Author: Kathryn

Reader of books and player of games. College professor and pokémon trainer. Writes about Japanese fiction, media, gender, and society. In love with monsters and magic. https://digitalfantasydiary.com/

がらんどう

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Asako Ōtani’s novella Garandō (がらんどう), which won the 46th Subaru Literary Prize in 2023, follows two 40yo women as they settle into a cozy life as adult flatmates.

Hirai recently moved in with her friend Suganuma, who suggested that they live together so they can afford a nicer apartment. The two women met as adults through their shared fandom of the boy band KI Dash, and they managed to remain friends during the pandemic despite drifting away from their other friends and family members.   

Hirai works in an office, while Suganuma is a self-employed artist who uses a 3D printer to create custom memorial figurines of her clients’ deceased pets. The two women share chores and meals, sometimes cooking for each other and sometimes going out to eat. Although they’re not romantically involved, they often fall asleep together in the living room while watching KI Dash performances on DVDs that they play on an old PlayStation 2.

When Suganuma’s star idol suddenly marries an adult video actress, Hirai takes her flatmate to the beach for a breakup vacation. Afterward, Suganuma begins dating a married man she met at the hotel bar. Hirai is jealous but understands that this is simply the way of the world.

In resignation, Hirai signs up for a dating app, but this goes poorly. Her lack of success is partially because she’s aggressively targeted by someone involved in a multi-level marketing scam, but it’s mostly because Hirai is about as asexual and aromantic as someone can be. She has a vague aspiration of having a child one day, but is that really what she wants?

For Hirai’s birthday, Suganuma ends her relationship with the sleazy married man and uses her 3D printer to manufacture a baby as a gift for her flatmate. The story closes in much the same place it began, with the two women happy and secure in one another’s company. The title of the novella, Garandō, means “empty,” and it most directly refers to the hollow centers of Suganuma’s 3D-printed figurines. This title might at first be taken to refer to the relationship between Hirai and Suganuma as well, but their friendship is anything but hollow.

Because really, what’s to stop two adult women from spending their lives happily together as flatmates? Why do two people need to be married or related in order for it to be “normal” for them to live together? Is your life really “empty” if you don’t get married and have children?

More than anything, Garandō reminds me of Banana Yoshimoto’s bestselling 1988 novel Kitchen, which presents alternate models of modern families while comforting the reader that, even if you’re not “normal,” life is still well worth living. Granted, Hirai and Suganuma are older than the characters in Kitchen, and they’re not living in the lap of Japan’s bubble-era luxury. In addition, Ōtani’s writing style is relatively sardonic and dry, especially when compared to the bubblegum pop of Kitchen. Still, Garandō is a positive story about two weirdos who manage to find happiness. Even if their lives don’t follow the standard model, they’re doing okay.

At a slim 112 pages, Garandō is a quick read. Ōtani has a wonderful sense of pacing, juxtaposing scenes of comfort inside the home with scenes of (highly relatable) social awkwardness in the outside world. I really enjoyed this book, which pulls off something I appreciate – the normalization of “difference” without resorting to sentimentality or melodrama.

What Ōtani demonstrates in this meticulously crafted novella is that people like Hirai and Suganuma are less uncommon than you might think, and that’s cool. And honestly, given that a house and a nuclear family have become distant dreams for many of us, why not join them? 

Someone to Watch Over You

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Kumi Kimura’s 2021 novella Someone to Watch Over You is a subtly unnerving story about the strangeness of the Covid pandemic.

46yo Tae lives alone in her deceased parents’ house in a small town in northern Japan. She formerly worked as a middle school teacher, but she left the job after the death of one of her students. Now she lives on her inherited savings while leaving the house as infrequently as she possibly can.

Tae’s solitary lifestyle is unaffected by the onset of the Covid pandemic, but the “stay home” orders were followed by three unpleasant incidents in quick succession. An older man who’d just retired is found dead in an apartment on Tae’s street, and someone paints graffiti on the front wall of Tae’s house. Tae also receives an odd message from the father of the deceased student on her answering machine. These three incidents blend together into a paranoid fantasy that convinces Tae that she’s being stalked.

After a handyman named Shinobu treats Tae with kindness while cleaning her bathroom drain, Tae asks him to guard her house. Shinobu, who desperately needs the cash, readily agrees. During the pandemic, he’s been forced to live in the garden shed of his parents’ house, which is currently occupied by his brother’s family. Shinobu’s sister-in-law won’t talk to him, and his niece is weird and creepy in a way particular to young teenage girls.

Tae eventually asks Shinobu to move into her house so he can keep watch full-time, but this arrangement is supremely awkward. Both Tae and Shinobu are deeply damaged people, and Tae’s insistence on maintaining social distancing rules inside her own home stunts the development of any sort of friendly relationship between them. By the end of the novel, the reader wonders if Shinobu is any better off at Tae’s house than he would have been living rough.

To speak personally, a sudden change in employment forced me to scramble to move to a different city in April 2020. Due to social distancing, I had no opportunity to form and renew social connections, and the following two years were intense and unpleasant.

Someone to Watch Over You doesn’t reflect my individual circumstances, but it perfectly conveys the sense of displacement and alienation I experienced during the pandemic. It’s validating to see this sort of surreal experience taken seriously, especially since I definitely wasn’t alone in having a bad time during the lockdowns. I don’t think it’s healthy to dwell in past trauma; but, at the same time, the cultural expectation to pretend that all of this didn’t happen four years ago can sometimes feel maddening.

The back cover of Someone to Watch Over You promises “an unlikely connection” and asks if Tae and Shinobu can “become one another’s refuge,” thus suggesting the possibility of a heart-warming conclusion to the story. This does not happen, not by a long shot. While I fear that some readers may be disappointed by the weirdness of the ending, I appreciate that the author didn’t pull her punches. The Covid pandemic was indeed strange and unpleasant, and Someone to Watch Over You is one of the truest fictional accounts of the pandemic I’ve encountered.

Someone to Watch Over You is well-written and carefully translated, and I found myself fascinated by the dysfunctional characters and pulled along by the downward momentum of their story. This disturbing little book is compelling in its use of the pandemic as a stage for exploring the darker mysteries of mundane life, and I admire how Kimura revisits this particular moment of history without the comforting lens of nostalgia.

Strange Houses

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Strange Houses is a four-part horror mystery novel about houses with strange and uncanny floor plans.

Each of the four chapters takes the form of a series of conversations between the narrator, their architect friend, and various people who have been involved with the houses. The first three chapters explore three different houses with extra rooms and inexplicable gaps in the walls. These explorations are liberally illustrated with diagrams in which certain sections of the floor plan are highlighted and annotated to clarify the text.

Each of these stories is like a locked room mystery. Over the course of the chapter, the narrator’s architect friend performs a close reading of a floor plan while gradually building a theory concerning what sort of upsetting behavior that type of strange space might enable.

In the final chapter, it’s revealed that these houses are connected to an old and wealthy family with a terrible secret. I have to admit that I found this situation highly improbable, so much so that it comes off as almost cartoonish. The author is great at architectural walkthroughs but skimps on the character development, which contributes to the conclusion of the book feeling somewhat hollow. Still, there’s a lot of fuel for the reader’s imagination, and fans of gothic horror will have a lot to play with here.

I flew through Strange Houses and loved every page. The speculative conversations between characters are easy to follow; and, thanks to the diagrams, the spaces are easy to visualize. I enjoyed the slow build of the overarching mystery, and the revelations about the bizarre family at the center of the strangeness were beyond anything I expected.

It’s worth noting that the first story in Strange Houses was originally written as a script for a twenty-minute video on YouTube, which you can find with English subtitles (here). There’s also a manga adaptation, which has been scanlated and is available to read (here). And finally, I’d like to share a more substantial review of the original Japanese book that was posted on one of my favorite blogs (here).

I tend to think that Uketsu’s earlier novel Strange Pictures (which I reviewed here) is somewhat more successful as a work of fiction with three-dimensional characters whose bad behavior stems from understandable motives. In comparison, Strange Houses feels more like a puzzle box than a novel. Strange Houses is less a character-driven story than it is an imaginative architectural mystery, but its eerie atmosphere and clever narrative structure make it a fascinating read for fans of speculative horror and uncanny design.

うみべのストーブ

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Umibe no Stove (うみべのストーブ), originally published in 2022, is a collection of seven short manga stories by Kogani Ōshiro. In a surprising but well-deserved turn of fate, the collection was listed as the #1 women’s title in the 2024 edition of the Kono Manga ga Sugoi! (“This Manga Is Awesome”) series of mass-market reference books. Ōshiro’s magical realist stories are difficult to categorize, but what they share is a gentle and bittersweet appreciation for the small challenges and victories of growing older and moving on. 

The title story is about a man named Sumio whose girlfriend breaks up with him on her birthday. Left alone in the apartment they once shared, Sumio huddles next to the space heater and cries. The space heater takes pity on him and reveals that it can talk. It suggests that they go to the beach together, a trip Sumio never made with his girlfriend. Sumio agrees and spends the night sitting on a concrete embankment overlooking the ocean as he talks with the space heater and finally accepts the fact that his girlfriend isn’t coming back. Even though it’s unplugged, the space heater keeps him warm by sharing its memories of happier times.

The second story, 雪子の夏 (Yukiko no natsu), is about a trucker who encounters a Yuki Onna while stuck in traffic on a snowy night. The childlike yōkai doesn’t particularly want to kill the trucker; and, after they talk for a bit, she reveals that it’s her dream to see summer fireworks. The trucker invites the Yuki Onna to share her apartment until summer, at which point she can use her refrigerated cargo space to take her guest to see a summer festival. While watching the fireworks explode in the night sky, the Yuki Onna is so overjoyed that snow begins to fall.

My favorite of the stories, 海の底から (Umi no soko kara), is about a young woman named Fukatani who always dreamed of being a professional novelist. Her two friends from college both managed to become published authors after they graduated, but Fukatani lost her motivation to write after starting an office job. During a late-night drinking session, Fukatani’s friends ask her if she’d really be happy never writing another story, but she doesn’t know what to say. She used to love writing, but she just hasn’t felt any inspiration recently.

Later, Fukatani’s boyfriend comforts her, saying that there’s no rush for her to begin writing again. After college, he explains, she found herself standing at the base of a pyramid on the bottom of the sea. She’s been working to climb each step – finding a job, paying off student loans, and so on – but when she gets to the top and rises above the surface of her ocean of worries, she’ll be able to feel the wind of creativity again. This sounds like a silly analogy, but the way Ōshiro illustrates the process of coming up for air is remarkably cool and refreshing.

Something I love about Umibe no Stove is the non-commercial quality of Ōshiro’s visual style. Admittedly, the art of some of the stories feels a bit amateurish, but I find this charming. Even when Ōshiro’s drawings are unpolished, her sense of sequential art is unflaggingly excellent. Her use of panels in Umi no soko kara, for instance, creates a lovely sense of space during the protagonist’s conversation with her boyfriend. Even if Ōshiro’s drawings aren’t always technically precise, her manga still has incredible emotional impact.

I want to recommend this book to manga fans interested in a more indie style of Japanese comics, perhaps along the lines of the graphic novels published by Western presses like Fantagraphics and Drawn & Quarterly. Umibe no Stove may seem unassuming on the surface, but this manga is something special.

As an aside: if you’re looking for something similar that’s been translated into English, I’d like to recommend Natsujikei Miyazaki’s short story collection And the Strange and Funky Happenings of One Day. It’s weird, it’s fun, and the indie manga publisher Glacier Bay Books has done an amazing job with the translation and editing.

Toward a Gameic World

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Ben Whaley’s 2023 monograph Toward a Gameic World: New Rules of Engagement from Japanese Video Games presents four case studies of how the virtual narratives of Japanese video games encourage engagement with social and political issues in the real world. Drawing on Katherine Isbister’s 2016 How Games Move Us: Emotion by Design, as well as a wealth of other recently published work in the burgeoning field of Game Studies, Whaley positions “engagement” as one of the primary means by which a video game conveys its message to the player.

“As I use it in this book,” Whaley explains in the Introduction, “‘engagement refers to a game’s capacity to evoke actual feelings of overcoming, guilt, complicity, or shared connection from a fictional experience of trauma.” The resulting study is not only a fascinating reading of key texts in the emerging canon of Japanese video games, but also a convincing argument for how Japanese games are able to engage transcultural audiences in political concerns ranging from youth precarity to environmental disasters.

The first chapter, “Limited Engagement,” asks interesting and culturally relevant questions about the politics of representing disaster in its discussion of the conversation surrounding the Disaster Report series of action-adventure games. Representations of apocalypse are often critiqued as being “disaster porn” meant to titillate viewers, but this chapter offers an alternate interpretation of the effects that experiencing such stories can have on individual players, as well as broader currents of historical memory.

“If mass-scale disasters conveyed in newspaper photos and YouTube videos represent collective narratives that run the risk of flattening the individual victims and individual narratives,” Whaley writes, “then video games like Disaster Report offer players the potential to rebuild some of this context by hearing lost voices, inhabiting lost bodies, and experiencing lost narratives, if only in virtual space.” In other words, the player engagement demanded by video games can serve as a means of presenting environmental disasters not as an abstract concept, but as a personally meaningful concern. The controversial Disaster Report series of games thus facilitates empathy for real-life survivors while also providing an education on disaster preparedness and survivor outreach.

The book’s fourth chapter, “Connective Engagement,” focuses on how social connections are modeled by the networked gameplay elements of The World Ends With You, a 2007 RPG set in an urban fantasy version of Shibuya. The game’s protagonist is a socially isolated teenager who suffers from depression and seems well on his way to becoming a hikikomori. While it’s easy enough to tell a story about a young person finding friendship, it’s much harder to break out of a toxic spiral of isolation in real life. The narrative of The World Ends With You acknowledges this challenge, and its gameplay cleverly models what this process actually entails.

Whaley demonstrates that, in addition to helping socially withdrawn players feel seen and recognized, the game’s networked features have the potential to encourage players to actively seek out other people in physical space, as wireless connections between Nintendo DS consoles are meaningfully rewarded within the world of the game. With its sensitive cultural study, this chapter is an antidote to sensationalistic accounts of mental health in Japan, as well as a welcome contribution to the ongoing scholarship concerning how online engagement in the communities surrounding networked games can positively affect the mental health of young people (and not-so-young people) who would otherwise feel alienated and alone.

Where the empathy of this book falls short is in the second chapter’s discussion of the 2011 visual novel / puzzle game Catherine. Catherine is a deeply misogynistic and openly transphobic video game, and critical responses to its story and characters have been mixed. While Catherine’s almost comically misogynistic treatment of its cisgender female characters is questionably open to argument and interpretation, the way the game handles a prominent transgender character is unequivocally hateful and extremely distressing. It’s therefore odd to see Catherine presented as a model of empathy.

My recommendation to readers would be to skip this chapter entirely. The author isn’t writing with malice; rather, it can often take many years to research, assemble, and publish an academic book, and scholarship that felt fresh a decade ago sometimes ages poorly. I will admit that I’ve occasionally found myself in a similar situation when I look back at my own work. This is simply the danger of writing about contemporary political issues, but it’s no reason not to create scholarship that’s relevant to the current moment.

Without sacrificing the quality of its research, Toward a Gameic World is accessible to general-audience video game fans interested in sustained critical analysis. (I didn’t mention the book’s third chapter in this review, but Metal Gear Solid fans are in for a special treat.) The book is also accessible to scholars who know little about video games but want to incorporate them into their classes. I think the first chapter on depictions of environmental disasters, “Limited Engagement,” would make an especially excellent reading for undergraduates. Whaley also offers many strong examples of how to integrate online conversations into academic literature reviews and textual analysis.

Toward a Gameic World takes the serious cultural topics addressed in a key selection of video games and, with sensitivity and grace, transforms their analysis into a surprisingly entertaining and enjoyable discussion. One might even say that it’s quite an engaging read.

She and Her Cat

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She and Her Cat collects four interlinked short stories about women and their cats. Though these stories are bittersweet, their gentleness is a source of comfort and encouragement.

The stories in She and Her Cat were written by Naruki Nakagawa, who’s mainly known as a screenwriter for science fiction anime from the mid 2000s, and the concept is based on the 1999 short indie film (which you can watch on YouTube here) created by the international superstar anime director Makoto Shinkai. I think it’s fair to say that the original short film is a representative example of the iyashikei “comfort” genre of anime, which Patrick Lum describes as “designed to be as comfy and mellow as can be.” This book, which Nakagawa wrote in his late forties, similarly uses young female characters to create a sense of living in a world where a brighter future is always possible.

The first story is a direct adaptation of Shinkai’s original short animation. A young office worker named Miyu brings home a kitten who’s been left outside in the rain in a disintegrating cardboard box. Miyu is growing apart from both her boyfriend and her best friend, and she feels as though she’s no longer able to understand the nuances of other people’s feelings. Thankfully, her new cat Shiro loves her unconditionally, and he’ll always be there for her.

The second story is about an art student who can’t find the motivation to apply to a university-level Fine Arts program, and the third is about an aspiring manga artist who was unable to make her debut and became a hikikomori after the death of her writer, who also happened to be her childhood friend. Both women find the courage to pull themselves out of their depression and take the first few steps forward – with the help of their cats, of course.

In the last story, a childless middle-aged woman finds herself alone after caring for her husband’s parents only to be left by her husband himself. As she gets older, so too does the boss of the neighborhood stray cats, and she ends up adopting him. Around the same time, her nephew has a quiet breakdown at his first job out of college, and the woman ends up sheltering him too. In return, he eagerly learns the non-corporate life skills she shares, and he naturally begins to help her manage the household. While it’s always rewarding to nurture a mutually loving and beneficial relationship with a cat, this story reminds the reader that kindness can exist between humans as well.

The narrative viewpoint of these stories alternates between the cats and their human companions. When the cats aren’t expressing their undying love for the human ladies in their lives, they’re off on their own adventures in the neighborhood, doing as cats do. Even more than the human characters, the cats have strong personalities and know what they’re about.

Comforting Japanese books about cats are currently enjoying a small cultural moment, and She and Her Cat is among the best of them. As you might expect from a book written by a professional screenwriter, each “scene” is fairly short, which makes for a quick and engaging read. Nagakawa maintains the distinctive narrative voice associated with Makoto Shinkai’s films, and Ginny Tapley Takemori conveys this straightforward gentleness perfectly in translation. In the English edition, each story is prefaced by a gorgeous full-page illustration by Rohan Eason, which only adds to the book’s charm. Exactly like the creatures it celebrates, She and Her Cat is light, nimble, and filled with character. 

Memento Bento

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Memento Bento is a 65-page chapbook created by the Italian artist Alessandra Criseo. The chapbook, which is structured like an annotated sketchbook, chronicles Criseo’s trip to Japan with her partner Andreas in April and May of 2014. Over the course of two and a half weeks, the pair visited Tokyo, Kyoto, Nara, and Yokohama.

At the time, Criseo was working in London as a freelance character designer and concept illustrator for video game development studios. Criseo’s primary interest in Japan lay in its culture of cuteness, and the pages of Memento Bento are filled with sketches of clothing, characters, and street fashion. This fascination with cuteness is supplemented by photos of cute food, such as strawberry-themed pastries and the popular Tokyo Banana souvenir cakes.

Despite her stay in the popular tourist destinations of Kyoto and Nara, Criseo cares less about traditional Japanese architecture and handicrafts than she does about common urban cityscapes and mundane everyday objects. “I love taking the train. [It’s] one of the pleasures of life, especially in a country with such pretty houses as this one,” she writes next to an ink drawing of herself sketching on a commuter train.

Along with the urban tangle of telephone poles and power lines, Criseo is also fascinated by vending machines, instant ramen packaging, toilets, umbrellas, disposable cameras, and the uniquely non-aerodynamic shapes of domestic Japanese automobiles. Having submerged herself in the visual clutter of Japan, Criseo writes that she’s not looking forward to returning to the “boring and gray” monotony of London.

The heterodox and chaotic aesthetic often decried by older observers of Japan is a source of fascination and delight for Criseo. As an artist and professional designer, Criseo has translated her study of Japanese commercial design to her own clothing and stationery, which she distributes through her independent label, Mezzolume.

When I wrote about Ryōko Nagara’s recent manga about the local material culture of Sapporo (here), I was reminded of how many visual representations of Japan created by Europeans (such as Onibi: Diary of a Yokai Ghost Hunter) often emphasize “Shōwa retro” objects and spaces. In a time when the speed and productivity demanded by neoliberal capitalism leave many people anxious and exhausted, there’s a certain appeal to old and “useless” things, which artists like Criseo present as visually charming and emotionally compelling.

If you’re interested, you can order an English-language edition of Memento Bento (here), and you can follow Alessandra Criseo on Instagram (here).

北国ゆらゆら紀行

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Ryōko Nagara’s Kitaguni yura-yura kikō (北国ゆらゆら紀行) is an episodic travelogue manga that follows a young woman named Tsukiko who left her job to return to her hometown of Sapporo.

Tsukiko is too burnt out to resume full employment, and her savings are running low. Her friend Chitose invites her to move into a Shōwa-era sharehouse co-rented with her flatmate Kensuke and Kensuke’s girlfriend Miwa. Their landlord, a world traveler who no longer lives in Japan, says that Tsukiko can stay if she can manage to clean up all the junk in the spare room.

As Tsukiko recovers from her recent life changes, she and Chitose explore Sapporo at a leisurely pace. Chitose is a writer who aspires to create a magazine celebrating the city’s regional culture. For the time being, she posts articles on her blog and creates zines. Chitose brings Tsukiko along while she scouts for material at small local stores and restaurants. When they’re not out and about, the two women dig through the cardboard boxes left behind by the landlord and uncover all sorts of treasures, from vinyl records to unique Hokkaido woodcrafts. 

In my review (here) of Tomoko Shibasaki’s short story collection A Hundred Years and a Day, I touch on the phenomenon of “analog nostalgia,” the fascination with tangible media and the objects of an earlier era. Shibasaki’s collection dwells in a gentle sense of decay, but Kitaguni yura-yura kikō is marked by its youthful energy. As they stroll through beautiful streets lined with old houses and enjoy lively conversations over local cuisine in charming restaurants, it’s clear that Tsukiko and Chitose are thoroughly enjoying themselves.

Despite the fun she has with Chitose and her friends, Tsukiko suffers from depression and anxiety. The tiny apartment she occupies at the beginning of the manga is filled with trash, and she loses track of time while doomscrolling late at night. When Tsukiko considers the possibility of finding a new job, she imagines herself as a defenseless egg yolk sweating and apologizing while surrounded by menacing shadows.

When she invites her friend to move into her sharehouse, Chitose gives Tsukiko something tangible to hold. The manga’s emphasis on analog media, from Chitose’s printed zines to the old Walkman and cassette tapes that Tsukiko digs out of the landlord’s cardboard boxes, isn’t just simple nostalgia. Rather, it’s a concrete solution to a distressingly amorphous problem.

As the anonymous author of one of my favorite video game blogs writes (here) regarding the appeal of retro media, “We weren’t meant to live in an endless feed.” The rituals required by analog media once “gave life a shape that wasn’t constant images on a screen to choose from,” and these rituals serve as an anchor in the flow. Kitaguni yura-yura kikō doesn’t glorify the past or fetishize commodified nostalgia. Instead, tangible objects serve as a visual shorthand for places and relationships that don’t vanish when you close an app.

I don’t mean to suggest that Kitaguni yura-yura kikō is an introspective character study. More than anything, it’s a sweet and gentle travelogue, and it’s very charming. This manga makes me want to visit Sapporo and take long walks and eat delicious food. Still, I appreciate the subtext of the story, which is about readjusting to life lived at a slower pace while relearning how to have a meaningful connection with the place you live, the people who share the space with you, and your own embodied existence.  

或るバイトを募集しています

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Aru baito o boshū shite imasu (或るバイトを募集しています) is a collection of eight short horror stories conveyed in the form of documentary-style found footage. Each story is prefaced by a listing for a part-time job that seems a little strange, or perhaps too good to be true.

The most representative of these jobs is a request to make an offering of flowers at a certain empty lot between midnight and 1:00am every night. An aspiring comedian who needs the money and keeps late hours takes the job and carries it out faithfully. He never sees anything strange, but something about the job still feels off.

When he does research about the location, he can’t find anything out of the ordinary. Another entertainment industry professional explains that the job is probably a strategy to lower the land value. The comedian’s employer wants to buy the land and assumes they’ll be able to get it at a steep discount if it becomes known in the neighborhood as a “stigmatized property” (as explained by Business Insider here). 

The comedian does his best not to think about it too hard. When he finally gets a gig and fails to make his nightly offering, he leaves the studio only to find that an unknown number has called several times. When he checks his voicemail, a mysterious woman speaks to him through static, saying, “The flowers from yesterday have withered. Why didn’t you come tonight? Can I still stay here? Can I still stay here? Can I still stay here?”

Slightly outdated media and technology are a recurring theme in the collection, and this isn’t the only story about creepy messages left on an answering machine. Other stories revolve around physical media like VHS tapes, DVDs, and handwritten letters. When it comes to creepy found objects, I get the sense that there’s a certain air of uncleanliness that clings to the physical media of a prior century.  

Along with the spookiness of the stories, I enjoyed the rationalizations for why each strange job might exist. If I had to guess, I’d say that this collection is partially inspired by the recent discourse surrounding yami baito, or “shady part-time jobs” (which the BBC did a podcast about here). In real life, yami baito involves organized crime organizations using aboveground job postings on social media to recruit young people for illegal activities such as cash withdrawal fraud and stripping copper wiring from abandoned houses. Still, it’s not too difficult to imagine an entirely different shadow world seeking to prey on the living with the offer of easy money.

More than social commentary, however, Aru baito dwells in the realm of internet creepypasta. The collection’s author, Kurumu Akumu, has spent the past several years sharing short and spooky stories on various platforms, including YouTube (here), Note (here), and Twitter (here). Aru baito reflects the found footage nature of creepypasta by presenting its stories in a variety of formats, such as interviews, screenshots of text conversations, blog comments, and so on. The unusual formatting is a lot of fun, making the book feel like a file folder of cursed printouts.

Kurumu Akumu’s work reminds me of the mockumentary-style horror of Uketsu’s Strange Pictures, but Aru baito has no connecting narrative, nor does it make any attempt at portraying psychological realism. Instead, the reader feels as if they’re encountering real urban legends in the wild, and the lack of context heightens the eerie feeling of looking at something that shouldn’t be seen. Aru baito is an unsettling collection that blends the horror of cursed analog media with the eerie plausibility of urban legends, leaving readers with the lingering sense that some part-time jobs are better left unfilled.

ツミデミック

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Michi Ichiho’s Tsumidemic (ツミデミック), which won the prestigious Naoki Prize for popular fiction in 2024, collects six stories about the atmospheric strangeness of the Coronavirus pandemic. While everyone’s attention was focused elsewhere, Ichiho wonders, what sort of intriguingly antisocial behavior might have been enabled by isolation?

The opening story, Chigau hane no tori (違う羽の鳥), has all the grim fascination of a viral urban legend. Yūto moved to Tokyo only to drop out of college, and now he works as a barker for a bar in Shinjuku. Unfortunately, business isn’t going well due to the pandemic. During another eerily quiet night, Yūto sees someone he knew back from middle school in Osaka, Nagisa Inoue. This is a shock, as Nagisa is supposed to have committed suicide by jumping onto the train tracks. As she and Yūto get drinks together, Nagisa explains her devious plot to flee from the grasp of her overbearing mother, which was far from a victimless crime. Yūto is no saint himself, and he inadvertently reveals why he immediately recognized someone he never talked to when they were classmates.

Romansu (ロマンス☆) is about a bored housewife named Yuri who develops a serious online gambling addiction of an unusual nature. Yuri hasn’t been able to find a new job since she left her previous position to give birth to her daughter, and the pandemic isn’t helping. She channels her frustration into a food delivery app called Miideri, which she treats like a gacha game. Will the person who makes her next delivery be one of the handsome men rumored to be employed by the service? While gambling on the slim possibility that a prince will arrive at her door bearing a bag from McDonald’s, Yuri attracts the unwanted attention of an unhinged delivery driver who has read exactly the wrong message into her frequent orders.

Rinkō (憐光) is narrated by the ghost of a high school student named Yui who, strangely enough, can’t recall how she died. Having materialized back into the world fifteen years after her death, Yui finds herself confused and alienated by the loneliness of the Tokyo streets and train stations during the pandemic. She therefore returns home to her mother’s house in the country. Her arrival coincides with a memorial visit from her friend Tsubasa, who is accompanied by their old homeroom teacher, Sugita. As Yui eavesdrops on their conversation, she learns that she died after mysteriously falling into a river during a rainstorm. Sugita knows what Yui was doing and where she was going, and Tsubasa wants him to know that she knows, too.

The collection takes a slightly more positive turn in the fourth story, Tokubetsu enkosha (特別縁故者), in which Kyōichi, the unemployed and impecunious father of a young son, attempts to weasel himself into the good graces of an elderly man whom he suspects is a money hoarder. Kyōichi, an affable himbo who has no business scamming anyone out of money, volunteers for the daily task of picking up a takeout lunch from one of the many bentō stores in the neighborhood. The old man knows exactly why Kyōichi approached him, and he resents him for not pursuing his ambition to enter the food service industry. Harsh words are exchanged; but, when push comes to shove, even a relationship built on ulterior motives is better than living alone as an elderly shut-in during a pandemic.

Shukufuku no uta (祝福の歌) is about a happily married middle-aged man facing a new direction in his life. Despite being a high school student, his daughter is pregnant, and she intends to keep the baby. Meanwhile, the man’s mother seems to be entering the permanent brain fog of senile dementia. His daughter, who has been gossiping with the other mothers in her grandmother’s apartment building, gets the sense that there’s something else going on. With any luck, it’s a problem that can actually be solved.

Sazanami Drive (さざなみドライブ) follows the IRL meetup of five people who connected on Twitter after their lives were disrupted by the pandemic. As they drive out to the country in a minivan, they share their stories of abandonment and alienation. Little do they know that one of their number has a secret agenda. He’ll do whatever it takes to disrupt the group’s grim plan for the trip – and hopefully save their lives in the process.

As indicated by the book’s title, the two themes guiding this collection are “crime” and “the pandemic.” Each of the characters is hiding something, and the reader never knows where anyone’s true intentions lie. Michi Ichiho, who began her writing career as an author of BL romance novels, isn’t unduly focused on creating mimetic fiction, and the scenarios are improbable at best. Still, the twist at the end of each story is a lot of fun, and the fantastical plot elements accurately convey the feeling of just how weird and unreal everything felt during the pandemic.

It appears that the English-language publication rights for this collection are currently up for grabs (more info here). Tsumidemic is a fast-paced and emotionally cathartic book, and it would benefit from a tone-sensitive translation that renders Ichiho’s dialogue-filled writing into snappy, Stephen King style prose. I hope someone picks it up.