The Human Chair

The Human Chair (人間椅子, 1925) by Edogawa Rampo isn’t so much a scary tale as it is a deviant’s disturbing fantasy brought to life. An ugly furniture maker crafts a chair into which he can slip, sitting unnoticed beneath those—mostly women—who take a seat atop it. You can almost hear the wheels turning in Rampo’s head as you read; everything you might (or might not) want to know about hiding inside a chair is explored here. It’s a fun story, told in a straight-faced, serious tone.

It also exemplifies that distinctly Japanese mode of horror, rooted half in the quotidian and half in the deeply bizarre. As Eugene Thacker, writing for The Japan Times, puts it, it is “exemplary of a particular trope in Japanese horror where an innocuous, everyday event sends a character chasing a single idea—methodically, bit by bit—to its logical and terrifying conclusion.”