Tag: Gothic horror

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.

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.

Strange Houses

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

Now You’re One of Us

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now-youre-one-of-us

Title: Now You’re One of Us
Japanese Title: 暗鬼 (Anki)
Author: Nonami Asa (乃南 アサ)
Translators: Michael Volek and Mitsuko Volek
Publication Year: 2007 (America); 1993 (Japan)
Publisher: Vertical
Pages: 239

A few months ago, 26-year-old Noriko married into the Shito family, who operate a grocery and rice trading business in the Koganei suburb of Tokyo. Noriko’s husband Kazuhito, whom she became acquainted with through the auspices of a matchmaker, is handsome and loving, and his mother Kimie wants nothing more than for Noriko to be happy. The Shito house is large and surrounded by gardens, and the extended family of eight people all lives there comfortably. Noriko’s new life seems almost too good to be true.

It turns out that this perfect family is indeed too good to be true. The first indication that something is amiss appears three months into Noriko’s marriage, when one of the Shito family’s tenants tries to warn her about something but is immediately silenced by Kimie. When this man is killed in a mysterious explosion a week later, the Shito family denies any knowledge of the incident and sends Noriko to the funeral by herself.

Although she tries to suppress her gut instincts, Noriko finds herself bothered by the uncanniness of the Shito family. Everyone is too kind and too friendly, which renders it even more perturbing that the family never receives visitors or attends community events. In addition, the Shitos seem to have far too much money coming in from the family business, the Ichifuji Rice Mill, which primarily operates as a general store. Noriko isn’t allowed into certain areas of the manor, including the greenhouse, and she suspects that the family is meeting together late at night while she’s sleeping.

Noriko has no evidence to support her suspicions, however, and she’s hesitant to leave the comfortable household in the upscale suburb of Tokyo and return to her family in rural Yamanashi prefecture. After all, Noriko is well aware of just how lucky she is to have been given the opportunity to enter into such an advantageous marriage. When she meets her high school friend Tomomi in the city and hints at her concerns regarding the Shito family, Tomomi is thoroughly creeped out, but Noriko chalks up her friend’s response to jealousy.

Nevertheless, Noriko can’t shake her feeling that something is wrong with the Shito family. When she eventually confronts her husband Kazuhito, things become very strange very quickly, and the story shifts from a mystery centered around the death of the tenant to a terrifying account of gaslighting, a form of mental manipulation in which someone’s perception of reality is repeatedly denied while what they know to be true is replaced by false information. The members of the Shito family work together as a collective to destroy Noriko’s sense of identity, alternating between befuddlement that her memories do not align with theirs and outright bullying and abuse. By the end of the book, Noriko’s “pride was tattered, and all of her values smashed to bits. Everything – her confidence and will, and her reasons for being who she was – had vanished like dust into a breeze” (215).

Generally speaking, the accusation that a person not in a position of power has deliberately fabricated falsehoods serves to silence voices that offer contradictory evidence against a normative position, and it’s easy to read Noriko’s trials as an allegory of how the social institution of marriage is almost cult-like in the control it exerts over young women’s psyches and sense of self-worth. Moreover, the Suburban Gothic of the Shito family intersects with the repressed trauma of the Pacific War, and the bizarre history of the clan is braided into the strands of Japan’s history as a national polity.

Now You’re One of Us is a truly disturbing piece of feminist horror. The novel is also genuinely compelling, and it’s almost impossible for me to put down once I start reading, no matter how many times I return to it. Nonami Asa has been hailed as one of contemporary Japan’s finest writers of mystery and horror, and Now You’re One of Us showcases the author at the top of her game. By the time the reader understands what it means to be “one of us,” it’s too late to turn away, and the experience of surviving this book will stay with you long after its bone-chilling ending.