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annathepiperWhen one is accustomed to the trends of American fantasy novels, it's a refreshing shock to the system to come across a clean, spare little book like Taichi Yamada's Strangers. The blurbs on the cover call it a "ghost story"; it is exactly that, delivered without pretention and with a classic sort of eerieness that hearkens back to The Twilight Zone and even farther, with echoes of mythic tales of what one must and must not do when encountering the dead.
Hideo Harada is a middle-aged TV scriptwriter in Tokyo who has just suffered through a divorce. In an attempt to regain emotional stability in his life, he returns to the neighborhood where he'd grown up--and encounters a strange couple who appear to be his parents, exactly as they were the year they died, when he was twelve years of age. In the hands of another writer (many American horror writers come to mind), things would get overtly creepy very fast, but Yamada is more subtle than that. He lets the eerie flavor of his prose build slowly through the plot, and saves the payoff for the final few pages.
Having just visited Tokyo in the time of year in which this story was set and having recognized some of the place names as train stops during my stay, I found the novel particularly effective. Readers unfamiliar with Tokyo won't have that edge, but I don't think that'll be a detriment to enjoyment in the slightest. Four stars.
Hideo Harada is a middle-aged TV scriptwriter in Tokyo who has just suffered through a divorce. In an attempt to regain emotional stability in his life, he returns to the neighborhood where he'd grown up--and encounters a strange couple who appear to be his parents, exactly as they were the year they died, when he was twelve years of age. In the hands of another writer (many American horror writers come to mind), things would get overtly creepy very fast, but Yamada is more subtle than that. He lets the eerie flavor of his prose build slowly through the plot, and saves the payoff for the final few pages.
Having just visited Tokyo in the time of year in which this story was set and having recognized some of the place names as train stops during my stay, I found the novel particularly effective. Readers unfamiliar with Tokyo won't have that edge, but I don't think that'll be a detriment to enjoyment in the slightest. Four stars.