"Panoramatou Kitan" (Panorama Island Tales) by Edogawa Ranpo. This is what happens when someone has excessive artistic ambition and happens to acquire a great amount of wealth.
On the acquisition of wealth bit: many pages were spent on how the main character got to be filthy rich. It was not a normal career path -- gory details include faking a suicide and acting as a dead man resurrected. These bits seem like a diversion from the main panorama island story, but actually paved the way for the ending of the story later. My interpretation of the message here is that you need someone in good mental health to build up wealth, and someone of a completely different mentality to waste that wealth on large crazy projects.
On the panorama island bit: this was more like a theme park tour, with interesting scenery including underwater passages and ancient forests. Besides detailed visual descriptions throughout the tour, there were constant reminders of things that just do not seem quite right. Perhaps it was the nauseating optical illusions that made up the false perspective scenes, or the random crowd of naked people who were treated like transportation and decoration objects rather than amusement park workers. Ranpo wants the readers to feel afraid and uneasy like the characters in the story, and he has done a very good job here as usual.
There were many graphic bits throughout this story, accompanied by psychological bits for the characters on scene. There were relatively few action scenes compared to the volume of pages describing how things were and what people thought. We the readers are really observers to a panoramic landscape of psychological perversions.
Four extra stories are bundled in this book: "Hakuchuumu" (Daydream) was an observation of a criminal confession that may or may not have happened. This one was very well done. "Oni" (Demon) and "Hinawajuu" (Matchlock Gun) are conventional detective stories with easy physics, and "Seppun" (Kiss) is kind of a detective story with a psychological twist in the end. These were reasonably entertaining, but pales in comparison to "Panorama Island Tales".
I think after reading Ranpo's "Yami ni Ugomeku", Amazon's recommendation engine is accusing me of enjoying grave digging scenes and suggested this book accordingly. Or maybe it's just all a coincidence. It was really intense, not sure I would read this again soon, but it was worth reading.
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