Spoiler warning: this post discusses the full plot, including the ending. If you haven’t read the book yet, come back later.
My book club is discussing Strange Houses next week, so I’m writing down my thoughts first. I spotted the oddities in the floor plans almost immediately, but I still never saw where they were pointing.
The setup
Strange Houses is the follow-up to Uketsu’s Strange Pictures. The novel is built around the floor plans of two houses, and the story is told through conversations between Uketsu, the narrator, and Kurihara, an architect friend who reads the layouts like a detective reads a crime scene.
But for myself, I read this book first before the Strange Pictures. And it’s ok, each book can be read stand alone.
The way the book teaches you to read it is the clever part. You aren’t handed a mystery and then a solution. You’re handed drawings and left to decide what looks wrong.
What I noticed first
When I first looked at the plan, a few things stood out to me right away. Not the hidden space on the ground floor, but the second floor:
- A bedroom inside a bedroom. Why would a room only be reachable through someone else’s sleeping space? Nobody builds a house like that on purpose, and nobody lives comfortably in one.
- A sink on the second floor. It’s easy to explain away. Maybe it’s a utility corner, maybe a wet area. That’s exactly what makes it useful to the author. But usually, it will be put on the ground floor, isn’t it ?
Here’s the thing though: I noticed both oddities, but it never occurred to me to connect them to killing someone and disposing of a body. That’s the real trick of the book. The clues are in plain sight, and the reader’s mind rationalises them before it gets suspicious.
My practical solution, if I were the buyer, would be to buy the house and knock down the walls. That doesn’t work in the story, because the characters are investigating a house they don’t own. It’s also a fair question for discussion: how much can you actually investigate a property before you’ve bought it?
The Katabuchi family tree
The second half of the book moves away from the plans and into family history, and that’s where I started losing track of who was who. So I built a family tree for myself and my book club.
A quick orientation:
- Kaei is the patriarch. He chose his legitimate eldest son Soichiro as heir over Seikichi, his illegitimate but more capable son. Everything else grows out of that decision.
- Soichiro had an incestuous relationship with his sister Chizuru. Their twins, Asato and Momoya, are where the story turns dark: Momoya was born without a left hand and was hidden away in the house.
- After Soichiro’s wife Ushio died, he built a ritual called the Offering of the Left Hand, and Momoya became its instrument.
- Seikichi had at least seven children. The book only names one of them, Yayoi, the youngest. The fourth child was a victim of the ritual.
Is Yayoi the villain?
This is the question I’d most like to argue about. Yayoi’s brother was killed in a ritual she had no hand in creating. Her response was to pass a curse to her descendants: kill members of the head family.
Soichiro did something similar. He made a child carry a burden that wasn’t his. Yayoi hands that same burden to people who aren’t born yet.
So is she a villain, or a survivor who had nothing else to hold on to? The book never shows her point of view directly. We only hear about her through Kurihara’s reasoning, which is a nice way to leave it open.
Yoshie, Misaki, and Kurihara’s theory
The most unsettling part is Kurihara’s theory about Yoshie, Yayoi’s granddaughter, who married into the head family.
- Misaki, a daughter-in-law of Shigeharu, was expecting a child who, like Momoya, would be born without a left hand. Shigeharu locked her up.
- Misaki had phoned Yoshie, and she was locked up the very next morning. Coincidence?
- Yoshie also had the old bundle of paper with the five precepts of the Offering, one of the head family’s most prized possessions. How did she get it?
Kurihara’s theory is that Yoichi’s death, her husband’s accident, and Keita’s rebellion may all have been part of Yoshie’s plan. It is a theory. The narrator himself says it sounds ridiculous at first, then admits several things about Yoshie bother him too.
Who is actually “evil” here?
The more I look at the tree, the less it looks like good against evil. Almost everyone on it does something terrible: Kaei with his favouritism, Soichiro with the ritual, Shigeharu with Misaki, Yayoi with the curse, maybe Yoshie with her plan. And the biggest victim of all is Momoya.
On the tree, each character has a short note on what they did that makes your skin crawl, along with a reminder where the book leaves things uncertain.
Questions I’m bringing to book club
- When did you first realise something was wrong with the floor plan, and which clue did you explain away?
- Does the floor-plan format make the horror stronger, or does it get in the way of the story?
- Is Yayoi a villain or a victim? Is passing on a curse different from what Soichiro did?
- How much do you trust Kurihara’s theory about Yoshie?
- What happens to Keita at the end?
- Does the author’s anonymous, masked persona change how you read the book?
If you’ve read it, I’d love to hear where you landed, especially on Yoshie.
What I like about this book.
This is the book which afterwards triggered me to read all the books by Uketsu. I love how he ended it as open ending. I finished reading this book in only several hours. But the one amaze me was that when I was having difficulty in memorizing all the Japanese names, and trying to write all down, it turns out giving a more complex result. I was curious on the family tree, so I asked Claude’s help to write it down. After going back and forth with discussion, correction here and there, it surprises me how a very thin book is actually giving a story of 7 generations of family, from 2 branches. Really extraordinary for me.
P.S. I don’t quite like the Strange Buildings, so I will skip it, and discuss about Strange Pictures in my next posting.
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