found footage horror – Contemporary Japanese Literature

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.

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

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

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

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

Slightly outdated media and technology are a recurring theme in the collection, and this isn’t the only story about creepy messages left on an answering machine.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

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

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

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