Tag: Uketsu

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.

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.

Strange Pictures

Kathryn1 Comment

Strange Pictures is a compulsively readable horror mystery novel first published in 2022 by Uketsu, a mysterious masked YouTuber. This book is addictive, so much so that I accidentally spent an entire afternoon and evening reading it. So be warned – Strange Pictures is indeed strange, and it will hold you hostage.

In the five-page prelude that introduces the book’s premise, a psychology professor shows her class a photo of a picture drawn by a girl who killed her mother. The drawing is a childish self-portrait that shows the girl standing between her house and a tree. Although the picture seems completely normal at first, the professor zooms in on four small details that illuminate the girl’s inner state of mind. She makes the argument that, despite the abuse the girl suffered, she’s essentially a good person who never meant to hurt anyone. In retrospect, you can’t help but wonder how you didn’t notice these details of the drawing yourself.

This trick is an incredible sleight of hand. The same can be said of the following two chapters, both of which can be read as stand-alone short stories.

In the first chapter, “The Old Woman’s Prayer,” two college students in a small Paranormal Club discuss a curious blog they’ve found online. The blog is filled with cheerful observations of its writer’s everyday life. After a three-year hiatus, however, the blog closes with a mysterious post stating, “I can never forgive you.”

How did such a happy-go-lucky blog author arrive at such a mysterious statement? The five illustrations drawn by the author’s wife might just hold the key to the mystery. By themselves, they’re nothing special, but if you put them together in the right way…

The second chapter, “The Smudged Room,” features one of my favorite tropes, a creepy drawing made by a small child.

Five-year-old Yuta’s father recently passed away, and his preschool teacher is worried about the drawing he created for Mother’s Day. The picture shows a dark cloud hovering over the apartment building where Yuta lives with his mother, who is doing her best to care for Yuta with no family support. The matter comes to a crisis when Yuta suddenly disappears, and his teacher suspects that his mother may be keeping an unpleasant secret. What was Yuta trying to draw, exactly?

These two seemingly unrelated mysteries begin to coalesce in the third chapter, “The Art Teacher’s Final Drawing,” in which two sidelined newspaper employees become obsessed with the murder of a high school art teacher. The police dismissed the case due to a lack of evidence, but there is (of course) a drawing found in the teacher’s possession that was never fully analyzed. The younger reporter starts interviewing people who knew the teacher, thereby putting himself in grave danger.

Somewhere around the middle of this chapter, the story begins to strain credibility, but at this point I was fully invested and happy to be along for the ride. Uketsu has a gift for enabling the reader to suspend disbelief, and the Sherlock moment in the fourth and final chapter is incredible.

Strange Pictures is a bestselling cult hit in Japan and across Asia. I first heard about this book through word of mouth and read it in Japanese when it was first published. I was impressed by the clarity of Uketsu’s writing, which is simple and informative without being childish or condescending. Jim Rion has done an amazing job translating Uketsu’s distinctive style, with short declarative sentences pushing the reader forward at a brisk pace.

A large part of the mystery depends on the information that the narrative withholds from the reader, some of which is highly dependent on how Japanese works as a language. I’m impressed by how Rion manages to employ English to the same effect without the slightest trace of awkwardness. Reading Rion’s translation, I felt like I was encountering Uketsu’s story for the first time.

As long as you don’t mind losing a few hours to the addictive quality of the writing, I’d recommend Strange Pictures to anyone who enjoys puzzle box mysteries, creepy urban legends, and satisfying Sherlock Holmes style walkthroughs. I can’t overstate how much fun I had with this book, and I’m very much looking forward to Jim Rion’s upcoming translation of Uketsu’s debut novel, Strange Houses.