They don’t make them more mysterious than Japanese bestselling author Uketsu. No one – apart from his inner circle –knows who he is, his age, or even what he sounds like. He appears in a black bodysuit with a papier-mâché mask, and his voice seems digitally altered. He typically gives interviews over Zoom or the phone, and very rarely makes public appearances. He shot to fame in Japan when he posted YouTube videos that were, to put it mildly, rather odd – meat hanging on a washing line, ears on a wheel, and so on.
He stepped into the literary world in 2020 when he wrote a book based on a mystery he had made a video about, a mystery that revolved around the floor plans of houses. The book, with its unique narrative style of sketches, charts, and conversations, and loaded with sudden twists and turns (many of them rather dark), became a bestseller. Uketsu is now one of Japan’s highest-selling authors, three of the nation’s top ten bestselling fiction books of 2024 were written by him. His books are now being translated into English, and he seems set to be something of a global phenomenon in the horror-suspense genre.
Straightforward, simple and strange
Strange Pictures, Uketsu’s first book to be translated into English (translated by Jim Rion), was released earlier this year, and, not surprisingly, scaled bestseller lists all over the world. Now comes the translation of another one of his books, Strange Houses. And well, it has all the twists and turns that make Strange Pictures so intriguing, and, without giving too much away, it is actually a little darker, with some cult references. Like Strange Pictures, it is not a long book, it is about 200 pages. And, exactly like Strange Pictures, we are reasonably sure that those who get hooked on it will finish it in a day.
Story continues below this ad
Uketsu’s writing is incredibly simple, and Rion has done a great job of retaining that simplicity even in the English translation. He cuts to the chase and does not spend time building elaborate plots or characters. You are not going to get very clearly defined heroes and villains, elaborate descriptions of places, commentary on social conditions, ornate similes and adjectives, or even romance and heroism. The mystery is the star in Uketsu’s books, and it is their unraveling at breakneck speeds that makes them such compelling reads, you get sucked into the plot within a few pages, and the focus never shifts from it.
A dead space on a floor chart in a mysterious house
One of the many floor plans featured in Strange Houses, each hiding clues to a much darker truth.
Strange Houses starts off with a routine query. The narrator (who is Uketsu himself, although he is never named) is a freelancer who specializes in “stories of the macabre.” Of course, this means that he hears some very odd things. However, even he does not think anything too unusual is happening when a friend asks him to look at the floor plan of a house he and his wife are planning to purchase. The house seems very normal, with a number of windows and spacious rooms. However, there is a tiny area that is completely walled up—a dead space that cannot be reached. Perhaps it was meant for a cupboard or some sort of storage area that was never built, but it makes Uketsu’s friend uncomfortable, so he asks Uketsu to take a look at the floor plan.
Uketsu finds the “dead space” irritating but doesn’t see too much wrong with the house. Nevertheless, he shows the floor plan to his friend Kurihara, who works at an architectural firm. And that’s when things start to get grimly and disturbingly interesting. Kurihara points out that, while the dead space itself is curious, what’s very unusual is that the room labeled “child’s room”—intended for a baby—has no windows and is located at the far end of the house. They scrutinize the chart more carefully, and as more oddities and curiosities emerge, they realize that they may be looking at a house designed not just for living in, but for killing people. What’s more, the family that lived in that house had previously lived in another house with very similar peculiarities.
Strange Houses sees Uketsu and Kurihara unravel the mystery of the houses’ designs and the stories of the people who lived in them. Unlike Strange Pictures, which revolved around the interpretation of a number of drawings and had multiple narrators, here there are just three houses, and the narration stays with Uketsu. The story is basically told through a series of conversations between Uketsu, Kurihara, and a few other characters. Just as Strange Pictures had the reader going back to drawings and noticing key details, here the floor plans are scrutinized carefully as they reveal their secrets. In many ways, this is almost like classic Japanese Honkaku, the reader sees the evidence exactly as the detectives do.
Story continues below this ad
Flooring the reader with suspense-laden floor plans
Some might find the narration a little too simplistic and direct. The author doesn’t spend paragraphs describing what the characters are wearing, the color of the sky, or life in the city. Even the conversations between characters are devoid of frivolity. Uketsu simply sticks to the core mystery, even more sharply than in Strange Pictures, which had multiple narrators and showed us pictures from different perspectives.
Just as every look at a sketch in Strange Pictures brought a new revelation, every glance at the floor plans in Strange Houses reveals something new, and more often than not, shocking. There are secret passages, tunnels, strange altars, and much more. As in Strange Pictures, the publishers deserve praise for printing relevant portions of the floor plans where they are mentioned in the story, instead of grouping them all together under an “Illustrations” section and making the reader flip back and forth.
The finale of Strange Houses is a big surprise, though of a very different nature from Strange Pictures. While Strange Pictures had the feel of a classic detective story with a murderer being tracked down, Strange Houses has more of a haunted-house-with-a-family-curse surreal feel to it, which some might find a little harder to be convinced by. We weren’t altogether satisfied with the ending, only to be surprised by an afterword by Kurihara that leaves the door open for speculation.
Strange Houses is a riveting read for anyone who enjoys mystery, suspense, and horror, and wants to be literally glued to a book for a few hours. It will rattle you to the core, and while it may not change the way you think, it will definitely change the way you look at things—literally. We now notice every small detail in a document or a sketch and wonder, “What if…?” Sherlock Holmes, who himself hated dramatic narratives laden with sentiment, would have liked Uketsu. What else can we say?
Story continues below this ad
Strange Houses
By Uketsu (translated by Jim Rion)
208 pp
Pushkin Vertigo
Rs 699
AloJapan.com