Strange Tale of Panorama Island

Strange Tale of Panorama Island
Author: Edogawa Ranpo
Publisher: University of Hawaii Press
Total Pages: 146
Release: 2013-01-17
Genre: Fiction
ISBN: 0824837274

Edogawa Ranpo (1894-1965) was a great admirer of Edgar Allan Poe and like Poe drew on his penchant for the grotesque and the bizarre to explore the boundaries of conventional thought. Best known as the founder of the modern Japanese detective novel, Ranpo wrote for a youthful audience, and a taste for playacting and theatre animates his stories. His writing is often associated with the era of ero guro nansense (erotic grotesque nonsense), which accompanied the rise of mass culture and mass media in urban Japan in the 1920s. Characterized by an almost lurid fascination with simulacra and illusion, the era’s sensibility permeates Ranpo's first major work and one of his finest achievements, Strange Tale of Panorama Island (Panoramato kidan), published in 1926. Ranpo’s panorama island is filled with cleverly designed optical illusions: a staircase rises into the sky; white feathered “birds” speak in women’s voices and offer to serve as vehicles; clusters of naked men and women romp on slopes carpeted with rainbow-colored flowers. His fantastical utopia is filled with entrancing music and strange sweet odors, and nothing is ordinary, predictable, or boring. The novella reflected the new culture of mechanically produced simulated realities (movies, photographs, advertisements, stereoscopic and panoramic images) and focused on themes of the doppelganger and appropriated identities: its main character steals the identity of an acquaintance. The novella’s utopian vision, argues translator Elaine Gerbert, mirrors the expansionist dreams that fed Japan's colonization of the Asian continent, its ending an eerie harbinger of the collapse of those dreams. Today just as a new generation of technologies is transforming the way we think—and becoming ever more invasive and pervasive—Ranpo's work is attracting a new generation of readers. In the past few decades his writing has inspired films, anime, plays, and manga, and many translations of his stories, essays, and novels have appeared, but to date no English-language translation of Panoramato kidan has been available. This volume, which includes a critical introduction and notes, fills that gap and uncovers for English-language readers an important new dimension of an ever stimulating, provocative talent.

Ultra-gash Inferno

Ultra-gash Inferno
Author: Suehiro Maruo
Publisher: Creation Books
Total Pages: 0
Release: 2001
Genre: Graphic novels
ISBN: 9781840680393

Japanese manga at its most extreme, exciting and innovative. A compendium edition of nine graphic novellas by acclaimed cult manga artist Suehiro Maruo whose 'ero-guro' style (a unique fusion of sex and violence) is unlike anything seen in western comics.

Comics Underground Japan

Comics Underground Japan
Author: Kevin Quigley
Publisher:
Total Pages: 246
Release: 1996
Genre: Comics & Graphic Novels
ISBN:

A Manga Anthology,British and European comic fans are swiftly,embracing Manga, the unique Japanese graphic novel,art form. This new collection selects the best,from the Manga underground presenting material,from the leading artists that is unlikely to be,seen outside of Japan. Outrageous, mind-bending,and 'adult,' this is nihilistic humour at its very,best.

Fragments of Horror

Fragments of Horror
Author: Junji Ito,Ichiro Nakayama,Hirokatsu Kihara
Publisher: VIZ Media LLC
Total Pages: 226
Release: 2015-06-16
Genre: Comics & Graphic Novels
ISBN: 1421584743

A new collection of delightfully macabre tales from a master of horror manga. An old wooden mansion that turns on its inhabitants. A dissection class with a most unusual subject. A funeral where the dead are definitely not laid to rest. Ranging from the terrifying to the comedic, from the erotic to the loathsome, these stories showcase Junji Ito’s long-awaited return to the world of horror. -- VIZ Media

Erotic Grotesque Nonsense

Erotic Grotesque Nonsense
Author: Miriam Silverberg
Publisher: Univ of California Press
Total Pages: 422
Release: 2006
Genre: History
ISBN: 0520222733

"A sumptuously documented book, one that makes innovative use of the principle of montage to generate informative historical readings of Japan's myriad mass cultural phenomena in the early twentieth century. Both in terms of its scholarship and its methodology, this is a truly admirable work."—Rey Chow, Andrew W. Mellon Professor of the Humanities, Brown University "As Miriam Silverberg has brilliantly shown here, the modern times of 1920s and ‘30s Japan were rendered in a cacophony of cultural mixing: a period of consumerist desires and Hollywood fantasy-making but also the rise of nationalist empire-building. Excavating its kaleidoscope of everyday culture Silverberg astutely offers a theory of montage for how Japanese subjects 'code-switched' in juggling the mixed cultural/political elements of these times. Utilizing a montage of media, texts, sites, and scholarship, Silverberg leads the reader into the terrain of the 'erotic grotesque nonsense' in a work that is as scintillating as it is theoretically important."—Anne Allison, author of Millennial Monsters: Japanese Toys and the Global Imagination "Unlike other scholars who merely view ero-guro-nansensu in its literal meanings, Silverberg brilliantly documents it as a complex cultural aesthetic expressed in a spectrum of fascinating mass culture forms and preoccupations. With great erudition and humor, she traces the sensory and conceptual modes that are animated with potency and sophistication through this cultural metaphor. This book is destined to be a classic in Japan scholarship."—Laura Miller, author of Beauty Up: Exploring Contemporary Japanese Body Aesthetics

Weapon X

Weapon X
Author: Barry Windsor-Smith
Publisher: Marvel Comics Group
Total Pages: 132
Release: 1994
Genre: Comics & Graphic Novels
ISBN: 9780785100331

Of all the members of the X-Men, none has been more popular than Wolverine -- yet the origins of this mutant hero had always been tightly shrouded in mystery. Aside from a few hazy tidbits, Wolverine's past has always been little more than a blank slate. In WEAPON X, acclaimed writer/illustrator Barry Windsor-Smith peels back this veil of secrecy to reveal how Wolverine's skeleton became laced with an indestructible adamantium metal. Kidnapped and drugged, Wolverine is subjected to a series of sadistic medical experiments designed to create the perfect soldier. As he battles back against this tortuous experience, Wolverine proves himself to be a true hero long before his days as an X-Man.--Amazon.com.

Lychee Light Club

Lychee Light Club
Author: Usamaru Furuya
Publisher: Vertical Inc
Total Pages: 331
Release: 2020-08-26
Genre: Comics & Graphic Novels
ISBN: 1647290120

The Lychee Light Club is considered Usamaru Furuya's breakthrough work. Originally designed as an experiemental project Lychee's themes of youthful rebellion and deus ex machina destruction, and attractive designs eventually won over a new generation of readers and critics, leading the way for Furuya to take on his many recent high profile properties. In an abandoned warehouse, a band of nine students have assembled to plot out a new future. Their "leader" Zera is determined to cleanse his community of the ugly and cowardly. Having taken command of a band of young men to build him a god-like machine capable of changing the world. This machine, named "Lychee," will give them what they've been searching for...a beauty of the finest quality. A surreal yet touching horror comedy Furuya's Lychee Light Club that mixes elements of French Le Théâtre du Grand-Guignol and with modern day pop culture tropes and is set in modern day Tokyo. Shocking, sexy and innovative, the Lychee Light Club is at the pinnacle of modern day Japanese seinen manga (young adult comics).