Worldwide Horror: A Beginner’s Guide to Japanese Horror Lit
J-Horror is a genre unto itself.
Most genre fans are familiar with Japanese horror movies. Even if you haven’t seen the original versions of The Ring, Ju-On: The Grudge, or Godzilla, you’ve likely seen their many American remakes and sequels. Japanese filmmakers like Takashi Miike revolutionized extreme horror cinema, and Kinji Fukasaku’s shocking dystopian thriller Battle Royale paved the way for The Hunger Games.
But Japan’s relationship with the macabre goes far beyond film. From the ghosts and yokai of traditional folklore, to the supernatural subplots of kabuki plays, to the nightmarish creations of contemporary manga artists, Japan has a rich history of grim and ghoulish fiction.
If you haven’t delved into Japanese horror literature, here are five classics and modern classics to get you started. (Bonus: Most of these have movie adaptations!)
Ring by Koji Suzuki
On one level, you know the gist: investigating a string of inexplicable deaths, a journalist finds a cursed videotape that will kill anyone who watches it within a week. The quest to solve the riddle of the tape leads to a tortured spirit: a young girl with strange powers, cast into a well.
But if you’ve seen any of the many Ring movies, you’ll be caught completely off guard by the original novel.
One of the biggest differences is in the characters. Where the movies see an amicably divorced couple joining forces to save their son, the novel centres around a male journalist and his sociopathic best friend. This disturbing relationship personifies the perversity at the heart of the story, the protagonist finding parallels between the ghost girl and his friend’s fractured, predatory personality.
Hideo Nakata’s film adaptation revels in unsettling imagery and surrealistic flourishes. Koji Suzuki’s novel is methodically plotted and more accessible in style, but somehow even more disorienting: a mystery that grows more perplexing with every clue, the ghost story giving way to an evil apocalyptic in scale.
Rashomon and Seventeen Other Stories by Ryūnosuke Akutagawa
Translated by Jay Rubin, introduction by Haruki Murakami
Rashomon and Seventeen Other Stories collects 18 works by Ryūnosuke Akutagawa, one of Japan's most iconic literary figures. Among them is his most overtly horrific work: "Hell Screen," a harrowing tale of obsession and cruelty, starring an artist whose perfectionism drives him to madness, a corrupt nobleman, and an innocent girl doomed to a fiery demise.
But this is far from the only Akutagawa story that will ensnare admirers of the macabre. Much of his work incorporates black humour and dark folk traditions; his comedic and historical fiction is rife with bizarre transformations, beheadings, religious persecution, insanity, and death. “Rashomon” (one of the inspirations for the Akira Kurosawa film) will appeal to fans of the gothic: set in a rainstorm, underneath a once-grand entranceway reduced to a dumping ground for unclaimed corpses, it exposes the depravity humans are capable of, once the veneer of respectability erodes. “In a Bamboo Grove” (which provided most of the material for the aforementioned film) features a bone-chilling crime solved by a séance.
This collection also includes a chronicle of the author’s troubled life, which ended in suicide in 1927, and an admiring but frank essay by Haruki Murakami, who sees signs of insecurity in Akutagawa’s chameleonic writing style and fondness for historical settings. Akutagawa was haunted by the loss of his mother to mental illness, regrets over his infidelities, pressure to adapt to Japan’s changing literary landscape, and various family tragedies. The book concludes with the autobiographical "Spinning Gears," a nightmarish portrait of psychological turmoil which sees the author plagued with anxiety and stalked by grim omens.
Audition by Ryū Murakami
The inspiration for the shocking Takashi Miike film, Audition is a quietly sinister novel about lies.
After years of mourning, widowed entertainment industry executive Aoyama decides to hold auditions for a new wife. He falls in love with Asami before ever seeing her, touched by her melancholic cover letter. When they finally meet, she’s everything he imagined – never mind that some of the details don’t add up.
The sleaziness of the endeavour (Asami and the other prospective brides believe they’re trying out for a movie role) is complicated by the fact that Aoyama is otherwise an honourable man. This is one of the many dissonant notes in a story that might otherwise be mistaken for a romance – at least until the whiplash-inducing violence of the ending.
The discordance of Murakami’s writing makes it impossible to read Audition as a revenge novel or straightforward morality play. His characters are too complex, their actions at once sympathetic and inexplicable. At its core, Audition is about the human capacity to deceive and be deceived; how we reveal only the parts of ourselves we want others to see and, conversely, how we fool ourselves into seeing what we want to see in others.
Japanese Ghost Stories by Lafcadio Hearn
Edited by Paul A. Murray
Lafcadio Hearn was a Greek/Irish journalist whose career took him from Cincinnati to New Orleans to the West Indies and, finally, to Japan, where he married, held various academic posts, and dedicated himself to preserving Japanese folklore.
This Penguin Classics volume is packed with vengeful ghosts, vicious demons, and superhuman deities. Often augmented with Hearn's reflections on Japanese culture and human nature more broadly, the tales collected are a mix of traditional ghost stories, local legends, stage drama synopses, Buddhist parables, and the author's firsthand experiences with spirituality and superstition. (The most charmingly understated pieces recount conversations between Hearn, his amiable in-laws, and Japanese locals who share their personal beliefs and tragedies – for instance, a widower who believes his wife’s ghost returns to nurse their infant son).
Hearn approaches the material respectfully, his journalistic sensibilities allowing him to find the truth within the most fanciful myth.
Uzumaki by Junji Ito
Manga author Junji Ito is renowned in the horror scene for his phantasmagorically freakish illustrations, which are at turns awe-inspiring and revolting – body horror on a cosmic scale. His true brilliance may be how he integrates nightmare into reality. Ito’s settings are unremarkable, everyday places; his protagonists tend to be mild-mannered, normal people; strangeness invades so quickly the characters have no time to comprehend how profoundly their world has changed.
His epic manga series Uzumaki chronicles a town tormented by mysterious spirals.
These swirls, Ito reveals, can be found everywhere in nature. Fingerprints. Tornados. Snail shells. Even inside the human ear. So, when the townspeople of Kurouzu-cho become obsessed with the patterns, there’s no escape.
The curse unfolds through the eyes of a teenage girl (Kirie), whose boyfriend (Shuichi) is the first to notice the spirals’ insidious influence. The structure of the book is episodic, filled with storylines that seem ripped from teen romance comics (A cute new girl tries to steal Kirie’s boyfriend! Lovestruck teens defy their feuding parents! A boy skips class after being bullied!). Of course, the new girl’s pretty face collapses into an all-consuming whirlpool, the star-crossed lovers fuse together, and the bullied boy transforms into a giant snail. That’s all before things get really crazy.
In a weird way, Uzumaki is a love story. Kirie dotes on Shuichi even as he sinks into paranoid isolation, and when she needs him, Shuichi overcomes his mounting madness to protect her. The manga’s final image is as romantic as it is horrific.
By Madison McSweeney
Twitter: @MMcSw13
Instagram: madison.mcsweeney13
