The Traveler with the Pasted Rag Picture

On the train home from watching a mirage at Uozu, the narrator shares a carriage with a strange man carrying a framed picture made of pasted cloth. In it are an old man and a young woman. The old man, he says, is his brother.

Of all Rampo wrote, this is the one where beauty outweighs horror. A man tells a story, and inside that story another time opens up. Keeping the frames apart by speaker makes it much easier to hold on to whose memory you are inside at any moment.