Japanese Gothic is a gorgeously grotesque ghost story | The Verge
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Japanese Gothic is a gorgeously grotesque ghost story
Kylie Lee Baker’s latest is my favorite novel of the year (so far).
Kylie Lee Baker’s latest is my favorite novel of the year (so far).
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I’ll give the usual caveat: The horror novel Japanese Gothic is best experienced going in with as little information as possible. Content warnings for graphic gore, scenes of domestic violence, self-harm, and mental illness. If you’re okay with that, then consider pausing here. While I will try to keep this relatively spoiler-free, there will be some plot points I can’t avoid.
Kylie Lee Baker’s latest novel, following her acclaimed Bat Eater and Other Names for Cora Zeng, is sort of a ghost story and sort of a time travel story. It follows two protagonists.
Lee Turner is an NYU student in 2026 who has fled to Japan to stay with his father after murdering his roommate. He can’t quite remember why he did it, or where he stashed the body, partially because Lee stumbles through life in a haze of sedatives ranging from Benadryl to Ativan.
Jumping back a century and a half, Sen Iwasaki is the daughter of a samurai, trained by her father to be a warrior. She lives in hiding with her family, many years after the samurai were effectively abolished. Her father is one of the few survivors of the Satsuma Rebellion, in which the samurai attempted to rise up against Emperor Meiji’s imperial army and were mercilessly crushed.
What the two share is a house. Nearly 150 years after Sen’s family seeks refuge in the house behind the sword ferns, so too does Lee, and a portal opens up between their worlds.
Lee believes that Sen is a bridge to the world of the dead. He thinks that, through her, he might be able to find out what happened to his mother, who went missing when he was just 12.
From here, the mysteries just keep piling up. Why does the door between their worlds only open during certain times? How did Sen die? Why is Hina (Lee’s dad’s girlfriend) acting so strangely? Why didn’t Sen’s father die on the battlefield?
Some of the twists you’ll see coming, but it doesn’t take away from the experience. The plot is mind-bending and filled with unreliable narrators. The truth is eventually revealed in a climax that somehow feels more dreamlike than the rest of the novel.
In the hands of a lesser writer, such a convoluted narrative could feel unnecessarily confusing. But Baker’s vision is clear; her prose is, at turns, gorgeous and grotesque. There are plenty of passages that describe in great detail the salty taste of blood, teeth clattering out of a person’s skull, and “ropes” of intestines. But there are also passages that describe food tasting of “TV static,” or Sen as being not a girl, but a “refraction of light.” This is one of my favorite lines: “Once, the house had felt like it had a heartbeat. Now it only felt like a piece of driftwood chewed through with rot.”
Of course, Japanese Gothic isn’t just a time-bending ghost story. It tackles generational trauma, child abuse, colonialism, the patriarchy, and mental health. It’s equal parts folk horror, crime thriller, and gothic fiction. And most importantly, it’s compulsively readable.
Japanese Gothic is available on most ebook stores, but I highly recommend you buy a physical copy at your local independent bookshop or support your local library.
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