Japanese Gothic: A Gothic, Dual-Time Novel of Ghosts, Hauntings, and Redemption by Kylie Lee Baker
Many thanks to Harlequin Trade
Publishing, Hanover Square Press, and NetGalley for the advanced copy of Kylie
Lee Baker’s latest book Japanese Gothic. Gothic literature has been
around since the 18th century, and is largely characterized by a
dark and dreary mood and environment, and often involves hauntings, tragedies,
and horror. Furthermore, architecture and buildings, including the surrounding environments
like nature, forests, beaches, and gardens can all play an important, if not
sinister role in the plots of gothic literature. Kylie Lee Baker’s latest novel
emphasizes the dark and dreary elements of gothic, with the occasional blood-soaked
violence and gore that was a part of her last book, Bat Eater and Other Names for Cora Zeng. I was really impressed with Bat Eater, finding
it surprisingly dark and gory, yet also offering a sense of hope and a way to
deal with the anger and frustration of racism and discrimination. I thought
that maybe Baker had traded the rambling noise and squalid urban decay of NYC
for the quieter, if not more ominous trappings of the ghostly countryside of
Japan. Although Japanese Gothic is tonally different from Bat Eater,
there are still many similarities, including protagonists haunted and
traumatized by their past losses, a connection with spirits, and Baker’s unrelenting
pursuit of some of the goriest descriptions of violence (and I say this as a commendation).
I was cringing at the blood-soaked ending of the book. Like Bat Eater,
this book is also a wild ride, with many unexpected stops along the way;
however, there are also more moments of quiet introspection, as the main
character, Lee Turner, is kind of an introverted loner, whose dependence on medications
keeps him in a perpetual state of haze and fog. Part of this dependency, we
learn, is from his mother’s mysterious disappearance on a holiday in Cambodia
when Lee was 12.
Lee struggles to make sense of
his mother’s disappearance and his father’s muted response to this. Lee retains
some strange memories from this trip, recalling a voice from a suitcase, which
leads him to conclude that his mother was inside and possibly abducted by human
traffickers. The police and Lee’s father come to a different conclusion,
assuming that Lee’s mother drowned while out swimming. Neither option offers
much solace to Lee, who internalizes the absence and tries to please his father
by being an ideal son. Lee eventually ends up at NYU, while his father, a
professor of Japanese, ends up living in Japan after dating a series of Japanese
women. The story starts when Lee absconds to his father’s house, thinking he
has fled the murder of his roommate James, but unsure of what he did with the
body. Lee decides that fleeing to Japan to stay with his distant father and his
girlfriend Hina will allow him to escape responsibility and try to make sense
of his messy life.
Baker alternates chapters with
the story of Sen Iwasaki, a daughter of a samurai who lived in the house Lee’s
father now occupies, nearly 150 years before. Sen’s father was a prominent samurai
for the Shimazu Clan, but by 1877, samurais have basically been eradicated, and
Sen’s family struggles to find work and food to survive. We gradually learn
about Sen’s struggles to connect with her father, whose battle against the
empire led him to return a defeated and somewhat darker individual. Nevertheless,
he continues to train Sen since his sons are too young and weak to train. He
sees something in Sen, despite belittling her and sowing doubt about her instincts
to kill. We also learn about the tragedy of the house, as this once proud
family is reduced to eating porridge and hunting small animals while awaiting
for reprisals from their enemies. It’s a stark life that both contrasts and
mirrors Lee’s life in the present in some ways. Both characters deal with
distant or lost parents for whom they grieve, and both Sen and Lee try to
accommodate their living parents and connect with them in ways that seem
futile. The book is divided into 4 sections, and each section ends with a short
excerpt from a fairy tale about a fisherman who helps an injured turtle return
to the see. The turtle turns out to be the daughter of the Emperor of the Sea,
and as a result of the fisherman’s kindness, the fisherman is rewarded. It’s a
little unclear why this story is at the end of each section, but the ending of
the book ties these three stories together.
Both Lee and Sen are haunted by
those they lost. In addition to her father returning as a shamed warrior, Sen
has also lost a sister, and her spirit haunts Sen. Lee is also haunted by the
loss of his mother, but his senses are also highly attuned to others. He can
hear their heartbeats and know when others are lying due to their posture or
movements. These kinds of perceptions make Lee keenly aware of others’ emotions
but also seem to provide a kind of fixation that slowly drives him mad (almost
like a Poe narrator). One night, Lee hears and feels a heartbeat while lying in
bed. He gets up and listens to the room, eventually discovering a doorway in
the closet. Likewise, Sen lies awake in her room, communicating with her dead
sister, when she eventually is led to the doorway, allowing Lee and Sen to
transcend time and meet through this portal.
At first skeptical and defensive
against one another, the two must learn to make sense of their newfound
connection, and we see how each of them faces challenges in their own worlds, trying
to navigate the destruction of each of their own broken families. I was
particularly interested in Sen’s challenges as a daughter in a patriarchal
society that favors sons, and how she repeatedly receives messages that women cannot
be samurais. Nevertheless, she continues to train, fight, and push against
these ideas, proving to her father and others that women can be just as fierce
warriors. Likewise, Lee must challenge his father’s perceptions about his lack
of masculinity, while also challenging his dad’s fetishization of Japanese
women. In their work together and trying to understand what brought them
together, Lee and Sen form an unlikely bond of shared trauma and doubt. I
appreciated how Lee uses technology like the internet to find out about Sen’s history
and death, and while Sen thinks Lee might be a demon, he proves his knowledge
by predicting a fire that will occur in the town on a specific date. Baker creates
an interesting pair whose differences complement one another. However, I really
appreciated how the characters and their dialogue all seemed so unique and
different. While Lee doesn’t say a whole lot, readers witness his thinking move
from the kind of addled-hazy thoughts of someone addicted to allergy medicine
to the kind of paranoid and anxious thoughts of someone struggling with
withdrawal and trauma. Sen, on the other hand, is much prone to fighting, and readers
witness her training springing to action as she is pushed by doubts about Lee’s
intentions and the modern world. Baker has created an interesting dynamic that stretches
belief, but also keeps readers engaged and makes it work.
There’s a lot to like about this
book, especially if you liked Bat Eater. It doesn’t have quite the kinetic
energy of that book’s urban setting, yet the rural Japanese setting creates an
equally ominous and unsettling mood, especially with the sword ferns in the garden
that sway and scratch the house, threatening to poke and stab, as if wielded by
some psychotic samurai. Similarly, Baker’s writing is more descriptive and poetic
in this book. I kept highlighting these passages that either described Lee’s
anxious inner thoughts or reflected them in the environment. For example, from
the first chapter “But Lee hadn’t wanted to know the taste of James’s blood,
hadn’t wanted to hold this awful feeling inside him, like the collapse of an
entire star system inside his rib cage. Lee was full of dead stars and empty
universes now.” Or later on in the book “He liked how small the ocean made him
feel, like it could devour him and all his problems in a single gulp. Nothing
mattered in the face of the endless churning sea. It was important,
all-consuming, all-devouring. It might have been beautiful, but Lee had never
been good at discerning beauty.” There is darkness in this story, but it’s also
brilliantly projected onto the environment and setting, and Baker really captures
the characters’ inner turmoil through these descriptions and metaphors.
While I enjoyed the atmospheric
and moody nature of the book, and Baker’s ability to distill emotional turmoil either
with great analogies or through the surrounding environment, the story is complicated
and at times a little hard to follow. There are some loose ends that don’t get
completely tied up until the ending, which I won’t reveal. Furthermore, I grew a
little frustrated with Lee and his downtrodden nature, but I can see how Baker
made him really depressed and traumatized by the loss of his mother, so he also
becomes a sympathetic figure. The book also has a lot of incluing and indirect
exposition, where we are left to draw conclusions about Lee’s background based
on his spotty and naïve memory. And although the premise of this kind of secret
portal that allows the characters to meet across time is somewhat unbelievable,
I actually enjoyed this element of the story. It reminded me of another
Japanese writer who often writes about loss and different dimensions- Haruki
Murakami. Although this is like if Murakami was paired up with Stephen King and
writing more of a gothic horror novel rather than more of a fantasy sci-fi
story about identity. Japanese Gothic’s focus on the gothic elements
along with some Japanese mythology and ghost stories creates a compelling
atmosphere that engaged me and kept me turning pages, wanting to find out more.
I also appreciated the dueling narratives where one chapter focused on Lee and
another focused on Sen. It was interesting to see how their stories mirrored
and converged. Although it’s not the same as Bat Eater, Japanese Gothic has a lot to offer, especially if you enjoy ghost stories, folk
horror, and characters who are prone to hallucinations and fugue states. I’m
really excited for Kylie Lee Baker’s next book, as she crafted another complex ghost
story about the past that still addresses relevant and current issues in
society. Her descriptions, especially the characters’ turbulent emotional
states, stand out, but her descriptions of the gore and violence in the book
are visceral and left me cringing at the end. Highly recommended!
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