ramblings on strange pictures by uketsu
“people sometimes say that every child is an artist, and i feel that is not far from the truth.”
this book follows exactly what the title says, strange pictures. in each chapter you see a character trying to deconstruct the mystery behind a new odd drawing they stumble across, on a blog, at a school, left at a murder scene. as the book progresses the mysteries connect and the web being spun begins to unveil the story being told.
i was thoroughly enamoured by this book. halfway through it i went and bought uketsu’s second book strange houses knowing that i would need more of his writing. going into this i actually thought it was going to be a collection of short stories around haunted pictures, and that’s not what i got but i loved it so much more than i think i would have liked a short story collection. i haven’t really delved into the world of mystery books so i can’t speak on how well this served as one, but i had so much fun reading it. i’ve seen quite a few people say that the theorizing and reaches in this are unrealistic and well, yes. they totally are but i didn’t care, they’re still fun and kept me excited.
overall if you want a fun engaging read to get you out of a slump or give you a break from dense literature, an uketsu book is my suggestion. i myself am very impatiently waiting to get my hands on strange buildings so i can binge that as well.
oh my goodness. so I ended up making a chart (pictured at the end) to connect all the characters and their stories together as I was reading. because i didn’t realize these were not unrelated short stories when naomi was revealed to be raku’s mother at the end of chapter 2 my jaw dropped. i got so excited to start putting together all the puzzle pieces.
i am such a sucker for analog horror, it’s one of my favourite horror tropes so the majority of this chapter being told through blog posts was so fun for me. the blog also made the story seem more realistic than the other chapters, i’ve seen enough weird corners of the internet to know that people will post anything and everything online and the posts raku was making didn’t seem far out. the dynamic between raku and yuki that we see from these posts is odd to me. the almost childlike devotion and awe he holds towards her unnerves me, and having finished the book i think it’s intentional and stems from his sheltered childhood and looking up to yuki from a young age. i really liked that it was spurred by friends getting invested in the online mystery of the blog, i have definitely had my fair share of fixations on random internet pages and trying to understand them. this reads like an ARG (alternate reality game) that someone orchestrated and there most likely are some very similar to this premise. the actual aspect of them changing the dimensions of the drawings and moving them around and laying them out specifically was a little silly, but i did get a bit of a chill when the final image was revealed, and the fact that yuki was a graphic designer and actually had the knowledge to arrange the drawings like that made.
this one i have more mixed feelings about. the actual drawing and mystery of the man following naomi and yuta was interesting and eerie. on its own it’s a sad yet heartwarming story of a young boy being raised by his grandmother and missing his mother, of the grandmother realizing that she has to acknowledge his birth mother and let him grieve that relationship, that she can’t just completely replace her. yet the way it plays out with naomi being so paranoid about their safety but not contacting authorities or seeking much help when yuta goes missing just shows that something in their relationship is wrong. it made sense for yuta’s teacher to be worried and start speculating bad things about naomi’s seeming lack of concern for his safety, but at the same time it wasn’t something i was necessarily excited to read about. the best parts of this chapter in my opinion were the moments focusing on the man following naomi, where you can see her mindset and how calculating and prepared she is. the reveal at the end that she was not only yuta’s grandmother instead of his mother, but also raku’s (haruto) mother was probably the most exciting part of the book for me. it’s when i realized i needed to lock in and start piecing things together.
this chapter was probably my favourite, i love learning about unsolved cases and trying to put together what happened and this chapter had the best of that in my opinion. from the start of it i knew iaomi had to have been involved somehow, and uketsu purposely omitted the name of miura’s wife and gave her a small role in the puzzle so you aren’t too focused on her. again, i love when books utilize blog posts, threads, texts, newspapers, etc. so having the first few parts of this chapter be police reports of the scene was so fun. i liked the characters of kumai and iwata more than the other chapters’ side characters, they had a real motive to solve the case aside from just pure curiosity. while i initially wasn’t too suspicious of kameido (later revealed to be yuki), the story did a good job of leading you to suspect her by the time iwata is being killed only to surprise you again by the killer being naomi. the actual details of the crime are pretty grisly and as someone who listens to a lot of true crime cases and documentaries the food digestion aspects were so unique and interesting. i’m not a scientist or too well versed in medical knowledge so i don’t know exactly how accurate and realistic it is but it sounds plausible enough. i also enjoyed that the drawing was a bit of a red herring, it wasn’t as important to solving the case as the investigators thought, thus as a reader you put more thought into how the drawing connects things, what it means, only for it to draw your attention away from the real clues.
trying to figure out what yuki “did” that led to her almost murder, only to find out that it was just jealousy and fear of getting older stung. despite not agreeing with the things naomi did, and finding a lot of her thoughts horrible, i was surprised by how understandable it all was. of course because of her childhood she was overly protective of her son. of course when yuki discovered what naomi’s plan was she did what she felt was best for her baby instead of confronting her. it all made sense to me which made the book surprisingly heartfelt. having now read two of uketsu’s books i’m pleasantly surprised by the fact that i didn’t walk away from them with no emotional response to the storyline or the characters he creates. i wasn’t expecting such strong throughlines of family and unconditional (to a fault) love, and the fact that the book had these themes and the emotional depth to it made it really enjoyable to me
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