The Human Chair

[cyberghostface]

The story opens with a young writer entering a furniture store, asking for a chair that helps back pains. The store owner tells her that chairs are important, and begins to tell her a story that took place in the Taisho Era, about a chair that changed a person's destiny.

He brings her to a hidden room, showing her an old armchair that belonged to a writer named Togawa Yoshiko, a renowned author who was wife to the Minister of Foreign Affairs. Yoshiko would receive letters from anonymous letters everyday. One day she receives an intriguing manuscript.




Yoshiko later finds out that the manuscript about the human chair received first place in a writing contest, although no one was able to find the author.




She asks her husband where he bought the chair, and he tells her it came from the Y Market Place.




She tells her husband about the fears of the chair, but he reassures her that it's just a thief and he will get whoever is there.w



She tells her husband the chair moved. Her servants inspect it and can find no hole of entrance, but she insists that it must be well-hidden. When she asks to remove the leather, the husband gets annoyed and proceeds to beat the chair with his stick. There is no response.

A few days letter, she receives another anonymous letter. The letter-writer says that he has been lonely without her sitting in the chair, and he was hurt by her beating the chair.




When her husband returns, he admonishes her for not keeping up with her writing and for blaming the chair.






When the police arrive she tells them there must be a man in the chair and they proceed to cut it open with a knife.




Back in the present, the shop owner tells the young writer that while the police believed her, the public became suspicious of Yoshiko. Eventually her career suffers and she becomes mentally unstable. She eventually disappears without a trace.











The next day, Yuzuho receives a knocking on her door for a delivery.

Comments

[whitesycamore]

I enjoy the lack of agency because to me it feels similar to a nightmare.

The horrible plot is inevitably going to unfold, and you're helpless to do anything but follow it to the end.

[icon_uk]

True, though I don't usually want to follow my nightmares, and I have a hard time investing in other peoples, especially other people who behave in a rather stupid or ineffectual fashion for no other reason than the plot demands it. (cf many, MANY slasher flicks where I often end up wishing the bad guy well in improving humanity by removing the cast of characters from the genepool)

And I'm sure I've seen/read this basic concept in something else? A Poe short story perhaps?

[whitesycamore]

It only works for me if it's a certain type of surreal horror that feels like something I would dream. This does.

I will freely admit that I get a peculiar sense of enjoyment out of most of my nightmares. However, most of the time when I dream I'm semi-conscious of the fact that it's only a dream. Which I'm quite thankful for, because I often suffer from sleep paralysis on waking (complete with crazy hypnopompic hallucinations), and I imagine it would be terrifying if I didn't realise what was happening.

[icon_uk]

I have had a couple of very vivid instances of that, though not for many years now, I'm relieved to say.

[whitesycamore]

I'm lucky in that, although I have episodes semi-regularly, I retain a vague idea of the reality of what's actually going on, and also the emotional parts of my brain seem to be offfline when they happen so I don't find them all that distressing.

What I really hate are the rare occasions when I have auditory sleep starts. *They* terrify me, and since I get them accompanied by brilliant flashes of white light, my first thought is always that a nuclear bomb has just gone off.

[mishalak]

My nightmares are not like that. For me a nightmare happens when I make a bad decision or things are just beyond my control. More like Night of the Living Dead where they kept trying plans, but they did not work.