The graveyard apartment A novel

Mariko Koike, 1952-

Book - 2016

"One of the most popular writers working in Japan today, Mariko Koike is a recognized master of detective fiction and horror writing. Known in particular for her hybrid works that blend these styles with elements of romance, The Graveyard Apartment is arguably Koike's masterpiece. Originally published in Japan in 1986, Koike's novel is the suspenseful tale of a young family that believes it has found the perfect home to grow into, only to realize that the apartment's idyllic setting harbors the specter of evil and that longer they stay, the more trapped they become. This tale of a young married couple who harbor a dark secret is packed with dread and terror, as they and their daughter move into a brand new apartment buil...ding built next to a graveyard. As strange and terrifying occurrences begin to pile up, people in the building start to move out one by one, until the young family is left alone with someone... or something... lurking in the basement. The psychological horror builds moment after moment, scene after scene, culminating with a conclusion that will make you think twice before ever going into a basement again"--

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Subjects
Genres
Suspense fiction
Published
New York : Thomas Dunne Books 2016.
Language
English
Japanese
Main Author
Mariko Koike, 1952- (author)
Other Authors
Deborah Boliver Boehm (translator)
Edition
First U.S. edition
Item Description
"First published in Japan under the title Bochi o miorosu ie by Kadokawa Shoten Publishing Co., Ltd." (Tokyo, 1993)-- Verso title page.
Physical Description
pages cm
ISBN
9781250060549
Contents unavailable.
Review by New York Times Review

"SUDDENLY IT ALL struck Misao as impossibly artificial." This epiphany comes to a middle-class Tokyo woman about halfway through Mariko Koike's unnerving novel THE GRAVEYARD APARTMENT (Thomas Dunne/St. Martin's, $25.99), after a scant three months of living in the title residence: a roomy eighth-floor flat that overlooks a temple, a burial ground and a crematory. (No wonder the price was so reasonable.) What seems to her artificial isn't the strange things that have been happening in the building - the sudden death of a pet bird, a mysterious cold wind in the basement, an elevator that stops working at the most inconvenient times - but the day-to-day life she lives with her husband, her small daughter and her dog, which goes on as if nothing were happening at all. "Everything Teppei and I do these days - no, really, everything the four of us do, including Tamao and even Cookie - somehow feels as if we're all acting in a play, she thought. A theater-of-the-absurd play about the daily routine of an utterly ordinary family living in a beautiful, sunny apartment, without a care or worry in the world. Just an average family, living in a perfectly normal building, playing their parts to the hilt. Except that something isn't quite right about this idyllic tableau...." The idea expressed here, that a glimpse of other worlds beyond (or beneath) our own can make our accepted reality look mighty peculiar, is a common one in horror fiction; Misao's interior monologue just states it a bit more baldly than usual. Because it's so on-the-nose, though, it started me thinking about how plot works in horror novels. The short story is the ideal form for horror because it can convey a quick, vivid impression of fear, without having to extend the action past the breaking point of the reader's credulity. "The successful ghost story," the great English writer Robert Aickman remarked, "is akin to poetry and seems to emerge from the same strata of the unconscious." All Aickman's horror fiction is short. For longer works like "The Graveyard Apartment," there's really only one basic plot available: A person (or a group of people) struggles to escape an impossible situation. And the mechanism that keeps the plot moving is, inevitably, denial of the sort Misao describes - the stubborn refusal (until it's too late!) to believe that what's happening is in fact happening. What's most effective about Koike's writing (the lively translation is by Deborah Boliver Boehm) is that she links the beleaguered family's reluctance to accept the direness of their circumstances to a kind of habit of denial, a longstanding determination to push unpleasantness away. Misao and her husband, Teppei, began their relationship while he was married to another woman, who committed suicide when she discovered their affair. They don't like to talk about it; they keep her memorial tablet in a little shrine in the back of a closet. In a sense, they've been living in a "theater-of-the-absurd play" for quite a while, dodging the ghosts of their past and doing battle with the monsters of cognitive dissonance. The malevolent forces closing in on them are more things not to face, and although Misao and Teppei are proficient at that, the added weight is crushing. Too many elephants, not enough rooms. Their expertise in denial doesn't serve them well here. But it sure keeps the plot humming along. There's an eerily similar dynamic at work in S. L. Grey's THE APARTMENT (Blumhouse/Anchor, paper, $15). Mark and Steph, South Africans who are also troubled by some bad history, do a bargain house-swap online with a Parisian couple and find themselves stuck with a musty apartment in Pigalle that looks as if it hasn't been inhabited in years. The building has just one other tenant; the windows won't open; there are odd, unaccountable sounds and large bags full of hair in the closet. When they call home, they learn that the people with whom they've swapped, the Petits, haven't turned up. The South Africans' credit card doesn't work, and they don't have enough cash for even a cheap hotel, so they're trapped. Much of the story, which is told in the alternating first-person narratives of Mark and Steph, consists of their attempts to extricate themselves from these creepy circumstances, both physically and psychologically. The physical side involves running around to banks and trying to marshal their dwindling financial resources. The psychological aspect - which is more interesting - has to do with the ways in which they adjust to their bizarre new reality, how they keep reassuring themselves, hopefully, that everything's going to be all right. (It really isn't.) It's clear that the authors - S. L. Grey is the collective pseudonym of Sarah Lotz and Louis Greenberg - are more interested in their characters' mental adjustments than they are in the mechanics of the spooky plot, and as a result their novel is both a little more penetrating and a little less suspenseful than "The Graveyard Apartment." They're good books, each in its different way an exploration of a marriage haunted by unspoken shame and guilt, but the demands of sustaining a novel-length narrative have the effect of attenuating their best qualities. They'd both be better off as short stories. That's not the case, exactly, with J. Lincoln Fenn's DEAD SOULS (Gallery Books, paper, $16), which is a wickedly entertaining take on the traditional selling-your-soul-to-the-Devil story. The vendor, and narrator, an Oakland marketing expert named Fiona Dunn, is witty enough to realize that the transaction she has made represents "just such a medieval idea," but she's also genuinely frantic to find a means of getting out of the deal, made during a drunken hookup with a smooth-talking guy who calls himself Scratch. Because this is California, there's a support group for similarly damned souls, and Fiona begins to get a notion of the kinds of favors the Devil requires of those who trade with him: mass murder, acts of terrorism - nothing that can be lived with by even the most skilled practitioners of denial. Fiona, though, clings to the belief that her marketing talents can help her persuade her soul's owner to revoke, or at least modify, their arrangement. She's a slick talker too, and she hopes she's a match for him: "We're in the same line of work, after all," she says. For most of the book, she's dashing frantically all over the Bay Area, cooking up get-out-of-hell schemes and trying to implement them and putting out the fires (not all of them metaphorical) that keep flaring up to impede her progress. This book has plot to burn. Fenn's problem, though, is that there's almost no way to resolve it satisfyingly. If the Prince of Darkness can't be defeated, then all the heroine's furious action is pointless. And if Fiona can outwit him and take her soul back, well, he certainly isn't much of a Devil, is he? Fenn, clever as she obviously is, can't quite figure out how to square this circle - the one reserved in hell for writers of ambitious horror novels, plotting and plotting into the endless night. Sebastià Alzamora's startling BLOOD CRIME (Soho, $25.95) avoids that fate by the simple, daring expedient of ignoring the supernatural-horror elements of its plot more or less completely and concentrating instead on the real-life horrors of its historical setting: Barcelona in 1936, at the outset of Spain's devastating civil war. The city is under the control of the Federación Anárquica Ibérica, the FAI, a violent anarchist faction. "And," an overwhelmed police detective muses, "there must have been few cities in the world now where killing came as easily as in Barcelona." The story begins, however, with the monologue of an anonymous vampire, who introduces himself with a casual blasphemy: "Often, when I am overcome by thirst, I put myself in mind of the Holy Spirit." He explains that he, like the Holy Spirit, is "classed among those whose existence is inconceivable to men," and then, warming to his subject, goes even further. "The word most frequently employed to label what I am is monster" he writes, "and it does not trouble me to put it down in black and white. The Holy Spirit is also a monster. God is a monster. And it is a well-known fact that He infused monstrosity into all of creation." There's an apologia pro vita sua for you. Soon after, the garrulous blood-sucking theologian drains a few victims, but his thirst remains largely quiescent for the rest of the book. His philosophizing does not. Although Alzamora follows many different human characters as they go about their often murderous business, the thoughtful vampire periodically interrupts the action with aphoristic commentary. "Fear is the acid of the soul," he announces, "it corrodes without distinction children's dreams and men's desires." And this: "We monsters are not part of this world, but we exist and intervene in it, making our way among men, fashioning ourselves through them. Inside them." By the end of this eventful but consciously open-ended story, you realize that the vampire doesn't really need to draw any more blood for this to be a horror novel. All he has to do is be a metaphor, to hover over the gruesome action like a malign Holy Spirit, watching men who have become monsters and feeling that he has had some part in that - that he has conferred on them his terrible form of grace. "Blood Crime" (beautifully translated from the Catalan by Maruxa Relaño and Martha Tennent) has a sort of concentrated power that's rare in horror novels. It's akin to poetry. In his superb new novel THE FISHERMAN (Word Horde, paper, $16.99), John Langan also manages to sustain the focused effect of a short story or a poem over the course of a long horror narrative, and it's an especially remarkable feat because this is a novel that goes back and forth in time, alternates lengthy stretches of calm with extended passages of vigorous and complex action, and features a very, very large monster. Like Robert Aickman, Langan is a short story writer by inclination; "The Fisherman" is only his second novel, and this one took him over a dozen years to finish. The story is about a Hudson Valley man named Abe who takes up fishing after the death of his wife; eventually he begins fishing with a co-worker named Dan, whose family was killed in a car accident for which he feels responsible. At a certain point, Dan mentions a place called Dutchman's Creek, which doesn't seem to appear on any of the standard maps and which nobody they know has ever fished. On their way, they stop at a diner - it's upstate New York, so you have to - and hear, in great detail, a frightening local legend about the place, from the time, early in the 20 th century, when the Ashokan Reservoir was being constructed. The tale involves a magician, reanimation and a huge mythic beast, but the men go on to Dutchman's Creek anyway. Abe, who narrates, tells himself, as characters in horror stories do, that it can't be true; Dan may have other reasons for forging ahead. "The Fisherman" is unusually dense with ideas and images, and, with the tale heard in the diner taking up the middle third of the book, it's oddly constructed. But there's a beauty in its ungainliness. Langan writes elegant prose, and the novel's rolling, unpredictable flow has a distinctive rhythm, the rise and fall of its characters' real grief. These fishermen are restless men, immobilized but never truly at peace. Again and again, they cast their lines in the hope of catching something, anything, that will restore them to who they were. Abe characterizes himself as "desperate for any chance to recover what I'd lost, no matter what I had to look past to do so," and you feel that sad urgency on every page of his strange and terrifying and impossible story. Langan's novel wears its heart on its sleeve. In Brian Evenson's science-fiction horror novella THE WARREN (Tom Doherty/ Tor, paper, $11.99), the organ on display is a brain, specifically that of a character called X, who lives in some sort of underground facility with, often, only a computer monitor to talk to. He has a lot of time to think, and the big question for him is whether or not he is actually a person - and if so, in what sense? The monitor isn't helpful on this subject. X's brain, it seems, has been programmed with other people's memories, as a way of preserving them against the likelihood of extinction. As the story begins, he wonders first if anyone else is still alive, and then whether any "material" remains to serve as a repository for the thoughts and memories - the notional self - currently housed inside him. Otherwise he might be the last of his kind. Whatever kind that is. X's brain turns out to be a wonderful setting for a haunted-house story, because all sorts of diverse spirits are slithering around in there and playing tricks on him. "Parts of me," he says, "know things that other parts do not, and sometimes I both know a thing and do not know it, or part of me knows something is true and another part knows it is not true, and there is nothing to allow me to negotiate between the two." This brain is treacherous. At one point X says, "I am not the only part of me doing this," and later, more ominously, "I am working against myself." He can fall asleep as himself (he thinks) and wake up as someone else, or several someones else. His struggle to find his way in this mental labyrinth is all the plot Evenson needs to spin a suspenseful, darkly comic tale. "Je est un autre" ("I is another") Rimbaud said. We've all felt like that from time to time, but poor X feels it, multiplied, at every moment of his conscious life. "The Warren" is chilling because X's situation is not only impossible but truly, inherently irresolvable. It ends as all horror stories should, with a question mark. TERRENCE RAFFERTY, the author of "The Thing Happens: Ten Years of Writing About the Movies," is a frequent contributor to the Book Review.

Copyright (c) The New York Times Company [November 20, 2016]
Review by Booklist Review

A ghost story is never simply about the haunting of a group of people but also about the individuals' pasts and personal demons. This translation of Koike's 1986 novel shows this masterfully through one family that moves into a cheap apartment building in the center of a cemetery. The parents, Teppei and Misao Kano, are bonded not just by love of each other and their daughter but by their guilt and ill feelings about the start of their relationship they met when Teppei was married to another woman. When his wife discovered the affair, she committed suicide. Teppei and Misao's treatment of the suicide is strange, and the haunted building heightens their handling of their personal shame. It forces them to truly confront their feelings about death and Teppei's dead wife. The haunting itself is well done and scary. The atmosphere and anticipation build perfectly to create an apartment building one would be quite hesitant to live in. Fans of classic ghost stories, such as The Haunting of Hill House (1959), will appreciate the subtle chills.--Whitmore, Emily Copyright 2016 Booklist

From Booklist, Copyright (c) American Library Association. Used with permission.
Review by Publisher's Weekly Review

Reviewed by Cherie Priest. It's been 30 years since The Graveyard Apartment was published in Japan, and now this new translation aims to bring the supernatural stylings of Mariko Koike to a 21st-century English-reading audience. This claustrophobic ghost story does lay down the creepy atmosphere and hit the form's best notes, but I suspect the reception will be mixed-largely because the book could be at least a third shorter, and its protagonists are real jerks. Teppei and Misao Kano are seeking a fresh start in a largely vacant apartment building called the Central Plaza Mansion. Sure, it's surrounded on three sides by an old cemetery and it overlooks a temple with a crematory, but the price is right and the building is practically brand new. Immediately upon arrival, their pet bird dies, their small daughter complains of ghostly visits, and their dog behaves weirdly. One by one, the neighbors move out, and the scary incidents escalate. From a high-level genre standpoint, it's satisfyingly paint-by-numbers-which I don't say as a criticism, or intend as a backhanded compliment. I'm a big fan of ghost stories, and I don't want every one of them to reinvent the wheel. I love a good wheel. However, there's a lot of filler, and the narrative is almost entirely tell, no show. Too often the action slows down for a lengthy aside on a topic such as civic planning or urban real estate, and the characters routinely indulge in hefty interior monologues that mostly underscore what terrible people they are. To be frank, despite their adorable daughter and dog, the newest residents of the Central Plaza Mansion are hard to root for. Their relationship began as a torrid affair that drove Teppei's first wife to suicide, and even when he found her body hanging in their apartment, he couldn't find it in his heart to say anything nice about her. Instead, he idly mused about how badly he'd treated her when she was alive-and how much she'd deserved every minute of it. Misao isn't much better, though she does show a little embarrassment about the whole affair-and-suicide thing. Unfortunately, when she isn't going through the motions of respecting the dead wife's memory, she's busy being catty about people who are kind to her. By the end, I was hoping that the kid and dog would ride off safely into the sunset, and everybody else would go ahead and get eaten by monsters. That said, the supernatural mystery at the center is pretty interesting, and there are several solid scare-scenes that are beautifully done. The Graveyard Apartment requires some patience in places, and not everyone will hold out for the reward at the end. But for true genre enthusiasts, it's worth a look. Cherie Priest is the author of 19 books and novellas, including the gothic horror novel Maplecroft and the Clockwork Century series. Her novel The Family Plot will be out from Tor Books in September. © Copyright PWxyz, LLC. All rights reserved.

(c) Copyright PWxyz, LLC. All rights reserved
Review by Library Journal Review

Originally published 30 years ago in Japanese, celebrated fiction writer Koike's popular horror novel is finally available in English. A young family-Teppai (father), Misao (mother), and Tamao (young daughter)-move to a modern high-rise apartment building on the outskirts of Tokyo. Attracted by the low price, the couple believe their new home is almost too good to be true. Curiously, it is located next to a cemetery, crematorium, and a funeral temple. Once settled into the apartment, the family begin to experience spooky occurrences. Tamao claims he is in contact with the family's deceased pet bird, other occupants of the building swiftly are moving out, and there are unexplained sightings in the basement. Then there are the family's own demons, namely Teppai and Misao's illicit affair that resulted in the suicide of Teppai's wife. While the story delivers some frightening scares and the foreboding atmosphere is effective in building tension, the plot is never fully explained, which may bother some readers hoping for a final resolution. Verdict Taking into consideration that this novel is a translated work, some readers may find it difficult to get fully immersed in the text, but patient fans of supernatural fiction and Asian horror genre enthusiasts should be pleased.-Carolann Curry, Mercer Univ. Lib., Macon, GA © Copyright 2016. Library Journals LLC, a wholly owned subsidiary of Media Source, Inc. No redistribution permitted.

(c) Copyright Library Journals LLC, a wholly owned subsidiary of Media Source, Inc. No redistribution permitted.
Review by Kirkus Book Review

A too-good-to-be-true apartment turns out to be exactly that for a young Japanese family in this supernatural thriller.Confronted with prohibitive housing prices, a young couple is thrilled to find a large, airy apartment for themselves, their small daughter, and the family dog that they can afford. Misao, the wife and mother of the pair, has her own misgivings. Why are there so few tenants in a building that offers such a bargain? And why would anyone choose to build a high-rise surrounded by a graveyard on three sides? Unfortunately, all of the portents in this thriller are that obvious. Pet bird found dead in its cage on the morning after the family moves in? Check. Basement with storage space that can only be reached by elevator sincecue shuddery musicthere are no stairs? Yep. This is the kind of book in which, if the little girl didn't start announcing that the dead bird was talking to her, you'd think the author had forgotten to add it. It's also of that particularly unpleasant hue where basically decent characters exist to be punished. Ghost stories rarely end well. But the fates in this one are too grim to provide even spooky pleasure. There's a vacancy in the Graveyard Apartment. Just not the one the author intended. Copyright Kirkus Reviews, used with permission.

Copyright (c) Kirkus Reviews, used with permission.