“In the house behind the sword ferns, there was a man, and a murderer, and a stain.” Kylie Lee Baker, the author of Bat Eater and Other Names for Cora Zeng, builds a beautifully haunting tale in her latest horror novel, Japanese Gothic, which came out in April. The title of this novel is, I assume, playing upon Silvia Moreno-Garcia’s highly successful Mexican Gothic, which heralded the current resurgence of the Gothic in popular horror literature. But while Mexican Gothic is a sweeping tale of family drama, generational sins, and colonialism, Japanese Gothic is a quieter story in which the entangled lives of an American college dropout and a young samurai woman play out in a small house tucked away at the edge of reality.
Lee Turner has murdered his college roommate. But the worst part? He can’t remember why . . . or what he did with the body. Now he’s hiding out at his father’s new home in Chiran, Japan—a quaintly traditional house by the sea that is said to have once belonged to a samurai family. Lee’s days often pass him by in a haze as he pops sedatives to blunt the edges of his mind and become the kind of docile son that won’t aggravate his father’s heart condition. But when he discovers the ghost of a young samurai woman who inhabited the house three hundred years ago, Lee realizes this may be his one chance to bridge the veil between life and death and finally find answers about his mother’s disappearance. Sen is a samurai out of place and time. The emperor of Meiji Japan had dissolved the samurai class and Sen’s father returned in disgrace from the samurai rebellion. Now the family hides away in the house behind the sword ferns, waiting for the day when the imperial soldiers will inevitably find them. But Sen continues to train in the old ways, desperate to be deemed a proper samurai in her father’s eyes. When a strange foreign boy appears in the house at night, he promises to hold answers about the fate of her family. But neither Sen nor Lee are quite what they appear.
As is so often the case with the protagonists of Gothic novels, Lee Turner is an unreliable narrator. Two of the first things we learn about him are that he is addicted to sedatives, which blunt his perception of the world and ability to think clearly, and that he has troubling gaps in his memory. But as the novel goes on, it becomes clear that Lee’s unreliability goes deeper. He prides himself in his ability to read other people, but as the reader I found myself questioning Lee’s perception of his own self: he believes whatever strain of neurodivergence he has makes him fundamentally flawed, and that he must take sedatives in order to make himself tolerable to others, especially his father. From there, I began questioning Lee’s judgment of his father, whom he worships like a saint and is quick to excuse his faults. Ultimately, like the best of unreliable narrators going back to Shirley Jackson’s We Have Always Lived in the Castle, Lee is hiding a dark secret not just from others and from the reader, but also from his own conscious mind.
Japanese Gothic also puts an interesting spin on the haunted house story. Sen is not a ghost in the traditional sense. In fact, from her own perspective, she is still in the midst of living her life in 1877. But she and Lee soon discover that the closet door in the bedroom they both inhabit in different time periods serves as a sort of portal between worlds. At certain times of day, the portal opens and they can cross into each other’s timeline. Thus, it is not quite the usual unfinished business that causes Sen and Lee to haunt each other, but rather a peculiarity of the house itself, which seems to exist outside of or in between time. And it turns out the house is haunted by a supernatural presence much older than Sen or Lee.
If you like lyrical, atmospheric stories that play with classic tropes and twist in ways you’ll never see coming, definitely pick up Japanese Gothic! You can find it on shelves now at your favorite local retailer, or buy a copy online and support The Gothic Library using this Bookshop.org affiliate link. If you’ve already read it, let me know your thoughts in the comments!