So on /co/, we were just talking about the film Midori. This discussion eventually lead me to looking up the film on Wikipedia, and from there I ended up on the page about the Ero Guro movement in Japan.
The article states that the movement was first noticed in literature in the 20s and 30s, but the article on Japanese Literature has no mention of the movement. Or at least, "ctrl+ Ero Guro" doesn't come up with anything. I didn't read the whole article.
Anyway, my question is, does anyone know any examples of Ero Guro literature, and has any of it been translated into English?
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Anonymous2009-10-05 15:33
ctrl+f*
No matter how much I proofread... I swear...
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Anonymous2009-10-14 0:10
You bring up an interesting topic, but it's something I don't know much about either. So yeah, while there's tons of guro/grotesque films and manga that have been translated, I've never found any books translated from Japan. I guess they think such literature isn't marketable to english readers. And when you think about it, it really isn't.
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Anonymous2009-10-27 23:23
There's "Story of the Eye" by Georges Bataille. Hell I got it from my library.
Unfortunately, though, that's all I can think of, and it's not a particularly graphic novel.
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Anonymous2009-10-28 0:29
There was a series of Erotic Horror anthologies called "Hot Blood", but I haven't seen them for years.
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Anonymous2010-09-22 15:22
Hardly any ero guro literature has been translated into English. Don't feel bad, though: Sade's work wasn't translated into English until many, many decades after his death. (And God knows Sade is the closest western lit gets to ero guro.)
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Anonymous2010-11-08 19:17
I can't think of any eroguro fiction that's been translated into English, but you can go to gurochan.net and find plenty of fanfics that people have wrote. If castration is your thing, you can find plenty of fanfics related to that at eunuch.org.
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Anonymous2010-12-03 12:45
Several manga by the Japanese author Suehiro Maruo (b. 1956) have been translated into English. Maruo is very much a member of the ero guro movement, and his works include "Mr. Arashi's Amazing Freak Show" and "Ultragash Inferno." (Incidentally, to reflect on what started this thread in the first place, the film "Midori" was based on "Mr. Arashi.")
This isn't Japanese, but an author who might interest ero guro fans is the Spaniard Jesus Ignacio Aldapuerta (1950-1987). Aldapuerta, a one-time medical student, was highly influenced by both Sade and Bataille, and could be said to be more gruesome than the two of them combined. He even invented his own special language for describing sexual torture. Only one collection of Aldapuerta's short stories, "The Eyes," has been widely translated into English. Although he supposedly died in a fire in 1987, rumor has it he is still alive, in hiding, and deep at work completing Sade's unfinished "120 Days of Sodom."
It's a bit sad: we know this literary movement existed, but we can't name any authors associated with it. It's kind of like if we knew transcendentalism existed, but didn't know about Emerson or Thoreau.
Whoever these authors and their works were, they seem to have been lost in time, leaving only a blank page in the history of literature. I see somebody mentioned Suehiro Maruo, but there had to have been somebody fiddling around with ero guro before him.
Yeah, Aldapuerta does seem very ero guro- especially when you look at the surrealist quality of his work. If you look at some of the modern Spanish writers (say, Roberto Bolano) and then look at some of the modern Japanese writers (say, Haruki Murakami), they're actually not all that different. Must be that magical realism thing going around...
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Anonymous2010-12-21 23:07
There was "The Caterpillar" by Edogawa Rampo, which was written in 1929. That was pretty creepy...
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Anonymous2011-02-17 13:08
Rampo also wrote a novel, "Moju: The Blind Beast", that is very ero guro in style and tone. And guess what- it was just recently translated into English!