Category: speculative fiction

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.

Yokohama Station SF

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Two hundred years after the end of a devastating global conflict, Yokohama Station has expanded to cover almost all of Honshu, Japan’s central island. Once governed by artificial intelligence, the station now grows uncontrollably through ceaseless self-perpetuation. Most of what remains of Japan’s population lives inside the structure, where order is maintained by patrolling robots and automated systems that manufacture necessities. 

Hiroto was born and raised in one of the small coastal communities of people who live outside the station. Since this village is able to subsist on the excess food and goods discarded from the station, Hiroto’s vague dreams of making something of his life have no target, especially since people who don’t a possess Suikanet registration are quickly ejected from the Yokohama Station structure by robotic constructs known as Automated Turnstiles.

This changes when an exile from inside the station washes up at Hiroto’s settlement. Before passing away, the man gives Hiroto an 18 Ticket, a digital pass that will allow him to remain inside the station for five days. He asks Hiroto to find and rescue the leader of the Dodger Alliance, a group of hackers that aims to shut down what remains of the artificial intelligence that governs Yokohama Station.

Another exile, an elderly man suffering from dementia known only as “the professor,” adds to the mystery by telling Hiroto to search for Exit 42, where all questions about the station’s history will be answered. Hiroto, who’s happy to have an excuse for adventure, wastes no time in leaving, assuming that he’ll simply see what he can see in the five days before his 18 Ticket expires.

With no access to digital currency or knowledge of the rules and customs that govern life inside the station, Hiroto quickly finds himself in trouble. Thankfully, luck is on his side, and he’s aided in his journey by Shamai, an android sent to gather intelligence from Hokkaido, which is still free from the station’s growth. Hiroto also crosses paths with a beautiful otaku techno-wizard named Keiha, who turns out to be the very resistance leader he was sent to rescue. Keiha is fine, as it turns out, and she remotely assists Hiroto’s journey to Exit 42 while mining Shamai for information about the ultimate goal of the organization that governs Hokkaido. 

Hokkaido isn’t the only independent territory; and, about a third of the way through the novel, the perspective switches to a weapons specialist named Toshiru who is employed by the military government defending the island of Kyushu from the station’s encroachment. Toshiru is a lone wolf who isn’t suited for military bureaucracy, so his commanding officer gives him implicit permission to take a ferry to the island of Shikoku, which is partially occupied by the station.

On Shikoku, Toshiru meets a Hokkaido android named Haikunterke (whose name, like Shamai’s, is taken from the language of the Ainu people who once lived in northern Japan). Together they navigate the lawless territory on the fringes of Yokohama Station, where people who were unable to flee to Kyushu live in constant fear of starvation and roving gangs of brigands.

The horrors that Toshiru witnesses raise a moral dilemma. If the central A.I. core of Yokohama Station is shut down, and if the station loses its ability to maintain itself, what authority will rise to fill the power vacuum? And how will humans produce food on land that’s been so utterly destroyed?

Once Hiroto finds Exit 42, he’ll have to make a decision. In one of the most interesting scenes of the novel, it turns out that what remains of the original station A.I. has thoughts of its own, and the message it shares with Hiroto is kind, wise, and refreshingly unexpected. 

For such an intriguing setting and premise, Yokohama Station SF contains surprisingly little worldbuilding, and its exposition is delivered in short conversations that are frequently interrupted by the hazards the characters encounter as they travel. A full-color illustrated insert at the beginning of the book helps to fill in some of the gaps, as does a short glossary at the end, but most of the information the reader picks up will be through osmosis.

Speaking personally, I appreciate that the steady clip of the plot progression isn’t unduly interrupted by lore, and I feel that the character-focused narration serves the story well. At the same time, though the writing and translation are both excellent, Yokohama Station SF feels a bit like Dark Souls in the way it obfuscates its background story in favor of immediate action. Even as the characters navigate an unmapped maze of corridors, the reader must find their own way through a labyrinth of words.

Yuba Isukari writes that Yokohama Station SF began as something akin to fanfiction based on the manga (specifically Blame!) of Tsutomu Nihei, who sets his stories in the interiors of infinitely sprawling sci-fi megastructures the size of small planets. Though the novel’s chapter-opening character illustrations by Tatsuyuki Tanaka are lovely and filled with charm and personality, they don’t really convey a sense of the setting.

Along with the novel itself, I might therefore also recommend the three-volume manga adaptation drawn by Gonbe Shinkawa, which contains a number of fun architectural illustrations that convey the absurdity (and dead-mall liminality) of the station’s growth. The person who translated the novel, Stephen Paul, also translated the manga, and his notes at the end of each manga volume are extremely insightful.

As someone fascinated by the experience of navigating Japan’s monstrous urban train stations, I had a great time with Yokohama Station SF and its manga adaptation. Though the more technical details of Isukari’s writing may come off as opaque to readers who aren’t veterans of hard science fiction, the human stories at the center of the labyrinth make the journey worthwhile.

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.

Mushishi

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Yuki Urushibara’s ten-volume manga series Mushishi is a gentle but eerie collection of short stories about the uneasy relationship between humans and the natural world. Originally serialized between 1999 and 2008, Mushishi is now available in a series of hardcover Collector’s Editions from Kodansha, which has done a marvelous job with the release.

Mushishi is set in Japan during an unspecified time around the late nineteenth century. Some people wear Western clothing and smoke cigarettes, but traditional ways of life still persist in isolated rural areas, which seem untouched by time.

Ginko is a mushishi (“mushi scholar”) who travels to remote villages to study and document “mushi,” a collective term for a variety of lifeforms that exist partially in our world and partially in the realm of the supernatural. Like germs or bacteria, mushi are tiny and exist unseen by the vast majority of people. Problems arise when mushi form large colonies, especially within human bodies. Even as he studies and admires mushi, Ginko is often compelled to eliminate them in order to restore health to their human hosts.

As is the case with non-supernatural illnesses, people severely impacted by mushi often find themselves unable to return to normal life. In the manga’s second story, “The Tender Horns,” people living in a village deep in the mountains find that they go deaf in one ear when the snow falls. Ginko tells the village chief that this is the result of a mushi called “Un,” which lives in human ear canals and eats sound. This is a temporary inconvenience for most people, but one woman was so deeply impacted that she died. Now her son seems to bear the same affliction, which has manifested as a set of small horns on his forehead.

The tone of Mushishi occupies a liminal space somewhere between nostalgia and horror. Many of the stories have happy endings, but they’re nevertheless pervaded with the uneasiness of living at the edge of an unseen world that has little regard for human life. Mushi, which are something in between plants and animals and spirits, act in keeping with their nature, which is simply to grow and replicate. To most mushi, humans are little more than substrate.

Some species of mushi seem to possess something akin to sapience, however, and their relationship with humans is complicated. One of my favorite stories in the opening volume of Mushishi is “The Traveling Swamp,” in which a marshland appears and disappears seemingly at will. When Ginko studies the pattern of the manifestations on a map, he realizes that the colony of mushi is traveling through underground waterways. The young woman who appears and vanishes with the mysterious swamp has become saturated with the mushi, which have welcomed her as a companion on their journey to the sea.

What Ginko sees of mushi growth and behavior is akin to many written records of Japanese folklore, such as The Legends of Tono and Tales of Times Now Past, in which inexplicable things happen to people seemingly at random. In a time before modern science and infrastructure, the natural world was just as dangerous as it was awe-inspiring. As much as people in rural areas were dependent on nature for their livelihood, they were also at its mercy.

Yuki Urushibara’s artwork delights in wild spaces, from mountain roads to deep forests to ocean vistas to overgrown villages, and her depictions of premodern architecture and clothing are equally impressive. Urushibara is especially skilled with the use of etching and screentone to convey a sense of dim lighting while still using enough contrast to creatively highlight the focal points of each composition. The inkwork is truly impressive, as are the watercolor inserts, and Kodansha’s release of the manga allows Urushibara’s art to shine.

If you’d like to bask in the twilit atmosphere of a deep mountain forest, I might also recommend watching an episode or two of the Mushishi anime (available on Crunchyroll in the U.S.), which is extraordinarily well-produced. The anime is slow and quiet and isn’t for everyone, perhaps, but there’s really nothing else like it.  

The Woman Dies

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The Woman Dies presents 52 pieces of flash fiction by Aoko Matsuda, the author of the short story collection Where the Wild Ladies Are. Each of Matsuda’s small but sparkling stories responds to various aspects of pop culture in clever and surprising ways.

Characteristic of Matsuda’s idiosyncratic approach to the flotsam of contemporary culture is “Hawai’i,” which imagines a heaven for clothes that were thrown away because they did not spark joy. The heaven enjoyed by an unworn sweater sounds like a lovely time of relaxing by the pool while, in the sky, “not far from the rainbow, the pair of skinny jeans owned in similar shades was paragliding together with the dress once worn to a friend’s wedding and never again.”

At the same time, the over-the-top language Matsuda uses to describe this paradise hints at how ridiculous it is to ascribe any sort of teleological meaning to consumerist excess. Still, if this is the world we find ourselves in, why not imagine a heaven where even a discarded sweater is allowed to have a happy ending?

While the topics covered in The Woman Dies are varied, many of the stories playfully confront gender issues in popular media. One of the more intriguing of such stories is “The Android Whose Name Was Boy,” which Matsuda writes “evolved from my thoughts about Neon Genesis Evangelion,” a classic sci-fi anime from 1995 that does indeed inspire thoughts about gender. 

The eponymous android, whose name is in fact “Boy,” begins its life by setting out on an adventure. Over the course of the five-page story, it does its best to disrupt narrative conventions regarding young male characters. Challenging and unending though this task might be, “the android whose name is Boy, developed to heal the wounds of those hurt by boys hurt in the past, is on the move once more.”

While “The Android Whose Name Was Boy” is open to a diversity of interpretations, other stories in the collection are overtly feminist. In “The Purest Woman in the Kingdom,” a prince takes it upon himself to seek out a woman who has never been touched by a man. After a great deal of searching, he finally finds and marries one such woman. On their wedding night, she karate chops him into oblivion. This woman has never been touched by a man; and, thanks to her training and skill in martial arts, she never will be. Absolute queen behavior.

Most of the stories in The Woman Dies are relatively lighthearted, but “The Masculine Touch” (by far my favorite piece in the collection) is out for blood. This story flips the script on gender, casting male writers as delicate greenhouse flowers who need to be supported because sometimes – every so often – their work has cultural and economic value. Matsuda doesn’t pull her punches:

The more radical of the male novelists wrote articles about this turn of events for male magazines, declaring this the beginning of the Male Era. They bolstered their arguments with examples of the other times when the masculine touch had effected changes like this one, thus arguing for men’s continued progress in all areas of society.

“The Masculine Touch” responds to a painfully specific way of talking about female writers and artists in Japan, and I imagine that people in other contexts can relate to frustrations regarding how the publishing industry fetishizes “queer writers,” or “writers of color,” or any number of people whose humanity is compressed into marketing-friendly categories.

Unfortunately, other pieces in the collection lack this specificity. Though we’re all familiar with the trope of fridging female characters, the title story, “The Woman Dies,” is a bit too broad to resonate. Though it’s easy to sympathize with the sentiment underlying “The Woman Dies,” readers may find themselves simply shrugging and moving on. Flash fiction tends to be hit or miss, but this collection offers an array of stories to choose from, and it achieves an admirable balance between heavy hitters and palette cleansers.

The Woman Dies is remarkably cohesive as a collection. There’s a lovely rhythm and flow to the stories, and it’s just as entertaining to read the book in one sitting as it is to dip in and out at your leisure. Matsuda’s writing is sharp and self-aware, and she uses brevity as a weapon to puncture the absurdities of gender, media, and modern life. It’s a pleasure to read her work in Polly Barton’s translation, which is quick and lively and showcases an incredible range of tone and style that’s pure literary pop.

When the Museum Is Closed

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Emi Yagi’s 2023 novel When the Museum Is Closed is a refreshing work of magical realism about a shy young woman who falls in love with a statue of Venus. The twist is that the statue loves her back, and – even more miraculous! – their love story has a happy ending.

Rika is a recent college graduate who works in the freezer department of a warehouse for processed food. She sees this as the perfect job for three reasons. First, she never has to talk to anyone. Second, she can take pre-prepared food home from her job, so she rarely has to cook. And third, an invisible yellow raincoat suddenly appeared over her clothing in elementary school, and she’s found it almost impossible to remove in public. The heavy vinyl fabric keeps her body temperature high, but that’s not a problem in an industrial freezer.

The only variation in Rika’s days comes from her part-time job. Once a week, Rika takes the bus to a local museum to have an hour of conversation with a statue of Venus. Venus only speaks Latin, but Rika enjoys a freedom with the dead language that she’s never found in Japanese. Though Rika is shy at first, she and Venus become friends, and they eventually fall in love.

Unfortunately, there’s a bit of a situation with a man named Hashibami, the museum curator in charge of the statue. He wants Venus all to himself, and he never wants her to change – he doesn’t want her to learn modern languages, and he certainly doesn’t want her to learn about the world outside the museum.

Venus therefore makes a deal with Hashibami. If he can get Rika to fall in love with him, she’ll allow him to fire Rika from the conversation job. Regardless, Rika isn’t interested in men, nor does she allow Venus to push her away. What Rika wants is something else entirely, and her relationship with Venus has given her the courage to chase their mutual joy.

The fantastic elements of When the Museum Is Closed are presented as entirely mundane, and it’s easy to take them at face value. At the same time, the love story between Rika and Venus resonates at an allegorical level with the experience of having a queer crush on someone who’s friendly and flirtatious yet seemingly unattainable. It’s the crush you have on an older coworker, or the crush you have on an internet friend, or the crush you have on the gayest girl you’ve ever met who is, inexplicably, married to a man. It doesn’t really matter that Venus is a statue, as anyone who’s experienced queer longing can relate to Rika’s situation. At the same time, Emi Yagi’s Venus is animated by her own distinct personality and undeniably lovely.

I’m sure that When the Museum Is Closed could also be read as an allegory for how women tend to be treated in male-dominated artistic and curatorial spaces, but the story is far more concerned with Rika’s subjective experience of her own individual life. I especially enjoyed the subplot involving Rika’s friendship with her landlord, a quirky but kind elderly woman who needs home care assistance, and I appreciated the understanding Rika develops with the neglected young boy who lives next door. Though Rika’s invisible yellow raincoat is unique to her, she’s far from the only person carrying unseen baggage, and it’s not necessarily the case that this is a problem that needs to be fixed.

When the Museum Is Closed is a short but expertly paced novel that moves quickly yet still allows the reader enough time to appreciate each scene. Its premise is intriguing and well-executed, and Yuki Tejima’s delightful translation captures the author’s tone perfectly, both in Rika’s deadpan observations and Venus’s mature flirtations. Readers who enjoyed Emi Yagi’s novel Diary of a Void will be pleasantly surprised by When the Museum Is Closed, which features the same sharpness and clarity of writing augmented by lovely moments of sweetness.

Lost Souls Meet Under a Full Moon

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Lost Souls Meet Under a Full Moon brings together five interconnected short stories about people seeking to contact the dead. Though this book falls firmly into the category of “relaxing” fiction, it’s more plot-driven than most, and it distinguishes itself through its worldbuilding, especially its willingness to test the parameters of its magic system.

The central character of the novel is a handsome and stylishly dressed teenage “go-between” named Ayumi who can facilitate meetings between the living and the dead. The catch is that a person can only have one of these meetings in their lifetime, and each dead person is only allowed to return once. 

This is why the choice of the focal character of the first chapter, “The Rule of the Idol,” is so unusual. Manami asks the go-between to connect her with, of all people, a performer named Saori who made her living as a tv personality appearing on various talk shows and quiz games. When Manami was at the lowest point in her life, alone in Tokyo and bullied by her coworkers, she had a random encounter with Saori, who encouraged her to get back on her feet. Manami wants to use Saori’s death as an opportunity to thank her personally, which she never would have been able to do while Saori was still alive.

The third chapter, “The Rule of the Best Friend,” is far less wholesome. A first-year high school student named Arashi wants to be cast into leading roles in the plays performed by her school’s drama club, and she’s not shy about making her intentions known. Her biggest supporter is her best friend Misono, who joins the drama club in solidarity. Misono’s introverted grace has an alluring appeal that Arashi overlooks in her brash ambition, and she ends up losing a starring role to her best friend.

Arashi takes this poorly and stops talking to Misono. She assumes this will be a punishment, but she quickly realizes that her friendship was holding Misono back from achieving her own dreams. When Misono dies in a cycling accident, Arashi desperately wants to apologize, but she hasn’t yet developed the maturity to say what really needs to be said. I have to admit that I was surprised by the final meeting between the two friends, which is steeped in a complexity otherwise absent in these stories, and “The Rule of the Best Friend” ended up being my favorite part of the book.

In the final chapter, “The Rule of the Go-Between,” we see the characters from the previous stories from Ayumi’s perspective as he goes on his own journey during the process of inheriting the role of go-between from his elderly grandmother. Ayumi’s parents died under mysterious circumstances when he was a child, and his grandmother has carried a sense of guilt for years. Unlike his unfortunate classmate Arashi, however, Ayumi is able to break the barrier of silence and offer comfort and closure to his grandmother while they’re both still alive.

Despite a few brief moments of darkness, Lost Souls Meet Under a Full Moon presents little emotional challenge to the reader. There are very few subversive or self-reflective elements in these stories, and the characters occasionally behave like two-dimensional constructs who act solely in service to the plot. This isn’t a bad thing, of course. Lost Souls moves quickly and follows its internal logic so impeccably that the reader’s suspension of disbelief is never broken. As a result, each of the chapters is great fun to read.

Mizuki Tsujimura has taken the five-chapter cozy fiction formula and polished it to a high sheen. As far as the genre goes, Lost Souls Meet Under a Full Moon is as good as it gets, largely thanks to the author’s willingness to explore the more nuanced implications of the stories’ premise. Yuki Tejima’s translation is lovely and uses a light touch to bring the energy of Tsujimura’s prose to English-language readers. I’d recommend Lost Souls Meet Under a Full Moon to anyone looking for a good comfort read, not to mention a welcome reminder of the importance of saying what needs to be said while you’re still alive.

The Melancholy of Haruhi Suzumiya

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The Melancholy of Haruhi Suzumiya, originally published in 2003, is a sci-fi romantic comedy about a quirky afterschool club. It’s also one of the most influential light novels from the heyday of otaku culture. Although I can’t say that all of its humor has aged well, it’s a quick and fun read, and there’s a good reason why it’s still in print.

Kyon is an average high school boy who’s assigned to the same homeroom as Haruhi Suzumiya, a beautiful girl who has a reputation for being weird. True to everyone’s expectations, she marches into the first day of class and introduces herself with the declaration that she’s not interested in speaking to anyone who isn’t an alien, an esper, or a time traveler. When Kyon tries to strike up a conversation with Haruhi, he gets roped into joining the SOS Brigade, an afterschool club that Haruhi has created to research supernatural phenomena.

The plot twist is that, with the exception of Kyon, every member of the SOS Brigade is indeed an alien, an esper, or a time traveler. They gradually reveal themselves to Kyon, insisting that they’re posing as high school students in order to observe Haruhi, who unknowingly has extraordinary powers capable of restructuring the universe. If Haruhi becomes bored with the current universe, it’s not beyond the realm of possibility that she might inadvertently destroy it. It’s therefore imperative that Haruhi remains entertained and blissfully unaware of her power.

As you might imagine, this scenario has a number of unsettling implications. Is everyone in the story merely a figment of Haruhi’s imagination? Does anyone in the universe she created have free will? If Haruhi created “this” universe, what happened to the universe where aliens, espers, and time travelers don’t exist?

The Melancholy of Haruhi Suzumiya goes right to the edge of these darker implications but ultimately backs off in favor of light comedy and mild teenage romance, a tonal balance that undoubtedly contributed to its popularity.

This light novel was adapted into an anime that aired in the Winter 2006/07 season. I admit that I’ve never watched it from start to finish, but the show was ubiquitous in Japanese pop culture fandom communities for years. The ending theme, “Hare Hare Yukai,” became a meme that spawned countless flash mobs of cosplayers recreating the iconic dance at anime conventions.

Due to its prominent place in mid-2000s otaku culture, I was considering including The Melancholy of Haruhi Suzumiya on the syllabus of a college class about Japanese science fiction and fantasy. I think it would be a good choice, but I’m still undecided. My hesitation is mainly due to the fact that one of the early chapters includes light elements of goofy sexual comedy that made sense in the cultural atmosphere at the time but might read a bit differently today.

To give an example, in order to blackmail the members of the computer club into giving her a PC, Haruhi takes someone’s hand and places it on the breast of one of the female SOS Brigade members before asking Kyon to take a photo. To me, this scene reads as the sort of stupid but harmless fantasy that might appeal to the book’s target readership of teenage boys, but I understand how it might be interpreted as sexual harassment (because, undeniably, it is).

Still, light novels are filled with this sort of thing, and I tend to think that The Melancholy of Haruhi Suzumiya is on the “unproblematic” end of the spectrum. To be fair, it’s not anything worse than what’s in most Haruki Murakami novels.

I don’t read many light novels these days, but I enjoyed The Melancholy of Haruhi Suzumiya. The pace is brisk, the writing is snappy, and the story offers a nice treatment of its speculative worldbuilding without getting too deeply into the weeds of hard science fiction. Looking back on this book from twenty years in the future, I found myself waning a bit nostalgic for an earlier (and, I think, more lighthearted) era of otaku culture. The Melancholy of Haruhi Suzumiya is an interesting cultural artifact, but it’s also a fun story that I’d recommend to anyone who hasn’t yet encountered its particular flavor of high school comedy.

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.