Uketsu, whose true identity remains a mystery, is a crime-writing sensation in Japan. His work blends eerie narratives with elements of horror and social commentary. He has 1.8 million subscribers on YouTube where he posts surreal videos and macabre puzzles wearing a full-face white papier-mâché mask.
Although there are plenty of sinister forces at play in both his visual and literary works, there’s also a wry sense of humour. “I have thought about maybe sneaking a giant fake eye under the mask and then taking it off to reveal that I’ve been a terrible Cyclopean monster the whole time,” he told one interviewer.
The video that inspired this brain-teasing novella, posted four years ago, has been viewed more than 24 million times and covers much of the first, and most compelling, part of the book.
Our narrator is a freelance writer who specialises in the macabre. He is sent a floor plan of a home that a friend is considering purchasing.
The friend has noticed something odd in the home’s layout – a mysterious dead space between the kitchen and living room which makes no architectural sense.
Adding to the mystery is the disappearance of the home’s occupants.
Our narrator calls his friend Kurihara – an architectural draughtsman and fellow horror and mystery fan – for advice. After examining the floor plan he comes up with a wild theory regarding the unusual design (various floor plans are printed throughout, allowing readers to join in solving the puzzle; Uketsu’s debut novel Strange Pictures operated similarly, as readers were invited to decipher a series of eerie crayon drawings).
With its windowless spaces, hidden staircases and possible interconnecting rooms, Kurihara pronounces it a perfect home in which to keep a young child prisoner and then use them to commit murder. In his view, the house design is specially built to allow for discreet body disposal.
It seems a crazy interpretation, not worth taking seriously, until a dismembered body is found near the same home, prompting our narrator to publish a story about his concerns.
The narrative unfolds via dialogue and those ever-present floor plans, and leads to the discovery of another mysterious house and a strange and complex family history.
At times, it comes across as a Japanese take on Mark Z Danielewski’s cult 2000 novel House of Leaves, a horror-mystery in which a young couple discover their house is bigger on the inside than outside. However, Uketsu also uses certain elements from the cosy crime fiction genre.
It all ends with a meta-fictional flourish in an afterword by Kurihara.
“I first met Uketsu in 2018. He sought me out as a consultant for a story involving architecture … I had the opportunity to review those stories and books at the manuscript stage, and one thing I can say about all of them is, each one contains a lie.”
It may all be a bit too clever for its own good, but there’s an undeniable disquieting pull to Uketsu’s writing. If he seems to lose control of the initially intriguing narrative, which becomes increasingly fraught as the book progresses, Strange Houses remains compelling to the end.
Fans of bizarre mysteries or those with a penchant for experimental fiction should seek this out.
Strange Houses, by Uketsu (Pushkin Vertigo, $36.99), is out now.
