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Japanese author Hirai Tarô took his pen name, Edogawa Rampo, as an homage to the American writer Edgar Allan Poe. Like his idol, he produced numerous stories that incorporated mystery and horror elements in various admixtures, and exhibited a similar fascination with mental abnormalities and (perhaps more so in Rampo’s case) sexual perversities. The term that came to be associated with Rampo’s work starting in the late 1920s was “erotic grotesque nonsense,” delineating a sensibility that outrageously mixed together sex, violence, and a dark sense of humor in ways that bring to mind the surrealist movement percolating to a boil in Paris at around the same time.

Rampo Noir was the unholy brainchild of producer Miyazaki Dai, who had unleashed Miike Takashi’s Ichi the Killer on the world a few years earlier. He hand-selected the four stories to be adapted and then recruited the directors: two industry...