Discover Japan's stories—across time, across language.

| Original Title | 猟奇歌 |
|---|---|
| Author | 夢野 久作 |
| Genre | Modern Short Fiction |
| Author Type | Male Author |
| Summary | A nameless narrator’s fractured psyche unravels through fragmented vignettes of violence, guilt, and existential dread. Obsessed with death and driven by impulses they scarcely comprehend, the voice oscillates between cold detachment and frenzied desperation—strangling women, discarding corpses, and confronting spectral visions of their own malevolence. Blood drips endlessly: from severed throats, cracked photographs, even the sky itself, staining a world where sanity blurs with hallucination. Mirrors reflect monstrous doubles; razors and pistols whisper temptations. Amidst prison cells, moonlit forests, and shadowed alleys, the narrator grapples with a conscience both absent and suffocating, envying oblivion yet clinging to a grotesque vitality. Surreal imagery—a fetus alive in a drowned corpse, a headless monkey-shaped conscience—paints a landscape where love curdles into cruelty, and every act of destruction becomes a futile ritual. This is not a confession but a fever dream, inviting readers into a labyrinth of poetic grotesquerie where darkness begets darker truths. What compels such a soul? The answer lies in the spaces between each bloodstained verse. |