Soseki’s short story “The Tower of London” (1905) is a curious mixture of the record of his visit to that great historical monument and the gruesome fantasies associated with human agonies suffered by many victims confined there. The author，going round that ancient building just as Dante went through the “Inferno”, literally sees dreadful things performed —such as the murder of the infants of Edward IV and the execution of Lady Jane Grey.
In the note to his own work，Soseki admits that he is indebted to Shakespeare’s Richard III and Ainsworth’s Tower of London. But the detailed investigation reveals that he has got some of his ideas from W.R. Dick’s Short Sketch of the Beauchamp Tower，a kind of guidebook which Soseki bought in the Tower. From these works Soseki picked up various passages related with the visitor’s regular route of the Tower, irrespective of the original stories or plots，and changed these passages into very impressive scenes or images. He also took up the historical paintings of Delaroche and re-expressed the scenes in his own words. Then he assimilated these images or scenes into his own context, producing a kind of surrealistic effect. Especially noteworthy is his ingenious use of the devices similar to the techniques of cinema, such as “fade-in”,“fade-out”, “close-up”,“montage”,etc.
It is through these unique devices that Soseki succeeded in creating a peculiar world of his own, consisting of the report of his personal experience and of the representation of the nightmarish scenes connected with the history of the Tower.
