STRANGE PICTURES, aptly titled off-kilter murder-mystery narrative translated from Japanese

STRANGE PICTURES
UKETSU (tr. Jim Rion)
HarperVia (non-affiliate Amazon link)
$13.99 Kindle edition, available now

Rating: 4* of five

The Publisher Says: The spine-tingling bestseller that has taken Japan by storm—an eerie fresh take on horror for fans of Hidden Pictures and Junji Ito, in which a series of seemingly innocent pictures draws you into a disturbing web of unsolved mysteries and shattered psyches.

An exploration of the macabre, where the seemingly mundane takes on a terrifying significance. . . .

A pregnant woman's sketches on a seemingly innocuous blog conceal a chilling warning.

A child's picture of his home contains a dark secret message.

A sketch made by a murder victim in his final moments leads an amateur sleuth down a rabbithole that will reveal a horrifying reality.

Structured around these nine childlike drawings, each holding a disturbing clue, Uketsu invites readers to piece together the mystery behind each and the over-arching backstory that connects them all. Strange Pictures is the internationally bestselling debut from mystery horror YouTube sensation Uketsu—an enigmatic masked figure who has become one of Japan's most talked about contemporary authors.

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My Review: Visual horror...sequential art, film, artworks...isn't very effective on me. My idea of horror is Wrongness, and that's deeply individual in its iconography, therefore effective representation. I'm more afraid of people than Supernatural Forces because the Supernatural, by definition, can't be identified until we know all the laws of nature, and know that we know all of them. Until then, everything that happens, including things that break the known laws of physics, are simply unexplainable but still not supernatural.

Reality stinks, mono- or a-theistic religious nuts. Miracles and superheroic gods are improbable but not impossible because nature is not even a billionth of a percent explained yet. Stay agnostic, it's the only defensible stance.

This effort at image-enhanced horror is very interesting, though I'm pretty convinced it's one of that most Japanese of stories, the eerie murder mystery. I've reviewed plenty of those. This is another one. It's...fine, perfectly readable (as a mystery), and in spots enjoyable. It's a complex puzzle, not at all easy or simple to solve. It defeated me. I was sure one particular thing was true, and it explicitly wasn't. That made the read much more interesting to me than it would've been if I'd been correct.

Like so many mysteries from Japan, the characters are more gesturally indicated than developed. Mystery-genre readers in the US are less tolerant of this than they could be; we tend to look for people to invest emotional energy in, not just puzzles that rake place in a brooding ill-defined space. I think the ideal reader for this story, among my Anglophone audience, is likely to be someone who really enjoys Julio Cortázar or Umberto Eco.

I was not particularly enraptured by the read until after I finished it. This was more akin to a storyboard pitch to investors about an idea for a horror story connecting some...suspicious deaths that were or could've been Influenced From Beyond than itself a horror story. Thinking about the read, which I finished last night after taking a week to read (in my habitual scattershot way interspersed with other books), I realized I was very, very successfully manipulated from the off. A child psychologist explaining how a little murderer's artwork provided clues to the reality that child operated within initially felt a bit In Cold Bloody to me. Should I believe the narrative? Should I be interested in *how* or why? Or permaybehaps what....

That's top-quality misdirection for that to work on a reader with sixty years' experience.

Will you love it? I doubt it; I didn't. Will you enjoy reading it? See my comps, if you love them you might get a charge out of this off-kilter, well-crafted read.

THE SEISHI YOKOMIZO PAGE (3): THE LITTLE SPARROW MURDERS & THE DEVIL'S FLUTE MURDERS, fifth and sixth of the Kindaichi series translated into English

THE LITTLE SPARROW MURDERS
SEISHI YOKIMIZO (Kosuke Kindaichi #6; tr. Bryan Karetnyk)
Pushkin Vertigo (non-affiliate Amazon link)
$16.95 trade paper, available now

Rating: 4* of five

The Publisher Says: An old friend of Kosuke Kindaichi's invites the scruffy detective to visit the remote mountain village of Onikobe in order to look into a twenty-year-old murder case. But no sooner has Kindaichi arrived than a new series of murders strikes the village - several bodies are discovered staged in bizarre poses, and it soon becomes clear that the victims are being killed using methods that match the lyrics of an old local children's song...

The legendary sleuth investigates, but soon realises must unravel the dark and tangled history of the village, as well as that of its rival families, to get to the truth.

PAGE ONE IS HERE★PAGE TWO IS HERE☆
PAGE THREE IS HERE★
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My Review: An interesting cross between Kawabata's masterwork Snow Country and a sideways take on Dame Agatha's lesser work Hickory Dickory Dock mixed with her absolute chef d'œuvre The Murder of Roger Ackroyd, only in 1950s Japan.

One factor that must be attended to by Anglophone readers of this series is that in Japan they are historical fiction. Japanese readers will be as "at sea" as any Anglophone reader would be; the story is sixty-five years old, and was about a bygone way of life even then. So there's a layer of anachronism baked into the modern reading experience irrespective of language it's read in. That doesn't mean it's not a good read. It is indeed a fun story to follow. Don't expect fair play in modern mystery terms, and all will be well. Read it for atmosphere, read it for the trip to the past...you'll enjoy it more that way.

Dysfunctional family dynamics are crime-fiction evergreens. The rage and hatred needed to work a person up to killing someone build in that pressure cooker. This story has a corker of a horrible family in it. The murder Kindaichi investigates took place twenty years before the present...remembering that present is 1959...and the victim is one of those folks who just need killin' in the old US Southern idiom. Mysteries exist because we, as a society, need to see ma'at maintained in our fiction because it seems so unmaintained in the world. The zeitgeist of 1950s Japan would reasonably suggest itself as a similarly traumatized one. I suspect the Kosuke Kindaichi series serves much the same function as the Poirot series did post-Great War...a superior intellect comes along and apportions blame for the guilt of tearing the already fragile fabric of a society in flux.

Letting the reader in on all the clues, all the information the superior intellect possesses, isn't the playbook for the crime stories of this period. I'm sure some sociology thesis treats this topic, but I don't have access to such material. I suspect it goes along with the social norms of trusting experts, even...especially...if they know more than The Authorities...which seems almost quaint in this day and time.

It's a series I get a lot from reading. I enjoy the historical aspects on several levels, within the story told and the storytelling itself. It feels, in these translations at any rate, like work that could have come from the same era as the original Japanese work.

That's a compliment. Four stars for solid enjoyment of a fun-to-read story.

++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++



THE DEVIL'S FLUTE MURDERS
SEISHI YOKIMIZO (Kosuke Kindaichi #5; tr. Jim Rion)
Pushkin Vertigo (non-affiliate Amazon link)
$9.99 ebook editions, available now

Rating: 4* of five

The Publisher Says: An ingenious and highly atmospheric classic whodunit from Japan’s master of crime.

Amid the rubble of post-war Tokyo, inside the grand Tsubaki house, a once-noble family is in mourning.

The old viscount Tsubaki, a brooding, troubled composer, has been found dead.

When the family gather for a divination to conjure the spirit of their departed patriarch, death visits the house once more, and the brilliant Kosuke Kindaichi is called in to investigate.

But before he can get to the truth Kindaichi must uncover the Tsubakis’ most disturbing secrets, while the gruesome murders continue…

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My Review: A peek at the very immediate aftermath of WWII in bombed-out Tokyo, and the dreadful inconvenience all this war nonsense with its barbaric social leveling brings to The Better Classes.

Deeply dislikable "noble" people doing disreputable things for ignoble motives, aaahhh there's the sweet spot for a story! The supernatural window-dressing was sort of fun. Seances are entertaining silliness in fiction, cynical and sordid manipulations in person. The one in this book is, oddly, both; the fact is the "supernatural" gubbins of the music playing eerily would not work at all in today's world, but was very amusingly handled so flew under my eyeroll threshhold.

Again, and as always in this vintage of Japanese crime novels (based on my limited sample size, anyway), be prepared for the sleuth to know things you do not. You're here to be Dr. Watson, or Inspector Japp, not Hercule or Sherlock. Accept this and enter in the spirit of "what did bombed-out Tokyo look like?" and this read will both entertain and educate you. Kosuke Kindaichi's rumpled Columbo-like presentation of self is a lot more...unusual, noticeable, in Japanese society both then and now. The author's choice to make him rumpled is making a statement about surfaces in a country where they're even more important than they are here in the West.

I land on four stars, per usual in this series, for the fun of being in this very, very dissimilar-to-mine world.