The Ghost Tower

Remember Edogawa Ranpo? The Japanese author of horror and thrilller who gave us the strange and haunting Panorama Island. After reading the graphic novel, I read the novel last summer, and apparently it became tradition that I read Japanese horror when I’m on the traditional 10-days summer vacation with my friends, and this year I grabbed a relatively new Italian translation of Yūrei tō, translated as La Torre Spettrale – Ghost Tower.

The novel is better known for being the inspiration behind some elements of Miyazaki’s Castle of Cagliostro, and it has an intricate story. Published in 1936 after appearing serially in a magazine, it springs from Ranpo’s wish to make more accessible a work by Ruikō Kuroiwa – The Spectral Tower – published in 1900 also serially. According to what Ranpo himself writes as a preface to one of the chapters, the style of the original work would have been too old-fashioned for modern readers and nevertheleess he thought a waste to forget such a marvellous work just for the language barrier.

A connection has also been suggested between this work and Alice Muriel Williamson‘s A Lady in Grey, which I’m not familiar with: apparently Kuroiwa saw a movie from 1920 with scenes of an adaptation, and sought out the original work to make it available into Japanese, making significant adaptation in its translation.

Regardless of its intricated origin, the novel remains one of the most brilliant Japanese mystery novels I’ve read, with a complex mixture of traditional elements and values (family honor and vengeful ghosts being the more obvious), a touch of romanticism with cursed beauties and poisons, plain horror with elements such as the house of spiders, and strikingly modern elements that wouldn’t be out of place in a contemporary sci-fi thriller.

Highly recommended.

Note: there’s also a comic book version with drawings by Miyazaki himself.