Read “Strange Houses”by Uketsu (translated by Jim Rion) and even if I didn’t entirely jive with the conclusion I still think it’s a great breezy read that kept me tense the entire time. The diagrams were a very cool touch. I read about a third of it sitting at my airport gate for 2 hrs but it was pretty successful in keeping me engrossed instead of eavesdropping on people loudly talking on their phones, haha.
Very excited to read “Strange Pictures” (the first Uketsu book translated to English I believe, even though Strange Houses was actually his first publication?). I heard there was a sequel or something to Strange Houses in Japan so I’ll probably wishlist that ASAP if it gets a translation too.
Some rambling thoughts and theories on the story below (spoiler alert):
Kurihara is weird as hell. I haven’t read Strange Pictures yet but I read somewhere that he was in it briefly. I don’t know if I should interpret his immediate jump to “haha this is a murder house and the murderer is a child” at the beginning as friends shooting the shit and making farfetched fun theories together or if he genuinely knew something was up, especially based on his Afterword where he points out the flaws in Uketsu’s recounting of the story. For my own farfetched theory, maybe he was the architect who designed the murder house(s) for the Katabuchi family. How convenient!
So was that unidentified dead body from the beginning Keita? It has to be??? it makes no sense to me that Yoshie so conveniently had this letter outlining his entire game plan to show Yuzuki and Uketsu, especially timed around Uketsu’s article about the weird house and Yuzuki’s meetings with him. (I’m not too surprised she had those old texts about the ritual’s requirements, considering her late husband likely had access to them.) I think Yoshie and her daughters were collaborating on this from the start, especially because Yoshie was from the branch family, and was using Keita as a scapegoat/tool for both the ritual and to get revenge against the main family by killing them off to inherit their fortune (as Kurihara conveniently posited). When that was done they probably disposed of Keita since he’s the only person who would know the full details of this whole story and could easily blow that whole house of cards down if he went to the police. Throwing in the detail about her grandma being a Katabuchi branch member was kind of stupid on Yoshie’s part but maybe not — anyone with a brain would have immediately went “wait what are the chances of her marrying back into the main family” but the narrator really did just let things happen to/around him instead of acting. The fact that Uketsu chose not to visit Ayano with Yoshie and Yuzuki at the end was kind of funny — both because it shows how very proper he was trying to be about their supposed grief and because now that he was in this deep they could have targeted him too (assuming they did kill Keita, the two husbands, and maybe Yoshie’s sister in law because she showed she was willing to go the police when Yoichi was murdered). Mr Uketsu PLEASE practice some basic safety by texting your friends about where you’re going.
Those poor kids, man. I read someone’s theory that Yoshie and her daughters might try to continue the cycle (but I don’t know if that means killing the kids and Yoshie’s daughters since they’re the only remaining main Katabuchi family members or what) but Momoya being an isolated and potentially brainwashed child does not bode well if his aunt is also a murderous puppetmaster. After all, we never see the boy.
The shift in Keita’s story, from theorized protector to potential puppet/prisoner, is intriguing. Are his parents actually looking for him? Did he really marry Ayano of his own volition if she literally had a guard watching her at all times and the Katabuchi family was so rich and powerful? (Do Japanese cops do DNA analysis regularly for unidentified does? Do they have something like NAMUS in Japan? You’d think so but I suppose that only works if Keita’s relatives put their DNA up for matching.) Maybe this story is making me conspiracy-brained but I wonder if he was also related to the Katabuchi family, being from the same area as the grandparents and that there’s several of Seikichi’s children unaccounted for (probably a few daughters besides Yoshie’s grandma and the potential 4th murder victim from the original ritual — but if Seikichi was a ladies man he could very well have bastard kids) and we don’t know how young Shigeharu’s brothers were when they died (though Yoshie would surely have mentioned them having kids who’d probably inherit a lot if they existed). If we assume Yoshie was manipulating everything from the start, including purposefully seeking out her husband to ingratiate herself into the main branch, then I doubt the family would hesitate about arranging a marriage between Ayano and Keita if they were related. Their marriage would parallel the potential relationship between Yoshie and her husband, as in using your spouse to do the dirty work of murder and then killing them. (I wonder why Shigeharu allowed Yoshie and his son to marry, though. Did he just assume there wouldn’t be another ritual needed where his half-branch family grandkids might be convenient targets or did he not know Yoshie was a branch member? Surely he did? Did he set up Ayano and Yuzuki to be two potential sacrifices so that Yoshie and her husband were really trying to protect them?) The bend towards incest isn’t something Uketsu (as author) shies away from so this theory isn’t entirely out of the blue, but it might be implausible based on what Uketsu gave us as narrator. Anyway, it’s a cool parallel that Yoshie might have used Ayano-through-Keita (brainwashed puppet influencing the actual murderer to action) to murder the main branch members in the same way that their ancestor Shizuko used Seichiro-through-Asata to murder her rival wives’ sons. Fun for the whole family!
For a while I thought there would be some big revelation that Ayano and Yuzuki were actually the same person. This got dispelled with the family photo in Yoshie’s apartment but I still think it would be funny if the second girl was a school friend or something and Yuzuki really was Ayano. Sadly Uketsu was too nice to go meet her (or get murdered idk) but considering how shady Yuzuki was in the first place I would have been researching the shit out of her to make sure she was even real.
Kurihara what the fuck is your deal.