Reading for October: Summer of the Ubume

In Books, Reading on 8 November 2009 with no comments

Summer of the Ubume, by Natsuhiko Kyogoku.

If you’re think­ing that I have been on a Japanese kick, you’d be right. I get tired of the same-old, same-old (who doesn’t?) and although I love hor­ror nov­els, I get a bit tired of American hor­ror. Right now, with vam­pires and zom­bies being trendy as hell, the mar­ket is flooded with these kinds of super­nat­ural thrillers. And frankly, I’m not ter­ri­bly inter­ested in vam­pires or zom­bies. (Although, when my local book­seller finally gets a copy of Del Toro’s The Strain, I’ll prob­a­bly read it.)

Anyway, I say all that to say that switch­ing cul­tures is a breath of fresh air. The Japanese have their own fas­ci­nat­ing pan­theon of things that go bump in the night; more­over, it’s a pan­theon I know noth­ing about, so every­thing is shiny and cool. So when I picked up Summer of the Ubume, I expected  some­thing of a Japanese night­mare. What I got was some­thing I wasn’t quite expecting.

Summer of the Ubume is, more than any­thing, a mys­tery. True hor­ror it is not. It has ele­ments of creepiness–and good creepiness!–but it’s not really a hor­ror novel. It uses all the devices of a clas­si­cal mys­tery, espe­cially red her­rings, to build drama and sus­pense. Usually I don’t care for mys­tery nov­els, but the clever inter­min­gling of Japanese folk­lore with the mys­tery made it readable.

If you can get past the author’s pro­lific pon­tif­i­ca­tion thinly dis­guised as dia­log in sev­eral chap­ters (and I can’t blame you if you can’t; this kind of pub­lic mas­tur­ba­tion usu­ally dri­ves me crazy), there’s a, intrigu­ing story wait­ing to be found.

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