Strange Tale of Panorama Island

Known as the founder of the modern Japanese detective story, Ranpo is associated with Edgar Allan Poe, whose name inspired his own penname, and whose grotesque imagination broke the boundaries of conventional thought, as did Ranpos own. Strange Tale of Panorama Island contains many of the aspects of the modernist era and the ero guro nansensu sensibility. In it we find reflected the new culture of mechanically produced simulated realities through motion pictures, photography, advertising, stereoscopes, and panoramas. Central to it are the themes of the doppelganger and appropriated identities that flourished in an era that was fixated upon the novelty of the simulacra. Its utopian vision mirrors the expansionist dreams that fed the colonization of the Asian continent; its ending is an eerie harbinger of the collapse of those dreams.