Cat and her friends are in Japan for a long weekend thanks to their high school friend, Phillip. Talia and Faiz, two of the friends, are engaged and want to relive their teenage stunts of visiting haunted houses in Kuala Lumpur. Phillip flies them, along with their friend, Lin, first class tickets from different parts of the world, including the United States. What’s more, Phillip rents out a haunted Heian-era mansion that houses a jilted bride who insisted on being buried alive in the foundation of the house centuries earlier. Since then, young women have been taken on an annual basis by the bride to keep her company.
This is the premise of Cassandra Khaw’s new novel, Nothing But Blackened Teeth: it’s just as spooky as it sounds. The book is short and is marketed as a novella, but Khaw’s rich prose compensates.

The house plays a central part in the story and unbeknown to most of the friends, Talia and Faiz are planning a surprise elopement there. Phillip is in on the plans and what starts as a kitschy getaway turns into something more sinister, starting with the house.
Though only two stories, each floor spanned at least twelve rooms and several self-contained courtyards, its symmetries united by ascetically decorated corridors. Every wall in the building was lavish with corroding artwork of the yokai: kappa and two-tailed nekomata; kitsune cowled like housewives, bartering with egrets for fresh fish. Domesticity as interpreted through the lens of the demonic.
Cat can hear a whisper throughout the house—Suenomatsuyama nami mo koenamu—and figures it’s from the fallen bride who haunts the premises. She has studied Japanese and translates the term for her friends—mostly of Chinese ethnicity apart from Phillip, who is white—and tries to explain the meaning behind it.
“That’s the poem. The thing she keeps repeating. It’s part of the poem,” I said. “She’s still waiting for her husband-to-be. After all these years, she’s still hanging on to the hope he’s coming home.”
As the first night wears on, the friends get into arguments over old tussles from their school years in Kuala Lumpur. Cat can see the ghost in the mirror several times before her friends first spot it.
There wasn’t a face to remember because there wasn’t a face to find. Black hair tendrilled across contourless meat, no features to be seen. Only suggestions. Only smooth flesh and that grinning mouth, those red lips stretched as far as they’d go, black teeth, and the smell of ink.
The arguments will soon seem trivial after all the friends encounter the ghost and the other spirits that patrol the house. With several twists and turns befitting the horror genre, the friends will never be the same after this weekend.
Khaw’s story is engaging and entertaining, if not a bit grotesque in parts. But the violence never seems gratuitous and makes for a gripping story that has a crossover appeal to fans of horror in both Asian and western traditions. For readers who usually shy away from horror and ghost stories, Khaw’s book is mild in the sense that it shouldn’t keep one up at night. But it may serve as a deterrent against visiting a creepy abandoned house anytime soon.
You must be logged in to post a comment.