Strange Houses (2021) by Uketsu

Back in March, I reviewed Henna e (Strange Pictures, 2022) written by the pseudonymous Japanese horror and mystery Youtuber, "Uketsu," whose true identity remains a big question mark – hidden behind a white mask, black bodysuit and a digitally distorted voice. Strange Pictures received some mixed reactions, but I enjoyed and appreciated it for trying to do something different with both the traditional detective and modern crime story. So looked forward to see what Uketsu was going to do with Henna le (Strange Houses, 2021).

I thought Pushkin Vertigo was translating and publishing the "Strange Novel" series in chronological order, which is why I called Strange Pictures Uketsu's debut, but Strange Houses is actually the first in the series. Strange Pictures was considered "a more solidly structured, more confident work" appealing to a broader audience. There were also responses from people already familiar with Strange Houses through the manga and movie adaptations who were disappointed, because Strange Houses is a treat to mystery fans who love their floor plans, family trees and the odd time table. So, once again, I was looking forward to see what Uketsu was going to do with Strange Houses and compare it to Strange Pictures.

Strange Houses, translated by Jim Rion, comprises of four, longish chapters in which the first three introduce and investigate three different mysteries concerning bizarre floor plans of strange houses.

The first chapter, "A Strange House," introduces its nameless narrator, a freelance writer, whose specializes in stories of the macabre and people come to him with their personal stories of "the eerie and unpleasant." Strangest story came his way when a friend asked for advice. The friend in question is house hunting and found a place that's both spacious and bright, but a curious detail about the floor plan bothers him. There's "a mysterious dead space between the kitchen and living room" on the first floor. So the freelance writer promises to look over the floor plans with another friend, Kurihara, who's an architectural draughtsman. When they pore over the floor plans together, they notice more odd features to the house with the biggest, puzzling feature being the child's room on the second floor. A central, inner room without windows, a double-door vestibule and its own toilet – resembling "some kind of solitary confinement cell." The house, of course, hides more secrets than can be directly read from the floor plan.

Finding all those architectural oddities and hidden secret fires up Kurihara's imagination, "this house was built for murder," but the author's friend tells them he has lost interest in buying the house. A chopped-up body found in a thicket near the house felt like a bad omen. So he worked the story of this strange house into article which was read by Yuzuki Miyae.

Three years ago, Miyae's husband vanished without a trace and only recently his body, minus a left hand, was found on a mountainside in Saitama. Miyae believes his disappearance and death is linked to house similar to the house described in the article. She even dug up a floor plan of the house. So this second chapter, "Another Warped Floor Plan," examines another house with prison-like child's room, hidden features and a curious, triangular room that was later addition to the original house. Just as important is figuring out who lived in those two houses and where they're now. That brings Strange Houses to its third chapter, "Drawn from Memory," which takes a detour into the past to tell the story of a tragic family gathering told through floor plans sketched from childhood memories. So, this far into the story, I have to remain as sketchy about the details, but it's undoubtedly the best, most memorable portion of the Strange Houses – not merely because it included a locked room puzzle, of sorts. But it always helps. And while (ROT13) V abeznyyl sebja hcba frperg cnffntrf be uvqvat ubyrf svthevat va gur fbyhgvba gb n ybpxrq ebbz zlfgrel, guvf vf gur frpbaq orfg hfr bs n frperg cnffntr V unir pbzr npebff.

Uketsu pulls the threads together in the final chapter, "House of Chains," which is the wordiest chapter of the book as it has to do without the numerous floor plans and only has the odd family tree. It's also the chapter clearly demonstrating the fundamental difference between Strange Pictures and Strange Houses.

I think most mystery fans prefer the examination of the floor plans and architectural anomalies over the armchair psycho-analyzing of drawings, which really is a treat for every detective fan who love maps and floor plans in their mysteries. My shoddy review barely gives you an idea just how many floor plans there are. But it's a lot. However, the answers behind these strange houses with their architectural anomalies is more along the lines of a horror mystery than a mystery with horror elements. Strange Pictures also straddles the detective and horror genres, but it worked as a detective story. Not the most orthodox of detective stories, but a detective story nonetheless. Strange Houses offers something out of a Wes Craven movie with an ambiguous ending, which is also more in keeping with the horror genre. Now a hybrid mystery, of sorts, is not the problem, but the horror elements driving the plot is unconvincing. And, to be honest, somewhat preposterous. Not helped by the fact that one of Kurihara's wild, illogical flight of fancies was closer to the truth than it had any right to be. That's bound to annoy or disappoint some mystery fans.

So was left with mixed feelings. I didn't expect Strange Houses to be a typical, traditionally-plotted shin honkaku mystery, but expected it to be ever so slightly more traditional and grounded, plot-wise, than Strange Pictures. Somehow, I figured floor plans would lend themselves better to this new type of visual medium horror-mysteries than a series of drawings. The floor plan puzzles were fun with the third one ingeniously using its hand drawn floor plan, but the reason for creating these houses underwhelmed. So, yeah, I think Strange Pictures is the better novel and Pushkin Vertigo made the right call, but both succeed in offering the reader something little different without being outright novelties or gimmicks. They're simply too good, not perfect, but too good to be ranked along past novelty and gimmick mysteries like the dossier novels or photograph mysteries. So look forward to Uketsu's third novel scheduled to be published sometime early next year. I'll be there!

Strange Pictures (2022) by Uketsu

I noted in the 2024 roundup post, "Murder in Retrospect," Pushkin Vertigo had begun to expand their catalog of Japanese detective translations beyond the lavishly-plotted, grandiose honkaku and shin honkaku locked room mysteries – starting with the publication of Tetsuya Ayukawa's Kuroi kakuchou (The Black Swan Mystery, 1960). A police procedural originally published during the rise of the social school in Japanese crime fiction, however, the breaking down of two cast-iron alibis is done with all the ingenuity of the classic detective story.

Somewhat of a departure from what readers have come to expect from the Japanese detective novels of Seishi Yokomizo, Soji Shimada and Yukito Ayatsuji, but comments on my review called The Black Swan Mystery one of their best translations to date. I can't entirely disagree. The Black Swan Mystery is a 1960s police procedural with the heart of a Golden Age detective novel and the social issues playing out the background enhanced the overall story. Pushkin Vertigo has a few other intriguing, non-impossible crime translations lined-up for this year like Yasuhiko Nishizawa's time-loop mystery Nanakai shinda otoko (The Man Who Died Seven Times, 1995) and Taku Ashibe's classically-styled family whodunit Oomarike satusjin jiken (Murders in the House of Omari, 2021). I was most intrigued of all when Pushkin Vertigo announced the forthcoming translations of Uketsu's "strange novels."

"Uketsu" is the pseudonym of a popular, Japanese horror Youtuber who has nearly two million subscribers and his debut novel, Henna e (Strange Pictures, 2022), sold over three million copies, but the person behind this success remains a mystery – hidden behind a white mask, black bodysuit and voice changer. I didn't know what, exactly, to expect from Strange Pictures except that it appeared to bring the visual medium to the printed page. But was it a proper detective, a hybrid mystery, horror masking itself as a detective story or something completely different? I decided to not probe it too much and find out when its published. A good decision as Strange Pictures gives you a different experience than your average detective or crime novel.

Strange Pictures is a collection of four, interconnected short stories each centering on the hidden or obscured meaning behind a drawing, or series of drawings, but the book has a ton of additional illustrations, diagrams, timetables and even the odd floor plan. So richly illustrated you can almost call it wordy picture book.

This collection of linked stories begins with a short, untitled prologue in which a professor lectures on the revealing nature of pictures and drawings into the inner works of the artist. She shows the drawing of a child who had been involved in a murder case to illustrate her point and explain why the child is "now living happily as a mother." This analysis pretty much serves as the framework for the bigger picture behind the overarching story.

The first of these linked mysteries, "The Old Woman's Prayer," takes place in 2014 and reads like a 2000s-era creepy internet story. Shuhei Sasaki, a student and member of his university's paranormal club, learns about an innocently-looking, dormant blog – called "Oh No, Not Raku." A blog filled with the "empty silliness that was the hallmark of your average daily diary." Someone going by the handle "Raku" started blogging about his daily life in 2008 and discovering his wife, "Yuki," is pregnant. So the blog prattled on for months, before taking a tragic turn and the blog became inactive in 2009. Three years later, Raku returned with a last, cryptically-worded update about finally having figured out the secret of those numbered pictures. The pictures in questions were drawn by Yuki depicting, what she called, "visions of the future." The solution to what happened behind the scenes is locked away inside those drawings.

Yuki's strange, cryptic drawings aren't the only illustrations adorning this story. There's a screenshot of the blog (yes, I tried the address, but nothing) and a ton of other pictures to illustrate ideas/solutions. So it definitely sets the tone for the rest of the book and provides some answers, but the open ending leaves the reader hanging. However, not without reason!

The second story, "The Smudged Room," takes a more grounded approach with an apparently small, unimportant domestic problem. Naomi Konno is asked by a teacher if anything unusual or scary had happened at home, because her five-year-old Yuta drew a strange picture in class. At first glance, it looks like a typical child's drawing showing him and his mother standing next to their apartment building. But the room in the middle of the top floor was "covered with a large grey scribble." The room where they lived. So nothing worrying enough to fuel some domestic suspense, but then a mysterious man begins to stalk the two and Yuta disappears one night from their apartment. And figuring out the meaning behind the smodged room is the key to finding him. This story also closes with an open end, but you can already see the bigger picture of the overarching narrative taking shape. The next two stories bring everything together with the next one, unsurprisingly, becoming my favorite part of Strange Pictures.

"The Art Teacher's Final Drawing" is an out, and out, shin honkaku detective story, but in the tradition of Ayukawa's previously mentioned The Black Swan Mystery. So no locked rooms or other types of impossible crimes, but unbreakable alibis, a gruesomely ingenious murder method and one of the few genuinely classic examples of the dying message.

In 1992, the horribly mutilated body of Yoshiharu Miura, an art teacher, was discovered on the side of "Mt K—in L—Prefucture," where he had planned to stay for an overnight camping trip – whoever killed him took his food and sleeping bag. But why not his other supplies? And why the overkill? Miura had been stabbed numerous times and beaten over two hundred times! So the police assumed the murderer had a very personal motive behind it and they come up with three potential suspects, but two have alibis and only suspicions against the third. So the case goes unsolved for three years, until a veteran reporter and young, eager newshound pick up the trail again and try to retrace everyone's steps. But central to their investigation is the victim's dying message. A drawing of the mountain scenery on the back of a receipt which poses two questions: message hidden in the drawing and how he could have composes such a dying message under, let's say, less than ideal circumstances. But the murderer from three years ago returns. And leaves behind another human-shaped, battered mess along the hiking trail. Just the solutions to the murders and how it folds the gruesome murder method, alibi-trick and dying message together with the identity of the murderer is enough to make it a first-rate shin honkaku mystery, but, more importantly, is how these murders fit into this interconnected web of strange pictures.

The complete, not exactly comforting picture emerges in the fourth and final story, "The Bird, Safe in the Tree," which connects the prologue and the previously three stories in a way that's both deeply satisfying and disturbing. Not merely a play on that old, tired cliché of the horror genre, "humans are the REAL monsters," but on their cruel, uncanny knack to create monsters. Strange Pictures is eerily effective in how each drawing, in each succeeding story, gradually reveals the whole tragic, sordid mess connecting all the characters and pictures. Something that makes Strange Picture very difficult, if not impossible, to pigeonhole. It's both a traditionally-plotted detective story and entirely in line with the darkly modern, character-driven crime novels told partially in pictures, diagrams and timetables. I was tempted to draw a comparison with Shichiri Nakayama's Tsuioku no nocturn (Nocturne of Remembrance, 2013), but perhaps Strange Pictures is best described as a darker, grislier take on the puzzles-with-a-heart stories from Motohiro Katou's Q.E.D. series.

Either way, I found Uketsu's Strange Pictures to be an engrossing, original take on both the traditionally-plotted detective story and the darker, character-driven crime novels of today. A different way to tell either and still something fans of both can appreciate. I sure did! Very much look forward to the sequel later this year.

A note for the curious: I only found out after finishing the book Strange Pictures got multiple translations including Dutch. If I had known a Dutch translation was available, I would probably have been tempted to pick it over the English translation. Anyway, I included the cover of the Dutch translation, Vreemde tekeningen (Strange Drawings).