Uketsu's Strange Houses and the Labyrinth of Domesticity

Encountering interiors and ourselves

I remember going to my friend Sarah’s house in middle school. Her family lived in one of these preserved historic homes where nothing could change. I found these houses beautiful for their stateliness and their ghostliness. This particular American Revolution-period relic held a secret passageway. It felt completely taboo to enter it —and poetic at the same time. It’s not unrelated that this childhood friend has become a professional poet.

A home should be a shell¹. But protection and closeness can likewise hide horror.

Photo by Mitchell Luo on Unsplash

On a recent night when I was alone and up well past bedtime in our tatami room, I read Uketsu’s Strange Houses in one scary and satisfying sitting. The Japanese pseudonymous horror author is totally creepy, but also fun. You can check out his YouTube.com page to see what I mean.

Well, honestly, the book is not satisfying in traditional murder mystery ways. The end is highly ambiguous. The puzzle merely partially solved. Only after pondering this firstly annoying conclusion for a few days did I realize how good the book truly is. Don’t worry; I’ll avoid spoilers, for there are still many answers provided to the novel’s questions.

At the surface, this book just feels fun…a page turner, a fascinating story. The fun is partially due to the way we as readers are given visual evidence and archive – namely, maps of homes – to support the investigation of the crime. It’s not exactly a whodunnit…we don’t know who has been killed. We just know there’s something wrong and the perception of such creates a drive toward discovery.

Not only is the audience a part of the narrative in this way, but Uketsu himself makes a late appearance as the ‘Author’ who has been our protagonist and narrator from the start, a little like Paul Auster at the end of City of Glass². However, Uketsu is already a fabrication, a fictional character performed by an unnamed author. So, is this the real-fake Uketsu or a new kind of self-referencing author?

An additional narratological aspect I enjoyed was the movement between classic narration and dramatic or script-like text between ‘Author’ (who also plays the armchair detective role) and Kurihari, his architectural expert and confidant, as well as witnesses and family members affected by the crime.

The mixing of text types both creates a more intimate relationship with the narrator and a more distanced, critical relationship with the other characters. The layers of complexity cause us to second-guess motives and create high awareness of the metafictional elements at play.

Press conference with the Foreign Correspondent’s Club of Japan (FCCJ)

UKETSU:

Why do they read these strange books written by this strange man?…

If I had to describe my novels, I’d like to call them comic-like novels or manga-like novels….I just hope that Japanese young people can discover the joy of reading novels through my books. … I hope they will have the courage to read [more challenging] books.

As I mentioned, the ending is less than clean when it comes to tying up loose ends. Hidden identities remain, and we have to conclude many elements on our own, or hope for a sequel. At first, this left me feeling a little empty. It was an amusing read, sure, but what have I taken from this? A crime involving severed hands and expectations of legacies is nothing especially new or provocative. And what was the meaning? The lessons or relevant themes?

We expect a clean finish with crime. In a note at the end of the English version, the translator, Jim Rion, explains that he felt there was simply too much left hanging and wrote to ask for at least addressing a dead body at the center of the story, initially abandoned in the latter third of the novel. Uketsu complied, suggesting that either he felt a culturally different audience needed this or that it was generally a strong editorial request. Nobody was forcing this change.

But I still felt the frustrating equivocacy for days after reading. Sitting with ambiguity, in the same way a modernist novelist might deliberately take us, is perhaps the point, I realized. Our dissatisfaction is our weakness and our strength, a kind of pharmakon³ that clarifies the strangeness of the world we live in, even the strangeness of our own domestic spaces.

In essence the book becomes self-questioning. The details of the crime or ending are not really the point of this investigation.

How could these evils happen right next to us, while we are sleeping? While we walk by a window on the sidewalk? And how do we make sense of a world where they do?

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Have you read this book? I’d love to hear your thoughts! A friend suggested that his first book, Strange Pictures, is better, so I’ll give that a try as well.

Aside: I feel inspired to include a few simple drawings in my rewrite of The Man from Brooklyn. Notably, Auster’s City of Glass, which I mentioned above, also makes use of these.

Update on the January reading list I shared a few weeks ago:

⬩I also read Clancy Steadwell ’s The Big T in one sitting (on an airplane from Boston to Hong Kong) and loved it. It has some of the classic investigations of (American) adolescence you may recognize as homage to Highsmith, Roth, Knowles, DFW, and Salinger.

⬩I’m rereading Kundera’s The Unbearable Lightness of Being for the classroom in parallel with Anne Michaels’ Held (recommended by Kate Jones in this article). I’m finding some wonderful symmetry between the photographer protagonists, metafiction, jumpy narrative, and haunting images of wartime violence mixed with beauty and love.

⬩Zadie Smith’s book of essays has popped into my hands on a several occasions, and upon each episode of encounter, I have left feeling lighter and even more optimistic. For in this wild world we are living in, whether worse or just more exposed, writers and artists, teachers and parents, whatever your profession or daily habits – we can all little by little envelope the baddies and turn their hatred and fear into dust.

⬩To add to the pile, my husband bought me Nigel Slater’s A Thousand Feasts while recently in London (ah, I do miss those bookshops…). As many have heard me wax poetic about Julia Child, I do adore food writing and the meta of chefs and culinary authors.

1. …as I was recently reminded by architect-writer-teacher Julie Gabrielli with homage to Gaston Bachelard’s The Poetics of Space.

2. Check out a recent pastiche on this novella — one of my favorites — by Feasts and Fables here: Wild Goose or my series on Auster.

3. A concept I explored on the podcast.