#14 The Human Chair by Edogawa Rampo

Edogawa Rampo’s short story, ‘The Human Chair’,was originally published in Japanese in 1925. The story is taken from the collection, Japanese Tales of Mystery and Imagination, translated by James B. Harris, and published by Tuttle Publishing. ‘The Human Chair’ is a tale of the grotesque in which a master carpenter entombs himself inside a chair in order to gain the intimacy that society has denied him. The longer he spends inside the chair, pressed close to the bodies of strangers, the harder it becomes to return to his ordinary life. As well as being a superb example of the uncanny tale, ‘The Human Chair’ is a rich palimpsest that reveals layer upon layer of sexual, social and national anxieties.