REVIEW: Strange Houses (book) by Uketsu, translated by Jim Rion

Strange Houses is a Japanese mystery. I bought my copy new.

Review:

The narrator has a friend who's considering buying a house but who wants the narrator to look over the floor plans first, because something doesn't quite feel right. The narrator enlists the help of Kurihara, who works for an architectural firm. Kurihara notes some oddities in the floor plans and somehow jumps from those to "This was a murder house in which the previous owners used a small child to commit murders." The narrator writes about the house, without identifying where it is, and yet is then contacted by a woman who not only seems to know which house it is, but who has identified another house with similar oddities. She believes that her husband was murdered by the former owners of both these properties. This eventually leads to the identification of a third house with oddities in its floor plan.

I spent a huge chunk of this book half expecting the big revelation at the end to be "and none of these were murder houses." Yes, that first house floor plan had some weird aspects, but it was a huge leap in logic for Kurihara to jump from that to "murder house with a child used as the killer." If Uketsu had had the narrator write about the house first, get contacted by the woman who identified the second house, and then had Kurihara jump to his "murder house" conclusion, I think I would have rolled with it better.

This is a book that simultaneously asks you to accept Kurihara's wild initial conclusion without question, but then also keep your eye out for parts of the overall narrative that shouldn't be trusted. The last revelation had me about ready to flip tables. It's so sudden, and there's no way to dig into any of the details. 

All in all, this was a quick read with some intriguing floor plan-based puzzles, but the flow of it all really didn't work for me.