Strange Pictures (2022) by Uketsu

I noted in the 2024 roundup post, "Murder in Retrospect," Pushkin Vertigo had begun to expand their catalog of Japanese detective translations beyond the lavishly-plotted, grandiose honkaku and shin honkaku locked room mysteries – starting with the publication of Tetsuya Ayukawa's Kuroi kakuchou (The Black Swan Mystery, 1960). A police procedural originally published during the rise of the social school in Japanese crime fiction, however, the breaking down of two cast-iron alibis is done with all the ingenuity of the classic detective story.

Somewhat of a departure from what readers have come to expect from the Japanese detective novels of Seishi Yokomizo, Soji Shimada and Yukito Ayatsuji, but comments on my review called The Black Swan Mystery one of their best translations to date. I can't entirely disagree. The Black Swan Mystery is a 1960s police procedural with the heart of a Golden Age detective novel and the social issues playing out the background enhanced the overall story. Pushkin Vertigo has a few other intriguing, non-impossible crime translations lined-up for this year like Yasuhiko Nishizawa's time-loop mystery Nanakai shinda otoko (The Man Who Died Seven Times, 1995) and Taku Ashibe's classically-styled family whodunit Oomarike satusjin jiken (Murders in the House of Omari, 2021). I was most intrigued of all when Pushkin Vertigo announced the forthcoming translations of Uketsu's "strange novels."

"Uketsu" is the pseudonym of a popular, Japanese horror Youtuber who has nearly two million subscribers and his debut novel, Henna e (Strange Pictures, 2022), sold over three million copies, but the person behind this success remains a mystery – hidden behind a white mask, black bodysuit and voice changer. I didn't know what, exactly, to expect from Strange Pictures except that it appeared to bring the visual medium to the printed page. But was it a proper detective, a hybrid mystery, horror masking itself as a detective story or something completely different? I decided to not probe it too much and find out when its published. A good decision as Strange Pictures gives you a different experience than your average detective or crime novel.

Strange Pictures is a collection of four, interconnected short stories each centering on the hidden or obscured meaning behind a drawing, or series of drawings, but the book has a ton of additional illustrations, diagrams, timetables and even the odd floor plan. So richly illustrated you can almost call it wordy picture book.

This collection of linked stories begins with a short, untitled prologue in which a professor lectures on the revealing nature of pictures and drawings into the inner works of the artist. She shows the drawing of a child who had been involved in a murder case to illustrate her point and explain why the child is "now living happily as a mother." This analysis pretty much serves as the framework for the bigger picture behind the overarching story.

The first of these linked mysteries, "The Old Woman's Prayer," takes place in 2014 and reads like a 2000s-era creepy internet story. Shuhei Sasaki, a student and member of his university's paranormal club, learns about an innocently-looking, dormant blog – called "Oh No, Not Raku." A blog filled with the "empty silliness that was the hallmark of your average daily diary." Someone going by the handle "Raku" started blogging about his daily life in 2008 and discovering his wife, "Yuki," is pregnant. So the blog prattled on for months, before taking a tragic turn and the blog became inactive in 2009. Three years later, Raku returned with a last, cryptically-worded update about finally having figured out the secret of those numbered pictures. The pictures in questions were drawn by Yuki depicting, what she called, "visions of the future." The solution to what happened behind the scenes is locked away inside those drawings.

Yuki's strange, cryptic drawings aren't the only illustrations adorning this story. There's a screenshot of the blog (yes, I tried the address, but nothing) and a ton of other pictures to illustrate ideas/solutions. So it definitely sets the tone for the rest of the book and provides some answers, but the open ending leaves the reader hanging. However, not without reason!

The second story, "The Smudged Room," takes a more grounded approach with an apparently small, unimportant domestic problem. Naomi Konno is asked by a teacher if anything unusual or scary had happened at home, because her five-year-old Yuta drew a strange picture in class. At first glance, it looks like a typical child's drawing showing him and his mother standing next to their apartment building. But the room in the middle of the top floor was "covered with a large grey scribble." The room where they lived. So nothing worrying enough to fuel some domestic suspense, but then a mysterious man begins to stalk the two and Yuta disappears one night from their apartment. And figuring out the meaning behind the smodged room is the key to finding him. This story also closes with an open end, but you can already see the bigger picture of the overarching narrative taking shape. The next two stories bring everything together with the next one, unsurprisingly, becoming my favorite part of Strange Pictures.

"The Art Teacher's Final Drawing" is an out, and out, shin honkaku detective story, but in the tradition of Ayukawa's previously mentioned The Black Swan Mystery. So no locked rooms or other types of impossible crimes, but unbreakable alibis, a gruesomely ingenious murder method and one of the few genuinely classic examples of the dying message.

In 1992, the horribly mutilated body of Yoshiharu Miura, an art teacher, was discovered on the side of "Mt K—in L—Prefucture," where he had planned to stay for an overnight camping trip – whoever killed him took his food and sleeping bag. But why not his other supplies? And why the overkill? Miura had been stabbed numerous times and beaten over two hundred times! So the police assumed the murderer had a very personal motive behind it and they come up with three potential suspects, but two have alibis and only suspicions against the third. So the case goes unsolved for three years, until a veteran reporter and young, eager newshound pick up the trail again and try to retrace everyone's steps. But central to their investigation is the victim's dying message. A drawing of the mountain scenery on the back of a receipt which poses two questions: message hidden in the drawing and how he could have composes such a dying message under, let's say, less than ideal circumstances. But the murderer from three years ago returns. And leaves behind another human-shaped, battered mess along the hiking trail. Just the solutions to the murders and how it folds the gruesome murder method, alibi-trick and dying message together with the identity of the murderer is enough to make it a first-rate shin honkaku mystery, but, more importantly, is how these murders fit into this interconnected web of strange pictures.

The complete, not exactly comforting picture emerges in the fourth and final story, "The Bird, Safe in the Tree," which connects the prologue and the previously three stories in a way that's both deeply satisfying and disturbing. Not merely a play on that old, tired cliché of the horror genre, "humans are the REAL monsters," but on their cruel, uncanny knack to create monsters. Strange Pictures is eerily effective in how each drawing, in each succeeding story, gradually reveals the whole tragic, sordid mess connecting all the characters and pictures. Something that makes Strange Picture very difficult, if not impossible, to pigeonhole. It's both a traditionally-plotted detective story and entirely in line with the darkly modern, character-driven crime novels told partially in pictures, diagrams and timetables. I was tempted to draw a comparison with Shichiri Nakayama's Tsuioku no nocturn (Nocturne of Remembrance, 2013), but perhaps Strange Pictures is best described as a darker, grislier take on the puzzles-with-a-heart stories from Motohiro Katou's Q.E.D. series.

Either way, I found Uketsu's Strange Pictures to be an engrossing, original take on both the traditionally-plotted detective story and the darker, character-driven crime novels of today. A different way to tell either and still something fans of both can appreciate. I sure did! Very much look forward to the sequel later this year.

A note for the curious: I only found out after finishing the book Strange Pictures got multiple translations including Dutch. If I had known a Dutch translation was available, I would probably have been tempted to pick it over the English translation. Anyway, I included the cover of the Dutch translation, Vreemde tekeningen (Strange Drawings).