Category: horror

Room 999

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Nanga Nan’s manga Room 999, whose first four chapters were published as a tankōbon paperback in May 2026, is a spectacular debut. As advertised on the book’s obi promotional band, Room 999 has been praised by artistic luminaries such as Inio Asano and Naoki Urasawa. Though Room 999 exhibits thematic similarities to the work of Asano and Urasawa, particularly in the realm of social critique, this manga is pure dystopian science fiction set in a nightmarish residential complex the size of a large city.

Courier #1871 lives somewhere in the middle of the decaying stacks of this massive structure, where he earns his living by delivering letters to the other residents. Though young and possessed of remarkable levels of energy and optimism, Courier #1871 appears to be a normal human. His appearance is unique, however, as most of the other residents exhibit varying degrees of deviation from a standard body structure.

The primary focal character of the opening chapter is an amalgamation of ten human bodies that form a protean ball of flesh capable of extending itself (himself? themselves?) into tendrils capable of moving with frightening speed. Courier #1871 incurs this entity’s displeasure by failing to deliver a letter to one of the ten people incorporated into the amalgamation, which explodes with sadness and rage. He therefore ventures down into the local sewer and waste treatment pit to recover the missing letter so that the entity can be appeased and the day’s work can be successfully completed.

Despite the threats to his life, Courier #1871 treats the amalgamation with kindness and respect, never failing to address it with keigo honorific language. I feel that, even more than its grotesque imagery, it’s Courier #1871’s unflappable good nature that gives Room 999 a strong sense of character as a manga. While plenty of sci-fi manga showcase intense body horror, Room 999 is relatively unique in its ability to normalize characters with an incredible range of personalities and body shapes, many of whom aren’t remotely humanoid.

The true horror of Room 999 comes not from its characters, but rather from the dystopian nature of its grungy futuristic setting. This isn’t simply a matter of the megastructure’s general state of disrepair (which is oddly charming) or the variety of forms that human bodies have taken (which are also charming); rather, the horror lies in the authoritarian government of this world’s society, whose will appears to be enforced through ideology instead of coercion. Residents of the nameless city / factory / apartment complex are woken every morning with an announcement broadcast over speakers installed in every home that encourage people to “work for the benefit of the nation.” And this is indeed what they do, seemingly without objection.

Each day’s labor is rewarded with a “People’s Ticket,” five thousand of which can be exchanged for permission to live in a high tower whose residents are entitled to luxurious accommodations, state-of-the-art medical care, and as much delicious food as they can eat. Collecting these tickets is a challenge, however, as exchanging them is also the only way to receive food. Unlike the citizens living in the central tower, normal people are limited to meals expelled from machines in the form of canned “standard rations” that are indistinguishable from dog food.

The language used by the government in its ubiquitous broadcast announcements is quite disturbing. The state refers to itself with the word 国家, which – like the German word Reich – has deeply unpleasant connotations. To continue the analogy to twentieth-century fascism, the constantly broadcast refrain of “labor” (労働) and “discipline” (規律) gave me strong Arbeit macht frei vibes that I didn’t care for at all.

Courier #1871 seems to enjoy his job, which is admittedly presented as an entertaining series of adventures, but it might be difficult to say the same of the city’s other residents. This is especially the case for the characters in the manga’s third chapter, who occupy prison cells while they’re granted the “opportunity” to live in one of the high-intensity labor areas where the standard rations are manufactured. Even more disturbing than the working conditions of this horrible factory is the compliance of the workers, many of whom have wholeheartedly bought into the state ideology.

The fourth chapter explores the theme of compliance with state-mandated orders in the context of an even more upsetting scenario: compulsory copulation.

Having read the first three chapters of Room 999, I was surprised that this manga wasn’t immediately licensed for translation and international distribution, but the fourth chapter might explain the hesitation, I think. This episode isn’t about sexual assault, necessarily, but “consent” wouldn’t be the right word to apply to the duty the city’s residents have been instructed to perform on the special days when mandatory labor is replaced with mandatory sex.

Despite the strong suggestion that this all-day sex must be performed in public, most people don’t seem to mind. Courier #1871 (whose age is unclear) is exempt from this duty, as his job is to deliver a steady supply of stamina-boosting drinks to everyone on his postal circuit. Many of the people he visits are dutifully enjoying themselves, but Courier #1871 also encounters two young women who aren’t happy about the demands being made on their bodies. Nothing overtly upsetting happens, but the manga makes it clear that some people do in fact suffer on account of state policies concerning reproduction.

I have a longstanding interest in Japanese feminism, and I’m profoundly troubled by the Japanese government’s frustrating series of responses to the country’s steadily falling birthrate. I have to admit that I actually loved the “compulsory copulation” chapter of Room 999. This story is drawn and written with a remarkable degree of sensitivity, but I could almost feel the heat of the artist’s anger rising from the pages. Like, is this really what the Japanese government expects from its younger generations? To make babies entirely for the benefit of the state? And what would that look like, exactly? Would it look like this?

Despite the power of its themes and message, I don’t want to convey the impression that Room 999 is entirely polemical. Even with its elements of dystopian horror, this manga has a surprisingly warm tone, as well as numerous small moments of humor. Courier #1871 is a charming and sympathetic character, and he’s often accompanied by a sweet dog named Toto with an above-average ability to solve problems. In the closing “Room 999 Broadcast” section that the artist uses to respond to reader comments, they write in comically large font that “Nothing bad will EVER happen to Toto,” who is apparently modeled on their own family dog. So it’s not all bleak, then.

Nanga Nan speculates in the “Afterword” to this first volume that they might belong to the last generation of artists to draw manga by hand, and they explain that Room 999 was partially inspired by their disdain for the drive toward efficiency and standardization in creative spaces. Because of the nature of social media, they add, every statement effectively becomes a part of the public domain, no matter how personal it might be. They therefore wanted to draw a manga about handwritten letters, while at the same time telling a story that is itself like a letter in its messiness and complications.

When read in this context, the visually dystopian aspects of Room 999 assume a different tone. Even though an authoritarian state enforces conformist rules to make everyone the same, each body and personality is stubbornly unique. The state makes grim promises of perfection, but the lived environment is organic, and its Brutalist lines are broken by gentle decay. Courier #1871’s world is perhaps the logical endpoint of our own, and that’s not ideal. Still, Room 999 suggests that state ideology can only reach so far; and, despite everything, human connection will always survive.

Fragments of Horror

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Junji Ito’s 2014 collection Fragments of Horror presents eight short manga stories about ghostly and demonic women and their hapless victims.

In classic Junji Ito style, the plots are fantastic bordering on ridiculous, and the stories are enhanced by marvelously creative and grotesque imagery. You wouldn’t want any of these cautionary tales to happen to you, but it’s great fun to watch them happen to someone else.

Ito writes in his “Afterword” that Fragments of Horror is the first short story collection he’d published since 2006. He also writes that his editor was taken aback by the opening story, “Futon,” in which a young man stays in bed for so long that his blankets become a substrate for mushrooms with hallucinogenic effects. This story is only eight pages long, but it’s filled with vivid imagery, from the fungus-filled blanket being peeled off the man to the pandemonium of hellish creatures he hallucinates. Ito’s editor may have wondered if he’d lost his touch for horror, but “Futon” is a marvelous introduction to the collection.

The story that will probably linger in the minds of most readers (whether they want it to or not) is “Tomio – Red Turtleneck,” which is filled with exquisitely unpleasant body horror. I was amazed by the places this story goes. The opening scenario, which involves a young man named Tomio who only manages to stay alive by holding his decapitated head onto his neck, is bizarre enough; but, at the end of the story, a woman’s corpse rapidly decays on the carpet of Tomio’s girlfriend’s apartment as the ghosts of dead babies smile from the sidelines. Perhaps the most outlandish thing about this story, though, is how goofy it is. I could almost feel the grin on the artist’s face as he drew “Tomio,” which is camp horror at its silliest.

My favorite story, “Gentle Goodbye,” breaks from Ito’s signature campy tone to weave a more subtle and elegiac tale of a haunted household. After Riko marries into “the pedigreed Tokura family,” she notices something strange about their sprawling manor. Namely, there are ghosts about. These shadowy members of the household are mostly ignored, but they’re still treated respectfully. When Riko finally notices that these quiet presences aren’t just distant relatives but actual ghosts, her new husband tells her about a ritual that creates “afterimages” of family members who have died. So that she’s able to understand, he even invites her to participate in one of these rituals herself.

The afterimages created by the family are justified as a means of dealing with grief, but are they really that healthy, psychologically speaking? Or is it perhaps better just to let go?

“Gentle Goodbye” has a number of twists that it would be a shame to spoil, but I think it’s worth commenting on the story’s subtle social commentary. Riko loves her husband; and, though she’s a (relatively) strong and independent modern woman, she considers it an honor to marry into his family. At the same time, living in another family’s house while occupying a subordinate position isn’t an ideal situation, and there’s more than a touch of Daphne du Maurier’s Rebecca in Riko’s story. Who’s to say that Riko isn’t a type of ghost herself?

I’m also a fan of “Whispering Woman,” in which a wealthy widower hires a caretaker for his teenage daughter, Mayumi. Mayumi suffers from anxiety and decision paralysis, and her father has determined that she would benefit from a companion to help guide her through the day. Due to the level of time and attention required, most of Mayumi’s caretakers quit after a few sessions.

The young and beautiful Mitsu is different, however. Mitsu seems to be content to live vicariously through Mayumi, who appears to be recovering under her care and attention. Still, given that Mitsu’s private life is anything but healthy, it’s possible that she may have an ulterior motive in issuing quiet suggestions to her impressionable charge.

“Whispering Woman” is 24 pages long, but this story is a journey that manages to cover a lot of narrative ground and character development. It’s difficult to discuss such a short story without spoiling the ending, so let me just say: good for her. Good for both of them, honestly. I wouldn’t want to encounter any of the demonic women drawn by Junji Ito, but I’m delighted to cheer them on from afar.

I’ve always been somewhat lukewarm on Ito’s graphic novels, but I love his short story collections. Fragments of Horror is probably my favorite, from the ridiculous (and ridiculously entertaining) body horror of “Tomio – Red Turtleneck” all the way to the haunting gothic drama of “Gentle Goodbye.” Every story in Fragments of Horror is a banger, and this is the book I’d most strongly recommend to anyone looking for an introduction to the artist’s work. If you’re a fan of spectacular horror art and devilishly campy humor, then this hole was made for you.

Exit 8

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Exit 8 is a 2025 prose adaptation of a video game of the same name that was released in November 2023 and achieved viral success after being streamed by popular YouTubers like Markiplier and The Game Grumps.

The game version of Exit 8 (on Steam here) is a liminal space walking sim in which you loop through a (very) short passage in the Tokyo subway system endlessly. The only choice you can make is to keep moving forward or to go back the way you came, and you must do this according to a set of rules: (1) If something in the current loop is different, go back; and (2) if nothing is different, keep going forward. The “anomalies” occur randomly, so being observant is key.

If the player gets it right eight times, they can escape to the end credits, which play over Tokyo urban sounds that are like heaven after the underground corridor. If there’s any sort of mistake, though, the loop count resets to zero. (This) no-commentary video playthrough is about ten minutes long, and it’s worth watching for a minute or two if you’re curious.

Genki Kawamura’s novel adaptation maintains the same scenario and rules as the video game but creates a story centered around an original protagonist, an unnamed man in his mid-twenties who works as a freelancer in an unspecified field. Though he moved from his hometown to Tokyo with his girlfriend, the Lost Man has recently ended the relationship after he and his girlfriend grew distant.

As he exits a subway train several weeks after the breakup, the Lost Man’s ex-girlfriend calls to tell him that she’s pregnant. Before he can respond, the call drops. He rushes to get outside and call her back, and this is when he finds himself stuck in the endless loop.

Along with the Lost Man, Kawamura also gives a backstory to a figure referred to as the Salaryman, a featureless middle-aged office worker who travels through the loop in the opposite direction without ever changing his behavior or acknowledging his surroundings. In addition, the novel introduces an original character called the Boy, a shy child who cooperates with the Lost Man to escape the loop.

Exit 8 is one of the many horror-themed loop games to emerge in the wake of P.T., a “playable teaser” designed by Hideo Kojima and set in a single looping hallway. As the player walks through endless versions of this hallway, the game semi-randomly triggers instances of disturbing imagery that hints at a story of a man who murdered his pregnant wife.

In writing the backstory for the Exit 8 game, I get the feeling that Kawamura is likewise borrowing from its predecessor P.T., as well as the Silent Hill horror series that the demo was intended to showcase. While the Silent Hill games excel at exposing the psychology of an unreliable narrator protagonist, however, Kawamura’s adaptation of Exit 8 is remarkably shallow. Kawamura never provides the details of his protagonist’s backstory or attempts to explain his behavior. There is no complexity to this character’s motivations, nor is there any sort of nuance regarding his situation with his ex-girlfriend.

For some readers – including myself, if I’m being honest – this lack of psychological depth may detract from the story. If we don’t know anything about the protagonist or understand the conflict he’s facing, why should we root for him to escape the loop?

In fact, if we imagine the Lost Man giving up his easygoing lifestyle to join the corporate workforce in order to spend his adult life trapped in a relationship with a high-school girlfriend whom he no longer loves and a child he never wanted, is life outside the loop really going to be better for him? This isn’t the sort of question Exit 8 thinks to ask, nor does the novel attempt to interrogate the cultural symbolism of its setting and scenario.

At the same time, I think it’s worth pointing out that the novel version of Exit 8 reflects the stylizations of a genre of internet-based weird fiction called creepypasta (netto kaidan, or “internet ghost story,” in Japanese), which itself mirrors the “this could happen to anyone” anonymity of urban legends. Though creepypasta is presented as fiction instead of a recounting of a real event, one of the conventions of the genre is not to provide too many details about the characters, who are often framed as people posting anonymously to online message boards.

I also appreciate that, by refusing to give the reader any sort of emotional anchor in the Lost Man’s character or backstory, Kawamura emphasizes the sense of being disoriented while allowing the liminality of the setting to shine. Though none of the POV characters are inclined to wax poetic about the Tokyo Metro’s underground corridors, the book is filled with screen stills from Kawamura’s own movie adaptation of the book (here’s the trailer), allowing the reader to see for themselves just how uncanny it is. As in many images of liminal spaces that circulate online, a major element of this uncanniness is, as Freud aptly pointed out, the familiarity of the setting. You’ve never been to this place; but, then again, you totally have. Somewhere in your mind, you’re still there.

At 109 pages, Exit 8 moves quickly and ends before the reader can develop a sense of complacency. This short book is a special treat for fans of internet creepypasta like The Backrooms mythos, as well as fans of contemporary urban horror more broadly. Also, if you enjoyed Strange Houses or another of Uketsu’s books currently in translation, Exit 8 is for you. 

Though I have to admit that the novelization of Exit 8 didn’t leave as strong an impression as my original experience of playing the game itself, I’d love to see more professionally published Japanese creepypasta in translation, and I’m always happy to see authors adapt the ludic aspects of video games into experimental prose. 

Vampire Hunter D

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Vampire Hunter D is the first in a (still-ongoing) series of science fantasy novels written by Hideyuki Kikuchi and illustrated by the legendary Yoshitaka Amano. This first volume was published in 1983; and, in 1985, it was adapted into a film-length, direct-to-video animation that became a cult classic in the 1990s, when circles of genre fiction fans discovered ultraviolent sci-fi anime like Akira and Ghost in the Shell.   

I will admit that I was never able to get into the anime, whose art style doesn’t appeal to me personally, but I recently became interested in the novel series after rereading Gene Wolfe’s The Book of the New Sun. Wolfe’s tetralogy is perhaps the defining work of the “dying earth” genre of speculative fiction, in which human civilization has decayed to a medieval level after a global disaster in the far future.

Vampire Hunter D is set roughly ten thousand years in the future, when what remains of humankind lives in isolated settlements supported by barely-functional robots and occasionally policed by traveling bounty hunters sent from the Capital, which is filled with ruins but nevertheless seems to be the last city of any size. The story takes place on the Frontier, which has a pseudo-American “Weird West” sort of atmosphere that will perhaps be familiar to fans of Stephen King’s Dark Tower series.

Lurking above the ranches and saloons and cowboys are the remnants of a European-style aristocracy, who live in gigantic castles fortified by hypermodern surveillance technology. The Nobility, as they’re called, are immortal. Through various genetic alterations, they’ve come to resemble mythical vampires, and they’re proud to refer to themselves as such. Though the scattered Nobility are capable of artificially manufacturing their own nutrition, they have grown cruel and proud, and some terrorize humans for sport.

Doris Lang, a seventeen-year-old girl who manages her late father’s ranch outside of a small and dusty town on the Frontier, has fallen victim to the attention of the local vampire lord, Count Magnus Lee. Knowing that it’s only a matter of days before she’s either taken by the vampire or exiled by her fellow townspeople, Doris stands on the highway and waylays travelers in hopes of finding a professional hunter who specializes in handling monstrous mutants.

In a brilliant stroke of luck, the first hunter Doris encounters is one of the greatest, a vampire hunter who goes simply by the initial “D.” Though he appears to be a beautiful young man, D is a mixed-species dhampir who possesses the superhuman powers of vampires without most of their weaknesses. For his own mysterious reasons, D consents to be “hired” by Doris for no other payment than room and board.

The ancient Count Magnus, who is backed by his beautiful but deadly daughter Larmica, will not be easy to defeat. To make matters even more complicated, vampires are the least of the dangers threatening the humans who live on the Frontier, and D will also have to contend with werewolves, witches, outlaws, and lynch mobs if he hopes to keep Doris safe. There are eight chapters in Vampire Hunter D, and each presents its own unique set of villains. All of these threats eventually converge into a perfect storm of danger; but, in the end, it all comes down to a battle between D and the vampire lord.    

There’s a great deal of action in Vampire Hunter D, all of which is translated in a quick and punchy style by Kevin Leahy. There’s a somewhat shonen manga style to the action scenes, in which each of the characters performs a series of special attacks that have a rock-paper-scissors way of canceling one another out. I’m not generally a fan of action scenes in prose fiction, but Kikuchi’s sense of pacing is excellent, as is the creativity devoted to D’s opponents.

I’m also impressed by how lowkey horny this book is. Stories about vampires are infamously erotic, but Vampire Hunter D has a more universal Frank Frazetta style of sexualization. Gender, age, and even species don’t matter; everyone gets the same “Vaseline on the camera lens” treatment. As with the monster-of-the-week action scenes, I found this 1980s pulp fiction style of writing to be extremely charming.

It’s perhaps because of the nostalgic charm that I didn’t mind the story’s relative lack of psychological depth or complexity. Though she’s capable of defending herself against lesser monsters, Doris is a classic damsel in distress, and D remains mysterious from start to finish. D’s opponents seem to be evil simply because they’re evil, and even Count Magnus doesn’t have a personality that goes deeper than the usual vampire tropes. His daughter Larmica is granted a modicum of character development, but this is sadly limited. Still, the gothic expressions of the “dying world” setting are fantastic, and I appreciate that the world itself has far more character than the actors who drive the plot. 

I’m given to understand that, as a series, Vampire Hunter D leaves behind its formulaic action-oriented structure after the first few volumes. I read the first volume around the time it was originally published in English translation in 2005 and didn’t think much of it, but I find it far more compelling now that I’m older and have a better understanding of the story’s genre tropes, as well as how Hideyuki Kikuchi fits into a timeline of Japanese dark fantasy that’s recently come to wider international attention with the 2022 video game Elden Ring.

Dark Horse Books has published the first thirty books in translation, which are currently being collected into ten omnibus volumes. The first novel stands alone, and it’s a relatively quick read. I’d definitely recommend Vampire Hunter D to dark fantasy genre fans, as well as to anyone curious about the roots of JRPG video game tropes and imagery.

Strange Buildings

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Strange Buildings, the 2023 follow-up to Uketsu’s smash hit Strange Houses, collects eleven illustrated stories about horror-themed architectural riddles followed by a lengthy exposition that reveals how these mysterious places are connected.

One of my favorite stories is “The Mousetrap House,” in which the wealthy heir to a large construction firm builds a luxurious mansion in order to kill a disabled elderly woman. If he puts a steep stairway next to the bathroom, he reasons, the woman will eventually lose her footing and tumble down the stairs.

When this eventuality fails to come to pass, he bullies his daughter into creating exactly the right set of conditions to make it happen. This horrible story is recounted decades later by the girl’s childhood friend, who was there on the night the old woman finally fell to her death.

I also enjoyed “The Watermill in the Woods,” which is presented as an old travelogue that recounts a curious building in the woods that’s nowhere near water. Its mechanical wheel instead powers the movement of an interior wall, but why would anyone need that?

This question is answered in the story “The House Where It Happened,” in which the frame narrator (who is styled as Uketsu himself) visits the old watermill in its current form as a remodeled modern house. When the village residents illuminate the shadows of the area’s history, the sinister purpose of the watermill becomes clear.

As in Uketsu’s other books, the overarching conspiracy is extremely silly. I don’t consider this a flaw, as there’s a certain sense of satisfaction in how delightfully outlandish the scenario is.

It should probably be said, however, that Uketsu is playing with acute cases of human misery as if they were Lego blocks. If one were to stage a gendered critique of this book, for instance, the ground is fertile. Still, I think it’s probably fair not to expect nuanced character portrayals from the weird architecture guy.

I enjoyed Strange Buildings, and I flew through this book as quickly as I could turn the pages. Jim Rion’s translation is compulsively readable, and I appreciate how Rion’s minor reconfigurations smooth over the “info dump” awkwardness of the original Japanese.

If you’ve never read Uketsu, Strange Buildings is a great introduction to the writer. If you’re already a fan, this is four hundred pages of the same, and it’s fantastic. Uketsu has found his niche, and it gives me joy to know that he’s out in the world being strange and living his best life.

Bone Ash

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Tow Ubukata’s 2022 horror novel Bone Ash is a story about cursed architecture. The twist is that the architecture in question is the skyscraper outside Shibuya Station that was under construction during the mid-2010s. Deep under the construction site is a hole, and inside that hole is… Just some random guy? What’s he doing there? And what happens if he leaves?

Bone Ash’s everyman protagonist is a white-collar office worker named Mitsuhiro Matsunaga. Mitsuhiro is employed by the PR department of the development firm overseeing the aforementioned construction project contiguous to Shibuya Station, and his job is to ensure that all news is good news so that none of the project shareholders get cold feet. When a pseudonymous Twitter account starts posting creepy photos of the site with sinister captions about contractor injuries, the task of managing the situation falls to Mitsuhiro.

The first order of business is to track down the location of each photo to ensure that there aren’t any code violations. So far, so good. During his investigation, however, Mitsuhiro finds an odd door that isn’t in the floorplans, and behind the door is an impossibly deep staircase that eventually empties into a cavernous concrete space with a bare minimum of lighting. There’s a small Shintō shrine off to one corner, as well as a discarded piece of heavy machinery painted entirely white. And also a pit with a man chained to the bottom.

The man seems somewhat confused, but he insists that he’s happy to stay where he is. Somewhat against the man’s wishes, Mitsuhiro hauls down a ladder, hoists him out of the pit, and hauls him up the infinite staircase. Before he has a chance to recover from this exertion, a fire breaks out on site, and the man disappears.

When he files a report the next day, Mitsuhiro is informed that he entered a “ritual hall,” a space constructed to preserve a shrine (or other place of religious significance) on the land occupied by a large building. The man in the pit was a “mi-keshi,” something like a sin eater who would symbolically absorb the spiritual pollution caused by the displacement of deities. As long as a purification ritual is conducted properly by the appropriate religious authorities overseeing the ritual hall, everything should be fine. Unfortunately, Mitsuhiro has disrupted the ritual, and now there’s going to be hell to pay. 

The scenario introduced by Bone Ash is incredible. The overview I’ve provided in four paragraphs is expanded in amazing detail over the span of about 170 pages, and these details are fascinating. Ubukata walks the reader through the deliciously liminal space of the ongoing construction site like a pro, all the while explaining the bureaucracy surrounding large-scale building construction in Tokyo in a way that genuinely caught and held my attention.

By the time the focus of the exposition shifts to the religious history surrounding the ritual hall in the earth under the building, I was hooked. The existence of creepy underground shrines sealing ancient calamities is a fun urban legend, and Ubukata’s skill as a writer is to ground this sort of fantasy in enough historical precedence to make it seem entirely plausible. I know this concept is silly, but as I read Bone Ash I was like Agent Mulder in The X-Files – I want to believe.

Bone Ash unfortunately falls apart once its focus shifts to Mitsuhiro’s attempts to deal with the curse he’s incurred, which influences his behavior in disturbing ways. Though he’s a convenient viewpoint character during the opening exposition, Mitsuhiro doesn’t have much of a personality, thus making his situation somewhat difficult to sympathize with.

I suppose the reader is supposed to identify with Mitsuhiro’s “everyman” qualities, but many of the author’s assumptions in this regard were lost on me. I don’t think it’s normal to feel compelled to work 15 hours a day, for example, nor have I ever been tempted to kill people for the chance to drive the company car.

Because I never really got a sense of who Mitsuhiro is supposed to be as a person, his cycle of making bad decisions for inexplicable reasons felt somewhat boring and repetitive. I get the sense that one solid conversation about what was going on could have gotten Mitsuhiro sorted out, but none of the other characters in the novel behave much more rationally than he does. In addition, though Mitsuhiro’s pregnant wife and young daughter become unwitting victims of his curse, they’re never allowed interiority and only exist to create complications.

I think what Bone Ash really wants to be about is the plight of unhoused people in Tokyo. Large-scale construction on top of open-air parks and other public gathering places often displaces communities of the unhoused, who are additionally exploited as day laborers with no recourse to legal reparations should something happen to them. Whether or not literal curses exist, Ubukata asks the reader to seriously consider the cumulative effect of this human misery, which is not only ignored but actively encouraged by Japanese politicians. Though this theme of housing precarity and labor exploitation is never fully developed, its introduction in the first half of the novel is handled with a remarkable degree of sensitivity.

In the end, it might seem odd to recommend Bone Ash only for the first 170 pages, but they’re really good pages! Despite my criticism of its narrative structure, I’d recommend this novel to anyone interested in the strange complications of urban architecture and the darker corners of Japanese religion and folklore – as well as to anyone interested in exploring uncanny spaces.  

I’d like to extend my appreciation to Bone Ash’s translator, Kevin Gifford, whose smooth and confident style grabbed my attention from the first few pages of the novel. In addition, Wendy Chan at Yen Press has done a fantastic job with the book design, which is very cool and clever. I hope the care and attention given to this release helps Bone Ash find an enthusiastic audience of readers interested in the sort of well-researched urban legends and creepypasta stories that are perennially popular on YouTube and Reddit.

About a Place in the Kinki Region

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About a Place in the Kinki Region, originally published in 2023, is a horror novel assembled from roughly two dozen short stories presented in various formats, from magazine articles to interviews to YouTube video transcripts to reproductions of forum posts. These materials have been collected by the pseudonymous author, Sesuji, with minimal editorial comment, supposedly in an effort to locate someone who has mysteriously disappeared.

I should probably note here at the beginning that the actual author, an online horror writer who has published under the name Sesuji, is male. The diegetic character Sesuji is female, and it’s the character I’ll be referring to in this review.

Sesuji, a freelance writer living in Tokyo, has been contacted by her friend Ozawa, a junior editor at a publisher that produces a magazine devoted to the paranormal. Though the magazine has stopped putting out regular issues, it occasionally releases special issues, and Ozawa has been tasked with publishing one of these special issues on a very low budget. After combing through the magazine’s archives, he decides to create a collection of older articles that all pertain to a certain place in the Kinki region, the geographic area surrounding Osaka and extending south into the heavily forested Kii Peninsula.

This “certain place” is the location of numerous spooky legends and strange sightings, most of which can be categorized according to several distinct themes. There’s a ghost called Mashiro-san that calls out to children from the mountain forest, as well as a creepy playground game of the same name. There are abandoned buildings tagged with unsettling sticker graffiti, an alarming number of suicides, and perhaps even a creepy New Age cult as well.

Various sources suggest that the more supernatural incidents might be the work of a god whose shrine has fallen into disrepair due to rural depopulation, but it gradually becomes apparent that something much weirder is going on. In order to get to the bottom of the mystery, Ozawa visited the place himself to investigate, but now he’s gone missing. Sesuji therefore asks the reader: Is it possible that you could examine the material he collected and help her find him?

About a Place in the Kinki Region begins as a relatively straightforward collection of articles but eventually starts to experiment with its format in interesting ways. A standout piece is a short story called “Waiting.” This story is first presented as it was published in a magazine and then followed by its original rough draft, which contains a number of odd details that aren’t strictly relevant to the plot but may present clues regrading Ozawa’s disappearance. 

Partially due to the author’s experiments with format, and partially due to the sheer variation of situations and narrators, nothing about this book feels repetitive. The careful sense of pacing creates a subtle sense of structure and generates narrative tension, gradually revealing the stakes of the story while pulling the reader into the mystery at hand.  

I’m a big fan of “archival horror” narrative podcasts like Archive 81 and The Magnus Archives. I love how these stories simulate the experience of research while conveying the joy of discovering an intriguing rabbit hole. About a Place in the Kinki Region is a fantastic expression of this genre, inspiring the reader to dig ever deeper for a long-buried truth hidden within layers of secrets.

In addition, I enjoyed being an armchair tourist in this “certain place,” which is gifted with natural beauty and an intriguing local culture. If any vengeful revenants or neglected god-demons are searching for someone to spirit away to a mountain forest on the Kii Peninsula, I volunteer myself. I hear the evening twilight is especially magical… and even the ghosts have good internet access, apparently.

The translator, Michael Blaskowsky, has done an excellent job creating a distinct set of narrative voices across a range of tones and styles, from campy to lyrical to journalistic to point-blank horror. The book’s designer and editor at Yen Press, Andy Swist and Emma McClain, have done a marvelous job as well, engineering an unobtrusive flow of stories while occasionally adding small creative touches. I apologize for spoiling the surprise, but the book includes a secret set of illustrations in a semi-hidden section in the back, and it’s extremely cursed.

It’s also worth mentioning that About a Place in the Kinki Region was adapted into a movie released in August 2025 (here’s a mirror of the region-locked trailer on Reddit), but I haven’t yet seen any information about a global release outside of the film festival circuit, unfortunately.

In the years following the pandemic, I’ve encountered a number of “textual found footage” horror novels by Japanese authors capitalizing on the recent boom in YouTube creepypasta videos. Many of these books are very silly, but About a Place in the Kinki Region is surprisingly well-structured and entertaining. I’m happy this book been published in translation, and I hope my fellow archive horror fans enjoy its collection of unsettling little treasures as much as I do.

Strange Map

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Strange Map (変な地図), published in October 2025, is the fourth book written by Uketsu, the bestselling author of Strange Pictures and Strange Houses. Unlike Uketsu’s previous books, which are collections of seemingly unrelated stories eventually connected by an overarching narrative, Strange Map is a proper novel that follows the actions of a single protagonist, Uketsu’s architect friend Kurihara from Strange Houses. Despite its more conventional narrative format, Strange Map is still filled with Uketsu’s characteristic illustrations and diagrams, which aid the reader in visualizing the uncanny spaces of its horror-themed mystery through a remarkable set of twists and turns.

Strange Map opens with the written confession of an elderly woman named Kimiko Okigami. In her youth, she writes, she took the lives of countless people. Before she dies, she wants to tell the story of the village where she was born and its neighboring mountain, which was supposedly inhabited by demons.

The next section raises the stakes even higher. In the present day of July 2015, Kōsuke Ōsato wakes up after a night of drinking to find himself lying in a train tunnel. He recognizes the tunnel immediately, as he’s the president of the railway company that constructed it. The tunnel has emergency exits, of course, but there’s just one problem – he’s right in the middle between two of them, and the first train of the morning should be coming any second now.

After thoroughly grabbing the reader’s attention, Strange Map shifts to the perspective of its main narrator, a 22yo college student in Tokyo named Fuminobu, who usually goes by his family name of Kurihara. Kurihara is an architecture major who’s currently on the job market, but he hasn’t had any luck so far. This is likely because, as he readily admits, he’s terrible at interviews. When asked why he’s interested in architecture, for instance, he can’t quite bring himself to admit that he wants to follow in the footsteps of his mother, who once played games with him involving engineering problems but died when he was still a child. 

After yet another unsuccessful round of interviews, Kurihara’s sister asks him to come home and visit his father, who needs to talk with him. This conversation ends up being about the house left behind by Kurihara’s grandmother – the woman who wrote the letter that opens the novel. Before his father sells the house, Kurihara asks to see it for himself, and he discovers a notebook containing a set of burned photos alongside the “strange map” of the title, which depicts a seaside village below a mountain filled with monsters. 

Like his late mother, Kurihara can’t sleep easy until he’s solved the problem in front of him. His father gives him permission to investigate, but only on the condition that he solves the family mystery in time to return home and do practice interviews with his sister before his next real interview, which is only a week away.

Interspersed between chapters, his grandmother’s letter continues. She writes of her hometown of Kasōko, an isolated village surrounded by the sea on one side and forest on all others. While the men caught and sold fish, the women handled the business of maintaining the village itself. Among other things, this maintenance involved carving stone statues to ward off the demons of Mojōyama, the mountain looming over the village.

Kurihara, who doesn’t know any of this history, nevertheless manages to ascertain the location of the village. He travels to the rural seaside only to find that the village was completely abandoned decades ago. To complicate matters, he finds himself smack in the middle of a scandal surrounding the succession of Kōsuke Ōsato, the president of the local railway company who was mysteriously run down by one of his own trains.

Was the death of the railway president truly an accident, or was it murder? What happened to Kasōko village? Who exactly did Kurihara’s grandmother kill – and what are the demons on the mountain?

To help the reader visualize the specifics of the story, Uketsu has provided all manner of simple diagrams illustrating how the space of the narrative is laid out. These visual inserts were necessary in Strange Pictures and Strange Houses; meanwhile, in Strange Map, they’re largely superfluous. The reader probably doesn’t need a visualization of the concept that “there are five equidistant emergency exits in the train tunnel,” for example. Uketsu has also provided slightly silly diagrams of various social relationships, such as an illustration of the railway company president wearing a suit and sitting at a desk while his second-in-command wears a construction helmet and manages a job site.

Still, I’m not complaining. Regardless of whether they’re necessary, I love all of these illustrations. I find their lo-fi clunkiness charming, and the space they create on the page helps to set the pace of the story. It would be all too easy to fly through this book, but the illustrations helped me slow down and focus on details. In addition, I found that the “unnecessary” illustrations help to reveal the inner workings of the narrator’s mind.

To me, Kurihara reads as being on the autism spectrum, an aspect of the character that contributes to the distinctive narrative style of the story. The closest comparison I can make is to Sayaka Murata’s Convenience Store Woman, but there are echoes of Mark Haddon’s The Curious Incident of the Dog in the Night-Time as well. Although he doesn’t identify as autistic, Kurihara understands that he needs to work on his people skills, and the secondary B-plot of the novel involves his carefully considered approach to teaching himself to behave “normally” instead of immediately saying something that’s true but will hurt other people’s feelings.

I’m used to Uketsu’s characters behaving like chess pieces on a game board, so this added depth of character came as a pleasant surprise. Also, while I usually read mystery novels for the pleasure of watching fictional characters die in ridiculous ways, I found myself feeling invested in Kurihara’s safety, as well as his emotional wellbeing. This attachment to the character adds yet another layer of tension to the story as Kurihara becomes personally involved with the family that runs a local inn.

Strange Map is a super fun and fantastically clever mystery novel, and its elements of gothic horror are as darkly brilliant as anything written by Edgar Allan Poe or Arthur Conan Doyle. Jim Rion has done a marvelous job with the translations of Strange Pictures and Strange Houses, and I’m looking forward to what he does with Strange Map. For the time being, the sequel to Strange Houses, which is titled Strange Buildings in English, is scheduled to be published in March 2026, so that’s something to look forward to as well.

It’s a great time to be a fan of Japanese mystery novels, and I’m interested to see how Uketsu’s work in translation might influence other authors. Do I want to see Uketsu copycats? Sure! Absolutely. But do I also want to see a generation of writers raised on YouTube creepypasta take inspiration from Uketsu and translate that sort of multimedia textual fragmentation into a new style of fiction? Hell yes. Let’s go.

At the Edge of the Woods

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In the woods, there is a castle. The castle was once the residence of the landowning family that ruled the area. During the war, it was the headquarters of a resistance movement. Now it sits empty and abandoned. The castle is so deep in the woods that most people couldn’t find it if they tried. No one tries, however, as the woods are filled with child-snatching imps. Strange noises come from the woods, and occasionally strange people as well.

Masatsugu Ono’s At the Edge of the Woods is a novel about dread and anxiety. There’s no plot, nor is there any sort of story. Instead, Ono presents four episodes in the life of a father left alone with his young son while his wife is away. There’s no chronological order to the four chapters, which all occur at roughly the same time, and there’s no meaningful change in the personalities of the characters. Rather, the story development involves the slow intensification of an atmosphere of foreboding.

The nameless father who serves as the narrator is Japanese, as is his wife, who is pregnant with their second child. The wife has flown back to Japan to visit her parents, leaving her husband and son in an unspecified European country that reads as Germany-coded. The family has taken up residence at the eponymous edge of a vast forest in a rural area dotted with small towns.

The country is now at peace, but its neighbors are not so lucky. Long lines of refugees stream across the borders, seemingly unhindered by local authorities. It’s entirely possible that some of these refugees have camped out in the woods next to the narrator’s house, but it’s difficult to say for sure. It’s equally difficult to specify the origin of the odd sounds constantly emerging in the forest.

Characters drift in and out of the narrative, leaving behind very little of themselves save for strong emotional impressions. The disabled daughter of a bakery owner has good intentions but struggles to make herself understood. The postal worker who delivers the mail relates grotesque stories to the father, who suspects the man might be reading and discarding his wife’s letters. A neighboring farmer has always been kind to the narrator’s family, but his son reports that he once saw the man tie a dog in a burlap sack and beat the poor creature to death.

Perhaps the most striking of these characters is an elderly woman that the narrator’s son invites into the house. She appears seemingly from nowhere, and she vanishes just as mysteriously. While she’s in the house, though, she becomes a living symbol of the narrator’s anxieties regarding his ill-fitting role as the solitary caretaker of a young child in a foreign land:

Overcome, the old woman buried her face in her hands. She trembled violently, and a sob escaped her. I looked up. The kitchen windows were all closed. And yet in the air there hovered the sour smell of decayed leaves from deep in the woods, leaves that would never dry out. Steam rose from the old woman. The steam was not from her tea. A puddle spread at her feet. (20)

In his “Introduction” to The Oxford Book of Gothic Tales, Chris Baldick neatly summarizes the genre as an expression of the fear that the horrors of prior eras will not remain comfortably in the past. At the Edge of the Woods presents the readers with a range of Gothic tropes to heighten the sense of uneasy suspicion that, even in the most progressive of European countries, there is no escape from misery and cruelty. While the back-cover copy of At the Edge of the Woods calls the novel “an allegory for climate catastrophe,” this feels like a bit of an interpretive reach. Instead, Ono seems to be suggesting more broadly that, even in our bright society sustained by futuristic technologies, we’re never that far away from the edge of a large and unknowable forest.

At the Edge of the Woods can be difficult to read, and it’s probably not for everyone. Speaking personally, though, I love this book, and I’ve read it on the winter solstice every year since it was published in 2022. Ono’s writing is gorgeously atmospheric, and the legendary Juliet Winters Carpenter has done a dazzling job with the translation. If you appreciate the sort of quiet, eerie, and darkly suggestive Japanese Gothic writing typified by Yoko Ogawa’s short story collections Revenge and The Diving Pool, I’d recommend At the Edge of the Woods as the next step on a shadowed path into the liminal spaces in the penumbra of modern civilization.

The Shadow Over Innsmouth Manga

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The Shadow Over Innsmouth is a gothic horror story in four acts. A college student on a self-guided architectural tour of New England takes an inexpensive bus that stops over in the isolated port town of Innsmouth. The student explores the town, and an elderly resident tells him about a wealthy sea captain who made an unholy bargain with ocean-dwelling fishpeople generations ago. The student is forced to stay in the town overnight, and the town’s hidden half-human residents chase him from his hotel. After successfully escaping Innsmouth, the student begins to question his own family lineage.

The writing in Lovecraft’s original 1931 novella can be difficult to parse, and the xenophobia of the narrative isn’t attractive to contemporary eyes. Regardless, this is an extremely influential story in the field of speculative fiction, with adaptations ranging from Alan Moore’s strikingly upsetting graphic novella Neonomicon to the ruined Fishing Hamlet of Bloodborne, not to mention countless stage plays, radio dramas, television episodes, indie films, video games, tabletop games, and even delightfully bizarre Christmas songs. Many of these adaptations, though excellent, assume a familiarity with the original that may not exist in an audience that isn’t already embedded in the speculative fiction fandoms of the twentieth century.

If you’re curious about Lovecraft’s work but put off by his prose, Dark Horse’s release of Gou Tanabe’s manga adaptation is an artistic marvel presented with an excellent translation in a handsomely published single volume.

Tanabe’s adaptation of The Shadow Over Innsmouth brings the story to life with the distinctive visual language of horror manga while maintaining as much accuracy to the original as possible. Just like the story’s protagonist, Tanabe is fascinated by the architecture of the rotting Massachusetts town. The immaculately detailed cityscapes that sprawl across the pages encourage immersion into the horror of social and moral decay. Moreover, whereas Lovecraft only hints at what lies underwater, Tanabe is gleefully explicit in his depictions of throngs of fishpeople so horrific they’d make even Guillermo del Toro uncomfortable.

Tanabe’s The Shadow Over Innsmouth succeeds not only as a faithful retelling but also as a standalone work of gothic horror. By pairing Lovecraft’s oppressive atmosphere with his own meticulous draftsmanship, Tanabe bridges the gap between early twentieth-century weird fiction and contemporary horror manga. The manga adaptation of The Shadow Over Innsmouth preserves the unsettling allure of the original while offering both longtime fans and newcomers an invitation to experience Innsmouth’s decayed splendor in disturbingly compelling detail.