Steal Me a Story

"There is no agony like it. You sit in a room, biting pencils, looking at a typewriter, walking about, or casting yourself down on a sofa, feeling you want to cry your head off."

"The Writing Habits of Agatha Christie"

The faces on the covers for Mitsuda's books published by Kodansha are always really creepy...

Horror novelist Mitsuda Shinzou receives a call one day from a friend, who is not only a succesful mystery novelist, but also acts as reader for a a Newcomer's Award for manuscripts by unpublished writers: this friend is not a judge, but he helps out in the first round by at least selecting the manuscripts that are actually complete novels and not half-hearted entries. While highly unusual, his friend decided to contact Mitsuda, because among the manuscripts he's reading, he has one that is sent in by someone called Tsuguchi, but the manuscript is written in the name of Mitsuda Shinzou! The story is also based on the horror stories Mitsuda has been collecting on his personal homepage, making it seem like he actually sent the manuscript, but Mitsuda assures his friend he has nothing to do with this. Meanwhile, Mitsuda finds a very creepy abandoned, classic British-style house: the house can not be reached via the street (which is already a dark place), but is reached via some back-alleys and having to go through the grounds of the neighbors: apparently, the house has been abandoned for decades now, with houses being built around it until it was "locked" in by the surrounding houses, making it nearly unreachable. Mitsuda is captivated by the house and goes great lengths in finding the real estate agent handling the property and manages to rent the place.  The house serves as the inspiration for his new serialized story, where a family moves into a house with a dark history. But as time passes by, the story start to develop on its own, beyond Mitsuda's control, and with sightings of ghosts in the vicinity, the mysterious writer using Mitsuda's name hanging about and the house's history slowly being uncovered, all leading to a catastropic finale in Mitsuda Shinzou's Ikan - Horror Sakka no Sumu Ie ("The Ominous House - The House Where a Horror Writer Lives", 2001).

I have read a lot of Mitsuda Shinzou's work in the last few years and have become a great fan of his work, but with a caveat: save for a short story I never reviewed here, all I have read by him is his Toujou Genya series, where he mixes folklore and horror with insanely brilliantly plotted mysteries. I can't overstate how crazy the quality level remains throughout the series, and the books always end up in my favorite reads of the year. Ikan is the first novel I have read by Mitsuda that isn't part of that series and it is also Mitsuda's debut novel: it was originally published with the title Horror Sakka no Sumu Ie (The House Where a Horror Writer Lives), which is now the subtitle of the book, and it is the first entry in a three-part series. Being up-to-date with the Genya series currently, I decided to fan out, and I figured, why not with his debut work? 

Ikan is a tale of horror told in a rather complex manner: besides the narrative of Mitsuda finding the titular house and slowly encountering more and more odd situations and people, there is also a narrative-within-a-narrative structure, as we also get to read all the installments of Mitsuda's serialized story as it is published each time: his story is based on his experiences in the house, and tells the story of a core family moving into a British-style house as seen from the POV of the younger son. The younger son soon finds hidden compartments in the house, and even a strangely built doll house that seems to be a copy of the very house they are living in. And oddly enough, Mitsuda too comes across the very things he writes about in his serialized story... 

The mystery of how all of this is connected and how both the narrative-within-a-narrative, and the "outside" world narrative will end is suspenseful, but also told in a manner that can at times make it difficult to keep track of everything. Many "puzzle pieces" are constantly being introduced, but often, they don't even feel like from the same set, and so you feel like there's too much chaos in the plot. While things do come together in the end, it is definitely not the "densily clewed mystery with lots of synergy" we've learned to expect from the Genya series. The Genya series features a lot of the horrendous and mysterious events that are eventually given a rational meaning via either the core mystery plot, or folklore analyses, but in this book, a lot of the core horror elements remain unexplained, and in that sense, I do feel the book is less satisfying. Especially the events in the narrative-within-a-narrative feature a lot of events that are not explained in detail, and while they may not be directly connected to the core mystery, it leaves you with so many questions that seemingly are only answered by "yes, the supernatural exists": I am not against the supernatural in mystery fiction, but without clear rules, you just have no idea what to expect and not, and here, the horror elements remain shrouded in the shadows. So Ikan is definitely leaning more into the horror than the Toujou Genya series and the conclusion is more like the twist ending (with foreshadowing) you'll expect from conventional horror mysteries, rather than a dense honkaku puzzle with a surprising, yet convincing twist.

I believe the epilogue is only available in the current version from 2008 (which I read), which tries to flesh out the background a bit more, but don't expect too much of it. 

Ikan - Horror Sakka no Sumu Ie can be read as an entertaining horror novel, with a mystery writer slowly being absorbed by his own fictional creation, but I wasn't really looking for that, so in that sense, it's a bit of a disappointment: it is certainly not in any way a proto-Toujou Genya novel in any way. While there are more books in this particular series, Mitsuda Shinzou has many other series available, so I will probably try those out first to see if he has other books that can give me Genya-esque experiences.

Original Japanese title(s): 三津田信三『忌館　ホラー作家の棲む家』