Japanese Gothic is a wonderfully gruesome ghost story

I’ll offer the usual warning: horror novel Japanese gothic It is best to try to enter with as little information as possible. Content warnings regarding gory, scenes of domestic violence, self-harm and mental illness. If you’re okay with that, consider stopping here. While I’ll try to keep this relatively spoiler-free, there will be some plot points that I can’t avoid.

Lee Turner is an NYU student in 2026 who fled to Japan to stay with his father after killing his roommate. He can’t quite remember why he did it, or where he stashed the body, partly because Lee stumbled through life in a haze of tranquilizers ranging from Benadryl to Ativan.

Going back a century and a half, Sen Iwasaki is the daughter of a samurai, trained by her father to become 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 samurai attempted to revolt against Emperor Meiji’s imperial army and were mercilessly crushed.

What the two share is a home. Nearly 150 years after the Sen family sought refuge in the house behind the sword fern, so does Li, and a portal opens between their worlds.

Lee believes that Sin is a bridge to the world of the dead. Through her, he believes he may be able to find out what happened to his mother, who disappeared when he was just 12 years old.

From here, the mysteries continue to pile up. Why does the door between their worlds only open at certain times? How did Sin die? Why is Hina (Lee’s father’s friend) acting strange? Why didn’t Sin’s father die on the battlefield?

You’ll see some ups and downs coming, but they don’t detract from the experience. The plot is mind-boggling and full of unreliable narrators. The truth is eventually revealed in a climax that somehow seems more dreamlike than the rest of the novel.

In the hands of a lesser writer, such a complex novel might seem unnecessarily confusing. But Baker’s vision is clear; Her prose is, at times, brilliant and grotesque. There are many passages that describe in great detail the salty taste of blood, teeth coming out of a person’s skull, and the “ropes” of intestines. But there are also passages that describe Gastronomy as “TV static,” or Sen as not a girl, but a “refraction of light.” This is one of my favorite phrases: “Once upon a time, a house felt like its heart was beating. Now it just looks like a piece of driftwood chewed up by rot.”

naturally, Japanese gothic It’s not just a time-bending ghost story. It addresses generational trauma, child abuse, colonialism, patriarchy, and mental health. It’s equal parts folk horror, crime thriller, and gothic fantasy. Most importantly, it is compulsively readable.