Japanese macabre: A reading list

Editor’s note: Following World War II, Japan had to rapidly industrialise, creating a growing tension between the old and the new, the individual and the collective. This action-packed list of Japanese thrillers, by Devarsi Ghosh, moves seamlessly between crime and horror fiction to lay bare the demons of post-war Japan—from male psychosis to female rage and terrifying fantasies of childhood.

Written by: Devarsi Ghosh

*****

A Quiet Place by Seicho Matsumoto

Seicho Matsumoto is best-known for the classic Inspector Imainishi Investigates (1961). It’s his most popular exploration of the running themes in his work, of a hard-nosed bureaucratic cop, alienated from his family, devoting his days and nights to solving a crime, which is discovered to be the byproduct of someone’s desperate need to maintain social respectability.

In A Quiet Place, these themes are performed at a poetic, quieter register. A middle-aged bureaucrat suspects his wife of infidelity. Soon enough, she is found dead. He does his own investigation and finds out that the wife was connected to a larger conspiracy. So far, so typical. But it’s the loneliness and lack of emotional closure haunting the book that you should not miss out on. Particularly, if you liked the Oscar-winning 2021 film Drive My Car, based on the Haruki Murakami short story, you will like this as a wildly different take on the same subject matter.

The Tokyo Zodiac Murders by Soji Shimada

Japanese crime-fiction fans might frown upon seeing the absence of Seishi Yokomizo in this list, but we’ll do you one better.

Yokomizo, widely popular now because of the Pushkin Vertigo translations, was the master of the orthodox Japanese locked-room mystery, which was popularised in the country first by Edogawa Ranpo—pen name of Taro Hirai. (Pronounce Edogawa Ranpo slowly, and you’ll know the source of these writers. Caw?)

What Shimada, who burst onto the scene in the ’80s with The Tokyo Zodiac Murders, did is, he took the puzzle-solving aspect of that variant and stretched it to a deeply psychological and philosophical territory.

This novel follows two amateur detectives revisiting the bizarre unsolved case of a reclusive painter obsessed with astrology. Our guy had written a manifesto about killing and cutting up the young women of his sprawling family to create his perfect muse. Soon, he is found murdered. And yet the killings and mutilations he had hoped to execute himself do end up happening. This one is a wild ride.

Piercing by Ryu Murakami

I call Ryu Murakami “the better Murakami” and aggressively promote him in the hope that one day people recognise Ryu and not Haruki as the primary Murakami. (He has been recommended before in 2025’s Halloween reading list by yours truly).

Ryu wrote the novel on which the classic J-horror flick Audition (1999) is based—a hit with gorehounds and feminists alike for how the psychotic woman brutalises the protagonist.

Not unlike Audition, Piercing is also a (twisted) love story at heart. The protagonist, a new father, has always wanted to stab people—a desire rooted in child abuse. He cannot help but think of stabbing his infant child. So he devises a plan to purge these urges on a stranger. He hires a prostitute, but, oh boy, she turns out to be a masochist who quickly figures him out and begins to manipulate the situation to her advantage. This one has a happy ending.

The Ruined Map by Kobo Abe

Kobo Abe, who was active between the ’40s and ’90s, is not recognised as a crime writer although his novels do begin with the premise of crime. But they quickly turn existential. The Western world and, by extension, Indian readers who have received Abe in English, must thank filmmaker Hiroshi Teshigahara for his scintillating adaptations of Abe novels: Woman in the Dunes (1964) and The Face of Another (1966).

The plot begins in a routine manner, but you can sense this is shaky ground from the prose itself.

Definitely my client had paid her money to retain me; she was my employer. But she usually made eyes like a begging dog or else flashed her servile smile as if she somehow felt guilty. At such times, in order to make her feel at ease, I would smile servilely along with her, thinking that people were like that. I would show her I was willing to handle her dirty wash. Since within our hearts we secretly want everything in existence to be dirty, we always recover our self-respect and discover light and hope in life.

A woman hires a detective to find her missing salesman husband. The detective goes about interviewing coworkers, visiting the man’s haunts, trying to trace his movements. Each encounter and connection he draws turns out to be a convoluted dead end mirroring the detective’s own psychosis. Soon, the lines between the investigator and his subject blur.

What the novel actually explores is: does anyone living in a metropolis truly have any identity to speak of today, and would anyone notice if you disappeared?

PS: Do check out the 2024 film The Box Man, a fab Kobo Abe adaptation.

My Annihilation by Fuminori Nakamura

Fuminori Nakamura is the contemporary Abe, but 48-year-old Fuminori tilts far more heavily into crime fiction, ensuring the reader gets the pulpy thrills promised by the cover but leaves with a lifetime’s worth of head-scratching. 

It is difficult to explain what goes on in My Annihilation. Let’s just say there’s a diary that’s a confession. It is discovered by a man, who’s not really who he thinks he is. And he is reading this diary in a place he can’t quite recognise. And that is just the first three pages.

FN is best-known for The Thief; his debut novel The Gun will be appreciated by fans of the Korean sensation, No Other Choice, directed by Park Chan-wook. The Gun has a simple idea: a teenager discovers a literal gun, and what happens next.

The plot of My Annihilation is the total opposite of simple.

Tezcatlipoca by Kiwamu Sato

The entire novel is a great metaphor for the flourishing and ruin of the... Aztec civilisation. A Mexican cartel warlord flees his country and encounters a disgraced Japanese cardiac surgeon. Together, they create an international organ-trafficking network preying on the most unfortunate.

What is motivating the warlord is his religious vision wherein he's singularly devoted to Tezcatlipoca, the Aztec god of sacrifice and destiny. Slowly, this house of cards collapses. No amount of blood can satisfy a god.

However, Valmiro’s thoughts about the nightmares were different. Throughout all the dreams, only two members of his family were spared: his abuelita and himself.

 

That it was only the two of them was a sign that the dream had some connection to his Aztec god. So Valmiro did not view the vision of his family being executed as an omen or a warning. If anything, it empowered him. The blessing of the god increased his resistance to despair and granted him the power to overcome his fear of death.

Six Four by Hideo Yokoyama

The 600-page tome from Yokoyama, a former police reporter, brings the grit and social realism of Matsumoto, who kickstarted this list, to the 21st century.

Institutional power, corruption, bureaucracy, and Japanese society at large are placed under the microscope. Our protagonist is a former homicide detective-turned-press director for the police. He is haunted by the unsolved case of a little girl who was kidnapped and murdered.

In the present day, the old case is opened for strictly PR reasons. Meanwhile, our protagonist’s daughter herself has disappeared. Soon enough, a copycat kidnapping occurs. Under mounting professional and personal pressure, our hero starts to see clearly; a professional’s muscle memory always kickstarts under stress. The old case had remained unsolved for a reason, and it’s not a nice one.

Journey Under the Midnight Sun by Keigo Higashino

Of course Keigo Higashino was going to show up. Devotion of Suspect X! (Cue: cheers in the studio).

For my money, Journey… is one of the most romantic novels of all time, a story of undying love spanning decades. As it happens in novels of this nature, bodies keep dropping to sustain this love. It’s best to stay tight-lipped about the plot. There’s a mysterious young criminal living in the shadows. And a most beautiful, elegant, successful woman. And something is fishy about these two individuals, who clearly have no connection between them. Or is that so? The dogged detective is hard to fool.

Goth by Otsuichi

Otsuichi is a contemporary Japanese crime writer, quite similar to Fuminori Nakamura, but less philosophical and more pulpy. This novel is pretty much a remix of several books that have appeared above.

Two teenagers. A boy, a girl. Discover a notebook. Belonging to a serial killer. They obsess over its contents. They encounter disturbing situations as the boy gets more and more obsessed and starts to identify with the killer. The girl, obsessed as well but not as much as the boy, grounds him. What is of importance that is revealed is not the killer’s identity, but the reasons the boy had always been so drawn to murder.

Earthlings by Sayaka Murata

Sayaka Murata is, of course, best-known to readers worldwide for her superhit novel Convenience Store Woman. She belongs to Fuminori Nakamura and Otsuichi’s generation and shares their interest in abnormal psychology in a repressive society, but she sidesteps the grotesque violence and delves deeper into sociology. 

All that changes with Earthlings. Like Convenience Store Woman, this, too, has protagonists uneasy in their skin. But they are way, way more determined to not conform to society at any cost. If they are rejecting marriage, child-bearing, capitalism—the basic fundamentals of what we understand as society—what’s stopping them from taking this attitude to its logical conclusion where they see all of human morality as a sham? Surely everything is permissible? Soon enough, murder and cannibalism follow. Fun stuff.

Out by Natsuo Kirino

Welcome the mother of Japanese feminist noir. Drawing from the social realism of Matsumoto, Natsuo Kirono switches the perspective to women, predominantly working-class. Her breakthrough novel Out follows four women, all troubled by either a broken marriage or debt or caregiving or overall gender discrimination. When one of them is driven to murdering their husband, the three cover up.

Except their method is exactly the same as that of a dreaded criminal. The police start investigating. Lies, counter-lies follow. One of the four, the most irresponsible one, starts blackmailing the group.

Meanwhile, the criminal, Satake, drawn to the investigation recognises a kindred spirit in the group’s mastermind, Masako, and takes a special interest in her. She, while recognising that only he can see through her emotional emptiness, and, worse, capacity for violence, realises that he is a cautionary tale. This much is potboiler-y enough to get you to grab that copy.

Confessions by Kanae Minato

Let’s get the most exciting information out of the way: Radiohead’s 'Last Flowers' is fabulously used in the film adaptation’s climax. (Don’t miss our Radiohead tribute from January). 

What’s more exciting, though, is the reading experience. Do not watch the movie before you have read the novel. This is probably the best-plotted novel in this list so far, going toe to toe with Higashino’s Journey…

Hell hath no fury like a woman scorned? Now make her a mother. With a murdered daughter. Now make that mother a teacher. And make the perpetrators her students. Now make our heroine’s husband ill with HIV. And that’s just the beginning. One twisted revelation follows another, but Minato holds the narrative together with a lot of care, thoroughness and righteous anger.

*****

Devarsi Ghosh is Consultant Editor at Advisory.