Strange Buildings – Contemporary Japanese Literature

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.

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.