{Blu-ray Review} The Ruin of Dreams: Rampo Noir (2005) and the “Japanese Poe”

“Artists are all compelled by madness.”

Released in 2005, “produced by the same team behind Ichi the Killer and Uzumaki,” Rampo Noir is a relatively high-budget anthology project featuring segments from four very different filmmakers, all of them adapting (however loosely) stories from the “Japanese Poe” Edogawa Ranpo (sometimes Romanized as Rampo.) If most of that is Greek (or, more accurately, Japanese) to you, not to worry; that’s where I come in.

Who was Edogawa Ranpo?

Born in 1894 in Mie Prefecture, Taro Hirai is widely credited with having shaped the tradition of modern Japanese mystery and thriller fiction under his adopted nom de plume Edogawa Ranpo – a sort of phonetic rendering of the Japanese pronunciation of Edgar Allan Poe.

As Ranpo, he wrote prolifically, with dozens of novels and short stories in print, almost all of them in the mystery or thriller genres. However, arguably his best and certainly his most famous stories all deal with human psychology and toe the line of what is known as “ero guro,” a Japanese wasei-eigo term made up of abbreviated English words – in this case “erotic” and “grotesque.”

“Ranpo became an author when Freudianism and other forms of psychoanalysis were entering Japan,” writes Ishikawa Takumi at Nippon.com. “Influenced by a science that scrutinized human mentality, he took people’s dark side and their desires and fears as material for his writing.”

Just like his American namesake, Ranpo has been adapted to film countless times in his native country – he has nearly a hundred credits on IMDb – beginning during his own lifetime, with a silent film version of his story The Killer Dwarf released around 1926. Some of the best and most famous of these include Blind Beast and Horrors of Malformed Men, both from 1969, and Shinya Tsukamoto’s Gemini from 1999, and anyone who has seen any of those probably has at least some idea of what to expect from Rampo Noir.

Ranpo has also served as an inspiration for numerous manga artists, including Junji Ito, who has adapted a couple of stories by the “Japanese Poe” – including what is perhaps Ranpo’s best-known story in the west, “The Human Chair,” which is a must-read for anyone with more than a passing interest in horror fiction.

What is ero guro?

In the prewar Japan of the 1920s, an artistic and cultural movement took shape called “ero guro nansensu” – erotic grotesque nonsense. Described as a “bourgeois cultural phenomenon that devoted itself to explorations of the deviant, the bizarre, and the ridiculous,” author Ian Buruma likened the movement to “a skittish, sometimes nihilistic hedonism that brings Weimar Berlin to mind.”

The ero guro nansensu movement began predominantly among ukiyo-e artists who presented erotic shunga woodblock prints alongside depictions of grisly acts of violence from Japanese history and dealt directly with themes such as rape and bondage.

Though Edogawa Ranpo was alive and writing at the same time as the burgeoning eru guro nansensu movement, he wasn’t necessarily a member of it. Nevertheless, his work would become inextricably associated with it as ero guro style and ideas permeated Japanese horror and “pink film” (films dealing with sexual subjects) genres, including several early adaptations of Ranpo’s work. Of course, the overtly psychosexual elements of Ranpo’s stories also make him a perfect fit for the ero guro approach.

Finally, what is Rampo Noir?

By 2005, the J-horror boom that had been heralded by the release of Hideo Nakata’s Ring in 1998 – and its subsequent American remake in 2002 – was undergoing a sea change. There were still plenty of waterlogged specters clogging up Japanese movie screens and getting English-language rehashes, but the release of films like Audition and Ichi the Killer had also primed audiences both inside and outside Japan to be ready for some ero guro nonsense, which set the stage for the 2005 release of Rampo Noir.

Bringing together four filmmakers with radically different CVs, Variety described Rampo Noir as “a colorful but over-arty quartet of Japanese horror yarns” – an assessment that is difficult to gainsay. Within the first twenty minutes, the movie has almost literally recreated the famous pretentious Mr. Plow commercial from The Simpsons.

The extremely short “Mars Canal,” helmed by music video director and visual artist Suguru Takeuchi, is almost literally silent, filmed not only without dialogue but without diegetic sound or even score for most of its running time. Frequent Ultraman director Akio Jissoji brings us to “Mirror Hell,” introducing viewers to detective Kogoro Akechi, a recurring character in Ranpo’s works. Here, Akechi is played by Tadanobu Asano, a Japanese star known for playing Kakihara in Ichi the Killer and Hogun in the various Thor movies, among many others. Besides Ranpo, Asano is the thread that holds these various segments together, as he appears in each one, in various guises.

Asano’s role is smallest and most incidental in “Caterpillar,” which adapts one of Ranpo’s “most grotesque stories,” about a “wounded war veteran who returns from the front line as little more than a bloody torso, ‘a pathetic broken doll whose limbs were cruelly torn off by the playful gods of war,’ helpless to defend himself against the increasingly perverted caprices of an embittered wife.” Overseen by splatter and pinky violence director Hisayasu Sato, it is no surprise that “Caterpillar” is probably the most ero guro of the lot, here.

In fact, the arrangement of the segments in Rampo Noir leads to an escalation from art house styling to more overt horror, though the final piece, the only directorial credit of manga artist Atsushi Kaneko, still has plenty of style. In fact, “Crawling Bugs” may be the most visually surreal of the lot, trumping even “Mars Canal.”

While the last two segments certainly overstay their welcomes, Rampo Noir at its best conjures some truly potent images and makes use of powerful sound design throughout. At more than two hours, it is overlong and, yes, probably “over-arty,” but it’s an interesting take on both the author for whom it is named and the movement his work helped to influence.

If you want to see a truly great adaptation of Edogawa Ranpo’s work, go watch something like Blind Beast. If an interesting one is enough, then Rampo Noir has you covered.