変な家: A Mysterious Story of Real Estate

[rynling]

変な家 (here on Amazon Japan) is a collection of short horror stories about houses and apartments with strange floorplans, and it's liberally illustrated with diagrams in which certain sections of the floorplan are highlighted and annotated to clarify the text. Each story is like a locked room mystery, except it starts with the floorplan and then gradually builds a narrative about what sort of upsetting behavior that type of space might enable.

There's a manga adaptation, and the first three chapters (which form a complete story) have been scanlated here:
https://mangadex.org/title/09b6eec8-adcb-4813-90c6-ee5f1e209083/henna-ie

This is an amateur production that's somewhat difficult to watch, but the author originally wrote the first chapter as a 20-minute video, which has been posted with English subtitles (on YouTube here).

There's also an English-language review on one of my favorite book blogs here:
https://ho-lingnojikenbo.blogspot.com/2023/02/wrong-way-door.html

変な家 is appealing to me both because it's easy to read and because it reminds me of the very specific pleasure of puzzling through video game strategy guides that present Zelda-style dungeons as the same sort of 2D floorplans.

On top of that, it resonates with me because of the unremittingly bizarre experiences I had while viewing properties in Philadelphia. 変な家 captures the exact sense uncanniness I experienced, like: There's something really "off" about this place, and I can't put my finger on it, but definitely murders happened here.

Anyway, 変な家 is my new favorite thing. I usually read Japanese very slowly, but I'm flying through this book and enjoying every bizarre page.

Comments

[lassarina]

....this entire post is so intensely you that I would have recognized you even without your name attached, lol.

[rynling]

Honestly my discovery of this book did feel very targeted. It was like Michelangelo's painting on the ceiling of the Sistine Chapel, with God descending from the heavens surrounded by a host of angels and dramatically extending his big beefy arm to give me this one book in particular.