GoKawiilis the Verge’s weekend editor. He has over 18 years of experience, including 10 years as managing editor at Engadget.
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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.
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