readings of the story and claimed that he was just
concerned with an existential question.36 Despite his denial, it is possible to
locate the subversiveness of the story within the historical context by reading
it as a story of the topological body that the scopic regime created.
The protagonist of “Imomushi” is Lieutenant Sunaga, who loses four
limbs in battle, as well as his ability to hear and speak. As the physician who
is treating him claims, “It was a real miracle” that he survived such massive
injuries.37 Seeing becomes the only way left for him to communicate with
others, especially with his wife, Tokiko. As the story unfolds, the reader is
gradually introduced to Lieutenant Sunaga, asked to reconstruct his exis-
tence through a constellation of labels—“disabled soldier,” “that poor crip-
pled man,” “crippled husband,” “lump of flesh,” and finally “strange grue-
some object.”38 The agency of the lieutenant is completely destroyed, and he
is designated as an “it” when he is finally described in the story as a worm:
Yes, there it was, a large, living parcel wrapped in [a] silken kimono, look-
ing like a parcel which someone had discarded, a queer bundle indeed!

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From one part of the parcel protruded the head of a man, which kept
tapping against the mat like a spring-beetle or some strange automatic
machine. As it tapped, the large bundle moved bit by bit . . . like a crawling
worm.39
The undifferentiated contents of the body are simply wrapped up in a bag of
skin. The narrator of the story describes the “it”: “At the end of the stumps
of the limbs were deep creases, like those in a handbag, being pulled from
four directions.”40 Lieutenant Sunaga’s bodily functions are reduced to the
traces on its surface, the “slight protrusions.”41 The anatomical functions of
the limbs are reduced to abstract points representing the arms and legs on
the lieutenant’s body.
Although initially Sunaga and Tokiko receive a hero’s welcome from
the newspapers, social attention fast recedes “as the excitement of the war
victory subsides.”42 Lieutenant Sunaga enjoys the honor that his deed brings
to him: he constantly asks Tokiko to show him the clippings of the papers
that feature him and his medal of decoration. Yet he soon grows bored with
this and finds an escape from boredom in food and sexual pleasure: “He
was greedy for food and demanded her body night and day like a patient
recovering from some alimentary disorder.”43 At first, it is the lieutenant who
desires Tokiko’s body; however, Tokiko later begins using his body, often
against his will, to satisfy her own sexual desire. Sexual pleasure becomes the
only possible means for Tokiko to establish a relationship with her husband
since Lieutenant Sunaga’s “wit has been dulled by the shock of the explosion
to which he had fallen victim.”44 “Completely shut up in the solitary cottage
in the country,” Tokiko and the “yellow caterpillar” sink deep into sexual
debauchery.45
Even Tokiko herself is disgusted by her ever-growing sexual appetite: “She
thought she might go crazy. She shuddered in shock, wondering where in
herself these disgusting feelings were hiding.”46 Yet she enjoys the sense of
control that she holds over this miserable “thing”:
The very fact that this poor, strange thing, which not only could neither
speak nor hear, but [also] could not even move freely by itself, was by no
means made of wood or clay, but was alive and real, possessing every human
emotion and instinct—this was a source of boundless fascination for her. Still

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further, those round eyes of his, which comprised his only expressive
organ, speaking so sadly sometimes, and sometimes so angrily—these
too had a strange charm. The pitiful thing was that he was incapable of
wiping away the tears which those eyes could still shed. And of course,
when he was angry, he had no power to threaten her other than that of
working himself into an abnormal heat of frenzy. These fits of wrath
usually came on whenever he was reminded that he would never again be
able to succumb, of his own free will, to the one overwhelming temptation
which was always lurking within him. Tokiko managed to find a source
of pleasure in tormenting this helpless creature against his will.47
Lieutenant Sunaga is imprisoned by his bodily senses and within his own
skin: his eyes, his only remaining expressive organ, comprise a small portion
of his bodily surface and are completely helpless in conveying his anguish.
He cannot even wipe away his own tears. What Rampo describes through
Sunaga’s body is far from a utopian celebration of the bodily senses, hidden
underneath the scopic field. Sunaga’s body is subjected to Tokiko’s relentless
sensual gaze, which reduces his entire existence to the surface of his body.48
To this scene of perversion, the gaze of the Other returns. Once the lieu-
tenant’s eyes cease to convey even his internal feelings of anguish, they turn
into an organ that reflects the gaze of the Other. Tokiko resents the fact that
his eyes conceal what she can never access:
Even at the best of times, it was an eerie thing to see a man whose only
organ of communication was his eyes lie there with those eyes fixed forever
on just one spot, and now how much more so in the middle of the night. Of
course, his mind has become dull, she thought, but in a person completely
crippled, as he is, there undoubtedly exists a world completely different
from any she could ever know. She was frightened when she wondered if
he was wandering in that world at that very moment.49
The internal world that Tokiko thinks Lieutenant Sunaga might still have,
and that she is so frightened by, no longer belongs to the lieutenant. It has
become a reflection of Tokiko’s guilty conscience. The Other, the sign of the
social, intrudes through the lieutenant’s gaze into the dyadic relationship
Tokiko establishes with “it,” or his body, through their bodily sensations.

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The transformation of the lieutenant’s body from anatomical to topological

is complete when it begins reflecting Tokiko’s gaze back to her, forcing her
to face the Otherness in her own gaze.
Tokiko destroys the Other by depriving the lieutenant of his sight with
her own hand; and in this act of destruction, she fulfills the role of pervert in
the Deleuzean sense. At the height of sexual frenzy, Tokiko gouges both of
Lieutenant Sunaga’s eyes with her own hands. The moment that she realizes
what she has done, conflicting thoughts pass through her mind:
It could not be explained away as an accident in the frenzy. She knew that
for herself. What was most clear to her was that she felt her husband’s
eyes, the eyes that spoke, as a hindrance to their becoming lowly animals.
She hated what might be called the concept of justice, which surfaced
once in a while in his eyes. Also, she felt not only that which was hateful
and troublesome but also something that was much more ominous and
frightening in these eyes.
But that was a lie. Was there not a much different, more horrible idea
deep in her heart? Didn’t she want to turn him into a real, living dead
body? Didn’t she want to turn him into a complete lump of flesh? Into a
creature which lost all five senses other than the sense on his torso? And
didn’t she want to satisfy her insatiable cruelty?50
All the fragmentary thoughts in her mind achieve the same answer: like Hit-
omi Kôsuke in “Panorama tô kitan,” Tokiko ultimately enacts an altrucide
to fulfill her perversity. It is the Other, reflected on the surface of the lieu-
tenant’s eyes, that Tokiko annihilates in her relationship with the lieutenant’s
body: by gouging out his eyes, she desires to complete the transformation of
the lieutenant’s body into a mere surface.
Thereafter her husband can exist only as a docile body, which Deleuze
characterizes as the “bodies-victims” or “accomplices-elements” in the per-
vert structure.51 After leaving a pencil scrawl of three words, “I forgive
you,” Lieutenant Sunaga commits suicide by throwing himself into the old
well in the backyard. His forgiveness makes him an accomplice to her act.
The body does not revolt; instead it acquiesces to the killing of the Other.
Lieutenant Sunaga’s body can sustain its integral existence only as a conduit
for the Other’s gaze. Once the Other—his gaze—is gone, the surface of the

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body disintegrates, and his body can exist only as “accomplices-elements.”

Crawling out of Tokiko’s sight and killing himself is his only way out of this
state of fragmentation.
Nationalist Rampo
What Rampo shows through these stories from the 1920s is not the primacy
of vision in the construction of the modern ego but rather the impossibility of
such a solipsistic project. It is not the realm of the premodern that he seeks to
excavate in his writing; rather, his characters are caught in the problematic
relation between modern and premodern. The series of binaries of premod-
ern/modern, Japan/the West, and other senses/vision are not sufficient to
encompass Rampo’s literary imagination. The first half of each of these bi-
naries (premodern, Japan, and other senses) are always already contained in
and mediated through the second categories (modern, the West, and vision).
By exploring the human senses against the backdrop of the social conditions
of Japan during the 1920s, Rampo reveals the fictiveness of the exclusion-
ary ocularcentric construction of the modern and the West. This reading of
Rampo’s works of the late 1920s and early 1930s, however, must be modified
with respect to his later work, which he wrote for a larger popular audience,
deploying more nationalistic tropes in his writing.
In 1927, Rampo decided to take time off from writing. He cited creative
exhaustion as the reason for this hiatus and immediately set out on an ex-
tensive tour of Japan without any particular destination or agenda. He was
dissatisfied and even disgusted with his novel Issun bôshi (Dwarf ), which had
been serialized from December 1926 to March 1927 by the major newspaper
Asahi shinbun, which had a circulation of 2 million.52 After fourteen months
away, Rampo resumed writing with a novelette, Injû (Cats), which was seri-
alized by Shin seinen in 1928. In the following decade he produced numerous
detective novels, the majority of them in serial form, though later he claimed
in his memoir, Tantei shôsetsu yonjûnen (Forty Years of Detective Novels), that
he had merely caved in to the pressure of magazine editors who demanded
such serializations.53 Critics agree that once Rampo went mainstream, the
quality of his work suffered.54 Rampo offered an apologetic explanation to
his readers for this reorientation, claiming that although his creativity was
limited, he still had to make a living through his writing.55

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In shifting the focus of his writing from short stories to serialized novels,
Rampo also began repeating many of his earlier themes. Yet what is most
noticeable in this transition is the change that occurs in Akechi Kogorô, the
private detective who is the principal character in Rampo’s later detective
stories. Akechi emerges in Rampo’s detective novels as a literary device to
resolve mysteries and to create unified narratives. In Rampo’s early stories,
Akechi and other detectives seem to be complicit with the criminals: the
detective stands as the sole witness to the criminal’s project. By being the one
who can articulate the intent of the criminal, the detective ironically proves
the impossibility of the perfect crime and its goal of erasure of the culprit’s
identity. Bringing the criminal to justice is only of secondary interest in the
detective’s mind.
In his later stories, however, readers see a linear progression of plot in
which the gruesome crime only foreshadows the plot’s final unification and
resolution. Fragmented bodily senses and bodies (female bodies are liberally
mutilated and ostentatiously displayed by criminals) are reduced to literary
devices that anticipate the denouement that Akechi’s superhuman efforts
achieve. Akechi defeats the criminals through the power of rational induc-
tion and striking dexterity. In Ôgon kamen (Golden mask), serialized in 1930
and 1931 in the popular magazine Kingu (King), Rampo resorts to blatant na-
tionalistic sentiment. The story becomes a surrogate for the rivalry between
Japan and the West, as Akechi fights a French criminal, Arsène Lupin.
Akechi prevents Lupin from stealing traditional Japanese cultural treasures
and from seducing a female Japanese character.56 In facing the perceived
exterior threat, Rampo invokes Japanese womanhood and tradition as the
symbols of a nationhood in desperate need of defense.
Rampo claimed that he refrained from deviant themes in Ôgon kamen
since he was writing it for the larger popular audience. His consideration
for his audience forced him away from exploration of more sensual subjects
and encouraged him to resort to an easy formula. Yet, in his effort to please
the masses, he responded to the larger social anxiety of the time. It was no
coincidence that Rampo invoked the binary scheme of us against them, just
as Japan—with its success in the Manchurian Incident in 1931—entered into
the quagmire of the Asia Pacific War.

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Rampo’s later writing arrives at a narrative resolution through resorting

to the easy binaries of premodern/modern, female/male, Japan/the West.57
Yet this resolution does not completely exclude further indeterminacy in
Rampo’s characters. While the two rivals embody their nations, it is no-
ticeable that the identities of Lupin and Akechi are reduced to the surface
appearance of their bodies, attained through various disguises. Lupin ap-
pears in the guise of a golden mask, while Akechi assumes a variety of
identities. Rampo describes the extreme fluidity of a character’s identity in
his preface to the 1936 text of Kaijin nijûmensô (Man with Twenty Faces):
“Kaijin nijûmensô himself might have forgotten his real face.”58 There is no
essential quality to the characters’ identities; instead, they appear merely as
interchangeable signs. Rampo thus deploys the nationalist trope ultimately
to contain the grotesque indeterminacy of identities. His later writings may
seem to resolve the dilemma presented in his earlier works, but they only
end up disguising it.
Rampo’s later works featuring Akechi Kogorô attest to the counterforce
within his own imagination that worked against his radical insights. It is
possible to find a parallel example in the actual historical condition of modern
Japan. Mass society, emerging out of the newly produced material and social
environment, was eventually reintegrated into the nation through the state
institutions of universal male suffrage, the social security system, and the
Peace Preservation Law. The masses were transformed into new national
agencies through legislation that made them visible to the political authority
and manageable in national politics. The faceless characters in Rampo stories
find national boundaries to be the final resolution to their crises. Akechi
emerges as a character with a positive identification as a modern, male Jap-
anese, who actively participates in the nationalist project of policing the
national boundaries.
Rampo was thoroughly disgusted by his own shift to popular writing, or
perhaps he needed this sense of self-disgust to justify the shift. The choice of
nationalist motifs in his work resonates with his patriotic activities during
World War II. His earlier aversion to any social interaction was completely
“cured” through his participation in neighborhood defense activities. (How-
ever, in 1941, under pressure from the Ministry of the Interior, Rampo’s
publishers discontinued the publication of his earlier works.) He also gave

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war-promotion lectures on numerous occasions, invoking the name of the

emperor.59 The nationalist Rampo and his nationalistic resolution of the ego
crisis of his earlier works also deserve thorough analysis in relation to his
postwar writing for children. In this essay, however, I simply suggest that
his radical insights about the contradictory forces in the scopic field necessi-
tated a repressive resolution. Rampo’s project was to locate the impossibility
of attaining a perfectly integrated identity under the seemingly monolithic
scopic regime. Yet this impossibility does not preclude—on the contrary, it
might compel—the construction of a fictive unity. The body fragments that
Rampo carefully displays in his work yearn for sutures.
Rampo’s conservative turn in the 1930s notwithstanding, the corpus of his
writing forces the reader to gaze at the historicity of vision. Rampo’s literary
imagination traces the process of subject formation and the transformation
in the scopic field of modern society and detects the radical impossibility
within such a process. Nostalgia is used as a device to foreclose possible en-
counters with radical fissures within Rampo’s texts. As long as one relegates
his imagination to the premodern realm, the repressed, one can safely dis-
regard the disturbing effects of his writing. The grotesque qualities in his
stories do not exist exterior to the modern; instead they constitute the kernel
of modern experience. Only by reading Rampo’s writing as modern, and as
a product of mass society, can one recognize the devastating effects of his
corporeal imagination.
Notes
Many people read this essay at various stages and generously offered their insights. I par-
ticularly benefited from the comments of Noriko Aso, Teresa Goddu, Eva Moskowitz, and
Amanda Seaman. I would also like to thank the journal’s two anonymous reviewers for their
theoretically astute readings of the essay.
1 According to the standard romanization of Japanese, Rampo’s name should be transcribed
as Ranpo. I will, however, use Rampo in transcribing his name since the majority of contem-
porary sources write his name as Rampo. For instance, a Russian newspaper transcribed his
name as Rampo when it carried a translation of his work in 1931. According to the entry
in “Who’s Who in Japan, 1936–37,” his name is transcribed as Edogawa Rampo. Edogawa
Rampo, Harimaze nenpu (Scrapbook) (Tokyo: Kôdansha, 1989), 248 and 335. He also worked
closely with the translator, James Harris, when the English translation was published in 1956.

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In his correspondence with Ellery Queen in the postwar period, Rampo was obviously using
m for his name. Whenever Queen mentions the Japanese writer, he uses Rampo, not Ranpo.
Queen learned about Rampo’s work through letters from him; hence, it is safe to assume that
Rampo identified himself as Edogawa Rampo. Edogawa Rampo, Waga yume to shinjitsu (My
Dreams and My Truth) (Tokyo: Sôgensha, 1956), 231–32.
2 Also, four movies based on Rampo’s stories appeared in 1994: Yaneura no sanposha (A Walker
in the Attic), Oshie to tabisuru otoko (The Traveler with the Pasted Rag Picture), and two different
versions of Rampo, broadly based on “Osei tôjô” (“Osei on Stage”). The first two films were
completed in 1990, but they were not released until 1994. The screenwriter, Katsura Chiho,
provides a brief history of the film adaptations of Rampo’s work. See Katsura Chiho, “Rampo
no eigaka ni tsuite,” Kokubungaku: Kaishaku to kanshô (National Literature: Analysis and
Appreciation), 59, no. 12 (1994): 70–75.
3 Tanaka Yûko, “Edo—Rampo no tsumetai kurêzî” (“Edo—Rampo’s Cool Craze”), Uriika
(Eureka), 19, no. 5 (1987): 119. (Author’s translation)
4 Matsuyama Iwao, Rampo to Tokyo—1920 Toshi no kao (Rampo and Tokyo—1920 the Face of
the City) (Tokyo: Parco Shuppan, 1984), 31.
5 Ibid., 34.
6 Yamada Fûtarô found the phrase natsukashi no Rampo (nostalgic Rampo) in a 1928 issue
of Shin seinen. Yamada Fûtarô, “Natsukashi no Rampo—sono rinshôteki ningen kaibô”
(“Nostalgic Rampo—A Clinical Examination”) in Shin bungei dokuhon—Edogawa Rampo
(New Literary Reader—Edogawa Rampo) (Tokyo: Kawadeshobô Shinsha, 1992), 63.
7 Edogawa Rampo, Rampo uchiwake banashi (Rampo’s Confessions) (Tokyo: Kawadeshobô Shin-
sha, 1994), 171–72.
8 Yumeno Kyûsaku, “Edogawa Rampo shi ni taisuru watashi no kansô” (“My Impressions
of Mr. Edogawa Rampo”), reprinted in Nakajima Kôtarô, ed., Edogawa Rampo—Hyôron to
kenkyû (Edogawa Rampo—Criticism and Research) (Tokyo: Kôdansha, 1980), 35. (My transla-
tion)
9 Ibid., 36.
10 Edogawa Rampo, “The Hell of Mirrors,” in Japanese Tales of Mystery and Imagination, trans.
James B. Harris (Tokyo: Charles E. Tuttle, 1956), 116.
11 Jacques Lacan, Écrits (New York: Norton, 1977), 4.
12 Ibid., 4.
13 Gilles Deleuze, The Logic of Sense (New York: Columbia University Press, 1990), 320.
14 Ibid., 309.
15 For historical accounts of panorama displays in the Meiji period, see Hashizume Shinya,
Meiji no meikyûtoshi (Labyrinth Cities of the Meiji) (Tokyo: Heibonsha, 1990), 120–48.
16 For the connection between railroad travel and panoramic vision, see Wolfgang Schivelbusch,
Railway Journey (Berkeley: University of California Press, 1977), 61–64.

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17 Edogawa Rampo, “Panorama tô kitan” (“A Strange Tale of Panorama Island”), in Nihon
tantei shôsetsu zenshû, Edogawa Rampo (The Great Detective Stories of Japan, Edogawa Rampo),
vol. 2 (Tokyo: Sōgensha, 1984), 248. (My translation) One can see a surviving example of a
panorama display in the Atlanta Cyclorama in Georgia. It features the Civil War’s Battle
of Atlanta. The Cyclorama’s art was completed in 1886 and has been housed in a building
constructed in 1921. The facility was renovated in 1979.
18 Ibid., 267. (My translation)
19 Ibid., 286. (My translation)
20 A strand of hair protruding from the column gives away the location of the body. Hence
the hair functions in the story as Lacanian objet petit, a piece of the real, which refuses
symbolization.
21 Lacan, Écrits, 4.
22 Edogawa, “Panorama tô kitan,” 289. (My translation)
23 Edogawa Rampo, “The Twins,” in Japanese Tales of Mystery and Imagination, 126.
24 Ibid., 141.
25 Keishi-chô Keiji-kyoku Kanshiki-ka (Crime Laboratory Investigation Section, Criminal
Division, National Police Agency), Keisatsu shimon seido no ayumi (A History of the Police
Fingerprint System) (Tokyo: Keishi-chô Kenji-kyoku Kanshiki-ka, 1961), 165–66.
26 Ibid., 46; and Watanabe Kôzô, “Hanzaisha no kaoshashin to shimon—Seiô no baai” (“Identi-
fication Photos and Fingerprints—The Case of the West”), in Rekishi o yominaosu 22: Kangoku
no tanjô (Rereading History 22: The Birth of the Prison) (Tokyo: Asahi Shinbunsha, 1995), 22–23.
27 Keishi-chô Keiji-kyoku Kanshiki-ka, Keisatsu shimon seido no ayumi, 46–47; Watanabe Kôzô,
“Hanzaisha no kaoshashin to shimon,” 16–18.
28 Minato Chihiro, Kangaeru hifu (Thinking Skin) (Tokyo: Seidosha, 1993), 30–48. (My transla-
tion)
29 Keishi-chô Keiji-kyoku Kanshiki-ka, Keisatsu shimon seido no ayumi, 47.
30 In 1911, four years after the Ministry of Justice’s decision to adopt the fingerprint system, the
National Police Agency began using fingerprint identifications for its criminal investigations.
Keishi-chô Keiji-kyoku Kanshiki-ka, Keisatsu shimon seido no ayumi, 54–55.
31 Michael Taussig, Mimesis and Alterity (New York: Routledge, 1993), 222.
32 Kim Youngdal, Ninhon no shimon seido ( Japan’s Fingerprinting System) (Tokyo: Shakai Hyôr-
onsha, 1987), 74–79.
33 Ibid., 78–79. The Ministry of Colonial Development estimated the population of Manchukuo
at the time at around 30 million, in arguing in the seventieth meeting of the Imperial Diet
(1936) for its magniloquent plan to settle 5 million Japanese in Manchukuo. Takahashi Yuk-
iharu, Zetsubô no iminshi (A Hopeless History of Immigration) (Tokyo: Mainichi Shinbunsha,
1995), 85.
34 Edogawa Rampo, Tantei shôsetsu yonjûnen (Forty Years of Detective Novels) (Tokyo: Chûsek-
isha, 1989), 138–39.

positions
35 The censored version is reprinted in Edogawa Rampo Wonderland, ed. Nakajima Kôtarô
(Tokyo: Chûsekisha, 1989), 11–31.
36 For example, a socialist paper reported in 1905 cases similar to the plight of the protagonist
in his story: “At a reserve hospital, without knowing that her husband’s four limbs were
amputated, a wife screamed and fainted when seeing him. Also in Yamaguchi Prefecture,
there is one who lost four limbs and was carried home from the front in a barrel. He was
eventually kicked out of his wife’s family’s house because of his disability.” Hikari, December
20, 1905, quoted in Unno Fukuju, Nisshin, Nichiro Sensô. Nihon no rekishi (Sino-Japanese War,
Russo-Japanese War. A History of Japan) (Tokyo: Shûeisha, 1992), 204. However, Rampo in
Tantei shôsetsu yonjûnen later protested the politicized reading of the story by leftists. He
claimed that the resistance presented in the question “why god created human beings is a
hundred times more fundamental and a hundred times more powerful than [the questions
of] war and peace, and [the political claims made by] the leftists.” Edogawa Rampo, Tantei
shôsetsu yonjûnen, 140.
37 Edogawa Rampo, “The Caterpillar,” Japanese Tales of Mystery and Imagination, 77.
38 Although James Harris translates isshu iyôno buttai in the original as “strange gruesome
creature,” the literal translation should be “strange gruesome object.” Edogawa Rampo,
“Imomushi,” in Nihon tantei shôsetsu shû, vol. 2, Edogawa Rampo shû (Tokyo: Sôgensha, 1984),
415. Rampo, “The Caterpillar,” in Japanese Tales of Mystery and Imagination, 71. Harris’s
translation also leaves out some of the characters’ philosophical pondering. In the following
citations, the ones without page numbers from “The Caterpillar” indicate the absence of
the passages in the translated text; I provide my own translation of those passages in the
discussion.
39 Edogawa, “Imomushi,” 419; “The Caterpillar,” 71.
40 Edogawa, “Imomushi,” 419.
41 Ibid., 418.
42 Ibid., 424.
47 Edogawa, “The Caterpillar,” 80 (emphasis added).
48 Minato, Kangaeru hifu, 30–48.
50 Ibid., 428–29.
51 Deleuze, The Logic of Sense, 320.
52 Edogawa Rampo, “Watashi no rirekisho,” in Rampo uchiwake banashi, 22; Waga yume to
shinjitsu, 161. For his own discussion of the work, see Rampo, Tantei shôsetsu yonjûnen, 82.
53 Edogawa, Tantei shôsetsu yonjûnen, 136–37.

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54 Ôuchi Shigeo’s overview of Rampo’s work attempts to rescue Rampo’s later writings, yet it
confirms them as secondary works. Ôuchi Shigeo, “Karei na yūtopia—Rampo no chôhen
shôsetsu” (“Fabulous Utopia—Rampo’s Novels”), in Edogawa Rampo—Hyôron to kenkyû,
168–90.
55 Edogawa, Tantei shôsetsu yonjûnen, 136–37.
56 Under the 1929 Law for the Preservation of National Treasures (kokuhô hozon hô), state control
over cultural artifacts was tightened and exports of “national treasures” became illegal. See
Noriko Aso, “The Art of Nations: Japanese National Treasure as Self-Representation” (paper
presented at the forty-seventh meeting of the Association for Asian Studies, Washington, DC,
April 6–9, 1995).
57 The conclusion of the story, in particular, confirms this observation. See Edogawa Rampo,
Ôgon kamen (Golden Mask) (Tokyo: Sôgensha, 1993), 318–37.
58 Edogawa Rampo, Kaijin nijûmensô (Man with Twenty Faces) (Tokyo: Kôdansha, 1979), 9. (My
translation)
59 Later in his memoirs, he confided to his readers that he enjoyed seeing listeners straighten
their posture and stand absolutely still (the correct official response) every time he invoked the
emperor’s name. He felt as if the audience was moved by his lectures. Rampo, Tantei shôsetsu
yonjûnen, 296.

Edogawa Rampo and The Excess of Vision A

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Edogawa Rampo and the Excess of Vision:

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this transparent vision—the sign of modernity—visible through his experi-

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life. Matsuyama’s book is an attempt to historicize and situate Rampo’s sto-

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The Hell of Similitude

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relocated themselves from the countryside to cities, seeking new educational

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One of Rampo’s best-known stories, “Panorama tô kitan” (“A Strange Tale

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Turning himself into a spectacle, Hitomi makes a final attempt to complete

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“structure-Other” is always a necessary condition for a subject. The detective

Bodies in the Scopic Field

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Igarashi Edogawa Rampo and the Excess of Vision 313

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tattooing machine), and he attempts to locate a subversive possibility in the

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newly established bureau for fingerprint management.33 Thus the history

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The transformation of the lieutenant’s body from anatomical to topological

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body disintegrates, and his body can exist only as “accomplices-elements.”

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Rampo’s later writing arrives at a narrative resolution through resorting

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