Edogawa Ranpo’s “Human Chair”, A Fusion of Styles

In the forest of Japanese modern literature, where many productions are easily recognized for their combinations of western literary trends and local cultural heritage, an enormous amount of works calls for timeless interests with their unique artistic values and inherent charms. The Human Chair undoubtedly falls into the league of excellence due to its spiritual inheritance from Japanese cultural campaign featuring unreality and eroticism as well as homage paid to foreign elements of grotesque and mystery. Edogawa Ranpo, as the household writer widely addressed by critics as the devoting contributor to the short-story fiction in Japan, made public his probably most fantastic creation in 1925. By adopting a story-in-a-story mode, the work primarily deals with a strange chair maker who conceals himself in a luxurious armchair and develops “love affairs” with female sitters. Obviously, The Human Chair’s flexible introduction of various representing forms and sophisticated use of narrative means that highlights unpredictability and unnaturalness deliver immeasurable benefits in generating phenomenal viewing effects. Through a careful review on the work’s rich blend of writing techniques and a masterful manifestation of chemistry between arts and Japan’s prevailing commercial phenomenon, this essay would argue that The Human Chair embodies both western aspects of bizarre atmospheres and madness and the famous national wave emphasizing hedonism and degeneration. With a proper middle ground, the work effectively accomplishes its goals of nurturing unforgettable reading experience, at the same time, encouraging broad examinations into the human qualities, such as unreliability and greed.

The Human Chair’s intelligent stylistic explorations serve as the most merit-making feature reaching the audience. The author, who was claimed as an admirer of the globally revered American writer, Edgar Allan Poe, apparently transferred into his story many of the master’s classic rendering tricks revolving around constructions of intriguing mystery and wildness. By taking full advantage of its skillful narrative and conveying methods, the eerie and curiosity-inviting atmosphere is accumulated and displayed in such a coherent and rigorous way that it could be identified in nearly every place. From a third-person point of view, the story opens by depicting a professional female author who unveils a rarely seen, untitled manuscript from a pile of letters sent by amateur writers asking for writing suggestions. As the public’s appetite is stimulated concerning the content, series of unanticipatedly maddening events are unfolded as the large focus is put on the manuscript sender, a chair crafter who confesses his wacky adventure of interacting with women by hiding himself in his chair. Though not extensively employed, the unique outsider perspective helps elevate readers’ frenzied and disturbed emotion to the maximum near the end where the female author is recorded “fled from the study” and “had sought sanctuary” in another room. Without any question, the commonly witnessed alluring method in American fiction, especially in the detective genre, is showcased with new depths as readers are engaged in striking a balance between sanity and craziness.

Ranpo’s language put into outstanding and subtle use is another significant factor shaping the achievement of evoking thoughts. In substantial paragraphs formed by well-arranged vocabulary and phrases implying the author’s adept writing skills, the audience is conveniently drawn into the man’s dramatic accounts of his emotional experience and unusual discoveries. For example, the astute selection appeared at the beginning of “miserable creature” and “helpless crawling worm”, a vivid metaphor, cause readers’ to naturally relate to the man’s low social status and his mentality of inferiority. The image of a suffering man in deep depression is hence projected upon appreciators and remarkably deepened near the end of the manuscript. This time, he is seen repeating “worm” and “loathsome creature,” accompanied by his utterance of “excruciating pains,” “mad love” and “longing for you.” Under the help of these wording choices, a contradiction, therefore, could be sensed between the man’s increasingly intense pleasures gained from women’s soft bodies and his awkward conditions of complete darkness and anonymity. With accurately defined meanings, these words collectively lift the case to a moral level of love and lust, allowing people to contemplate over the male character’s intention and ethical behaviors.

The careful buildup of diction naturally leads to the integrity and aesthetic beauty of sentences, all of which can be seen as loyally conforming to the fiction genre’s law of deliveries of information and psychological attraction. Readers, exposed to the environment filled with eroticism and oddness, elements borrowed from the dominant Japanese culture movement in the 1920s, are engaged in shifts of events and driven to travel through emotional details smoothly revealed. A mocking and confessional tone is adopted and functioned as a whole to achieve efficient and intimate communications, which would be impossible without relying on the particular material of manuscript, combined with the second letter emerged in the twisting end. By virtue of this on-paper form, rather than verbal expressions controlled by limitations of time and space, private feelings and hidden secrets regarding the chair maker’s human desire can be honestly and thoroughly expressed out. Examples that “I could find solace in the belief that her delicate feelings of love for even a mere chair were powerful enough to penetrate to the creature that dwelt inside”, and “Exposure would not only mean disgrace but severe punishment for the crimes I had committed” best illustrate the benefits. Through persuasive appeals to readers’ feelings, themes of human’s untrustworthiness, pursuits of pleasure, and moral degeneration are made clear.

To a remarkable extent, the work’s unprecedented success consists in Ranpo’s innovative incorporation of advantages of commercial objects and diverse presenting approaches. During the process of directing the appreciating attention to a chair, which is commonly seen as human production and daily design, the writer upgrades readers’ visions and reinvents the relation between a physical world and works of imaginations. Beyond any doubt, the huge armchair, a carrier of not only a male’s body but unspeakable secrets and extreme privacy, creates the most irreplaceable precondition for all possibilities of shocks, mental associations, and unforgettable memories. With the aid of wonderful writing, ideas such as “accommodate a man”, “conceal me far more effectively”, and “my sanctum” are orderly and ingeniously planted in readers’ minds, who are drawn to make sense of the event through an array of madness. Ranpo’s early experience, including his study background in economics during college and handful jobs, ranging from a clerk, editor, to bookstore worker, could be seen as an important source of inspiration. A more profound root comes from the increasingly industrialized society during Japan’s post-Meiji period. Broad and active efforts, from education, infrastructure construction, to improved commercial level, were made to catch up with western rivals. Consumptions of goods and services were gaining forces in the everyday life of native people. These factors not only shaped the writer’s fascinating and versatile writing style but left lasting impacts on his mindset.

Through marvelous displays of a rich set of fiction elements, The Human Chair triumphantly remains as an exceptional art piece involving Edgar Allan Poe’s grotesque styles and Japanese eroticism. Incalculable supports are from his application of various narrating and stylistic tools and original use of commercial colors. With these approaches, Ranpo succeeds in allowing for adventurous reading experience, making his short story superbly entertaining and thought-provoking over human behaviors.