Another fascinating, bizarre title from Uketsu--Japan's black body-stockinged, white-masked YouTube sensation--arrives Stateside, in his third collaboration with Jim Rion, translator and advocate for the author. "I am happy to say that Strange Houses was well received and read by a great number of people," Uketsu writes as preface, "with the result that many of those same readers began sending me their own 'house' stories." From those submissions, Uketsu's unnamed narrator chooses 11 mysterious domiciles that compose Strange Buildings, another puzzling, meticulously revealed exposé of the abusive, careless, loathsome humanity within.
A neglected daughter recalls a hallway to nowhere. A forensic cleaner remembers a home he attended after a teenager allegedly committed a triple murder. A CEO recalls a childhood sleepover in a luxurious mansion that ended in a fatal accident. An office worker who thought he bought a 26-year-old house learns that a woman's corpse was found there--more than 80 years ago. An obscure article reports on the Hall of Rebirth, home to the Rebirth Congregation cult. Two childhood next-door neighbors are convinced their fathers were murderers. A 79-year-old izakaya owner speaks about her imprisonment in an okito, a yakuza-controlled brothel, to pay off her business debt.
Complete with exacting architectural layouts, each of the 11 structures are somehow connected, their mysteries solved with assistance from Kurihara, the insightful draughtsman friend from Strange Houses. Uketsu plants both clues and red herrings throughout (creepiest of all is a one-armed, one-legged doll) to create a labyrinth of horrors that will prove eerily, unnervingly irresistible to tenacious and curious readers. --Terry Hong