5 + Spooky Stars!
YARC 2020
I find in Japanese Horror and Mysteries, two genres I quite admire, a certain delicacy of approach, which may be cultural. I've not tried to identify a particular story as Japanese based on this delicacy of approach [although that would be intriguing: reading a story without knowledge of its authorship to see if I could identify its culture]. Nonetheless, that "delicacy" and "order" is clearly apparent in this delightful supernatural horror.
"The Graveyard Apartment " is exactly as it sounds: a brand-new eight-story apartment complex, constructed with staggered balconies overlooking the dormant cemetery overseen by a Buddhist temple. Quiet and parklike, the cemetery is suffused with cherry blossoms and a multiplicity of flowering plants, providing a secure and peaceful nook apart from Tokyo's overcrowded urbanity.
Or so it should be: but then why are the condo apartments selling so inexpensively? Why are so many empty, and the current inhabitants moving out? And what is going on in the Basement? It's not natural....and what about the long-ago plans, long since defunct, for an underground shopping complex at the rail station? The new family are about to discover....
Subtle Horror creeps like little cat feet, all the more terrifying for being invisible: an excellently written exercise in Quiet Horror [think, as comparisons to Western Horror, Henry James' "Turn of the Screw," Susan Hill's "The Woman In Black."] Subtle Horror, in the end, is so much more effectively nightmare-inducing.
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