DOGRA MAGRA begins innocuously, if bizarrely, with the rhyme “Fetus, why do you squirm?,” a play on the opening line (“Crow, why do you caw?”) of the 1921 Japanese children’s song “Nanatsu no Ko.”
NANATSU NO KO Japanese Folk Song
The story commences in 1926, with an unidentified man’s first person recitation describing his awaking in a cell within the Kyushu University Department of Psychiatry. The man describes himself as a “stranger in an unknown world” suffering from “Ego amnesia,” with his sole connection to reality being a woman’s voice heard through the wall. The speaker claims to be the man’s deceased fiancée, who died, she claims, at his hands.
Initially published in 1935 and clocking in at over 700 pages, DOGRA MAGRA (a Japanese equivalent to “Abracadabra”) was the magnum opus of horror-fantasy maestro Yumeno Kyusaku (1889-1936). Reportedly a decade in the writing, the novel proved quite contentious with its free intermixing of philosophical speculation and gothic excess into a nested structure that grows increasingly discordant, with prose to match (it’s been famously said “Whoever reads this book will become insane at least once”). DOGRA MAGRA may be ninety years old but has a complexity both formal and thematic that invites terms, like formalist and postmodern, that weren’t in vogue in 1930s Japan.
To continue with the plot synopsis: the protagonist is attended to by Wakabayashi Kyotaro, a university professor with apparently supernatural abilities (among other things, he can intuit sleeping people’s dreams). He’s succeeded the late Makasi Keishi, a “great scholar” who prior to committing suicide formulated revolutionary theories on abnormal psychiatry, and created an equally revolutionary method of treatment. The inaugural patient, it just so happens, is the protagonist, with a methodology that’s contingent upon him remembering his identity, and the crimes he apparently committed, without any overt prompting. Wakabayashi also introduces his patient to the woman whose voice he heard through the wall, a woman who may or may not be his wife, and who’s apparently suffering the same form of amnesia as he.
Taken into the office of the deceased Makasi, the protagonist is shown a manuscript called DOGRA MAGRA, written by one of Makasi’s students. It’s a “supernatural science fiction story” that in most particulars, from the opening stanzas onward, conforms to the text we’re reading—one is tempted to deduce that what’s we’re reading is in fact the DOGRA MAGRA manuscript the protagonist peruses, but that would be far too straightforward an explanation for an extended anti-narrative that thrives on disconnection and dashed expectations.
The text-within-the-text does, however, provide a good barometer of what to expect from the remainder of this book. As described by Wakabayashi, “the factual contents contained in it are mixed with scientific tastes, bizarre tastes, erotic expressions, detective tastes, a taste of nonsense, and mysterious tastes,” even though “the main plot is quite simple. It is nothing more than a detailed account of the suffering of the young man, confined in this hospital for Dr. Masaki’s and my sake, being subjected to the most terrible psychological experiments imaginable.”
From there the text is hijacked by the contents of INSANE HELL HERETICAL SONG, a manuscript written by Masaki, who lays out his highly fanciful views on consciousness and insanity (inspired by the theories of the German physicist Ernst Haeckel) in grammatically suspect prose whose linguistic quirks (misspellings, incorrect punctuation, etc.) continue even after we switch back to the “reality” of the protagonist in his cell. This reality is called into question by the fact that said protagonist appears to become a character in INSANE HELL HERETICAL SONG, and that Masaki, who is supposed to be dead, not only appears to be alive but assumes narration duties.
And there’s more: one of the main characters may or may not have a twin who’s been wreaking havoc in the guise of his sibling, a thousand year old scroll is unveiled whose contents may or may not be determining present day actions, and it’s opined that all of this may or may not be a dream experienced by a fetus in its mother’s womb. The final pages, depending on one’s point of view, might offer an explanation for all this lunacy or simply compound it (I say the latter), with the author concerned not with solving the many mysteries raised by his book but with a depiction of 20th Century Japan as a madhouse as stifling and oppressive as the hospital in which the protagonist finds himself interred.
DOGRA MAGRA may not have wowed readers in 1935, but it gained a renewed appreciation in the 1960s, and has become a canonical Japanese text. It’s considered one of the “Four Most Bewildering Books in the History of Japanese Detective Fiction” (together with MURDER AT THE MANSION OF BLACK DEATH by Mushitarō Oguri, THE LOST MUSIC IN THE BOX by Kenji Takemoto and THE OFFERINGS TO THE VOID by Hideo Nakai, all of which remain untranslated) and regularly garners terms like “masterpiece” and “tour de force” from readers who manage to make it all the way through. Having done so myself (it wasn’t easy), I’ll have to agree with those assessments.
Translations? Given that Japanese speaking readers have had trouble deciphering the text (adding to all linguistic chaos, Yumeno utilized furigana, or explanatory phonetic surtext, quite heavily), rendering this book in other languages is a monumental, and perhaps even insurmountable, task. A French language version of DOGRA MAGRA, accomplished (somehow) by Patrick Honnore, was published in 2003, but English translators haven’t been nearly as lucky.
Numerous attempts have been made over the decades to render DOGRA MAGRA in English and, as of 2025, only two have made it to completion. The first, a disastrous 2019 pdf-only version that was evidently the result of Google translate, was quickly memory holed, while the second is a 546 page translation from the French version, credited to Colton R. Auxier, that was published in hardcover form in 2023. How authoritative Auxier’s efforts are I have no way of discerning (not being a Japanese speaker), but his text has a confounding air that jibes with descriptions of the Japanese language original, and stands as the closest thing that exists to a definitive English translation.
Speaking of which, let’s take a look at DOGRA MAGRA’s other major transpositions. The first was a 1988 feature film by director Toshio Matsumoto; DOGRA MAGRA was the unprolific Matsumoto’s fourth feature film, following masterworks like FUNERAL PARADE OF ROSES/ Bara no sôretsu (1969) and DEMONS/Shura (1971). Several pre-1988 attempts had been made to film this frankly unfilmable book, but Matsumoto was the first director who was able to get full permission from Yumeno Kyusaku’s family.
DOGRA MAGRA 1988 (Trailer)
Matsumoto’s film is a suitably mind-boggling affair that employs dreams, kabuki puppets, a talking photograph and all manner of visual bravura. Dr. Masaki has been made into a filmmaker rather than a writer, with a great deal of the runtime taken up with mock-documentary footage from one of Masaki’s films, and the revelation contained in the thousand year old scroll, which occurred toward the end of the book, was moved up to near the beginning of the film. I didn’t find either change hugely jarring (the narrative is every bit as fractured and confounding as it was in the novel), but did find the 20 year old lead actor Yôji Matsuda too young and naïve to be convincing as the married protagonist.
Ultimately the film fails because Kyusaku’s cerebral account, which takes place almost entirely within the confines of a mental hospital, simply isn’t suited to a visual medium. That fact is furthered by a single volume manga adaptation published in 2021, from which the novel’s complexity and formal audacity were jettisoned.
Credited to “Various Artists,” the artwork of the DOGRA MAGRA manga is far from exceptional, portraying the protagonist as a child and Professor Wakabayashi as an imposing fedora wearing grown-up, both caught up in an overtly dark-hued black and white universe that’s far removed from Kyusaku’s air of poetic irrationality. It’s not at all inappropriate that, even after nearly a century, no translator, filmmaker or artist can seem to get this book right.