Beginning in 2018, a Japanese person might log on to YouTube only to find a video featuring a thin figure clothed entirely in black. A white papier-mache mask—blank, with holes for eyes and mouth and a peak for the suggestion of the nose—provides the only contrast. The figure speaks in an artificially processed, saccharine voice and posts enigmatic, sometimes uncomfortable videos. One shows the figure awkwardly playing music on a child’s toy piano. Another features the figure receiving an odd and disquieting Christmas gift from a barely visible and sinister Santa-san.
The figure is Uketsu.
It’s hard to overstate Uketsu’s viral popularity in Japan at the moment. Not only does Uketsu’s YouTube channel boast 1.7 million subscribers and more than 200 million views (and counting), but since the persona’s literary debut, Uketsu has come to dominate Japan’s popular fiction scene as well. In 2024, of the top five selling books in tankobon format (something roughly like the English book market equivalent of hardcover editions in Japan), three were by Uketsu. Uketsu’s debut novel, Strange Pictures, originated as a YouTube video. It has sold 3 million copies in Japan since its 2021 debut and now appears in English translation by Jim Rion.
Strange Pictures is both a collection of linked mystery stories and a horror novel. It opens with a childish, hand-drawn picture of a girl in a floral-print dress. To her right stands a house. To her left, a white bird rests inside a hollow in a tree with sharply pointed branches. The frame linking the stories serves as the novel’s preface: a renowned developmental psychologist explains that the picture was drawn many years before by an eleven-year-old patient who had been arrested for her abusive mother’s murder. (Unsurprisingly for a mystery-horror novel, some readers will find much of the content upsetting. In addition to child abuse and murder, the novel also includes off-page rape.) According to the psychologist, the girl’s drawing
shows a tree protecting a small bird. That is an expression of maternal love seated deep in her heart… [and] her desire to protect creatures weaker than herself. At the same time, the large, sharp thorns would seem to indicate a prickly, aggressive nature. However, if we bring her in contact with animals and children, it should help soften that element.
With this frame and the psychologist’s careful analysis, the narrator invites the reader to think critically about the drawings that appear at the beginning of each of the novel’s chapters and ground each story’s action: an elderly woman kneeling, a mother and child standing in front of an apartment building, and a mountain landscape. How might the picture help solve the mystery? The novel’s visual images aren’t limited to these drawings. They also include ephemera like blog screenshots, floor plans, timelines, and calendars.
As a mystery, Strange Pictures is the highly satisfying kind of puzzle that might send readers scrambling for pen and notebook to jot down the connections between characters and events in the linked short stories, all of which take place between 1992 and 2014. (The narrator’s obvious nostalgia for Internet culture of the early 2000s is a secondary delight for readers of a certain age.) Each story starts with a new cast of characters, and it’s only gradually that the reader understands what links one to another. It is not just the story and structure themselves which satisfy, but the fact that, for all the novel’s narrative threads, the author ties up all of the loose ends before the novel concludes.
What justifies the classification of Strange Pictures as a horror is the abiding sense of dread, the unsettling sense of wrongness that creeps under the reader’s skin as she reads—and stays there. Uketsu’s writing is powerfully atmospheric, and each new threat a character faces feels like a danger to the reader as well. Every new link between seemingly unconnected stories nudges her pulse rate a little higher.
Between the novel’s disquieting pages, Strange Pictures also contains a notable degree of sensitive cultural commentary. Uketsu’s persona is genderless, but the author behind the mask is male. He nevertheless takes up the challenges of Japan’s working mothers, who often struggle to find well-paying jobs, from an understanding perspective. He also addresses the challenges of childbirth, which is “not some beautiful sacred rite, as so many men seem to imagine,” and includes implicit critiques of aggressively masculine gender norms.
Uketsu’s novel shows the economic problems of people born into Japan’s “Lost Generation”, permanently hindered by graduating after Japan’s economic bubble burst in the early 1990s. Art techniques used by the blind come into play. The narrator notes how dangerous it is to stigmatize depression and mental healthcare. The novel’s conclusion even inverts some of the norms Japan—or at least its government—purports to value most. All of these details come together to make what could be simply a well-executed mystery-horror volume into something more thoughtful and complex.
Strange Pictures is an engrossing mystery and suspense novel that comes to a deeply gratifying conclusion. Given Uketsu’s overwhelming popularity, it’s also a welcome reminder that Japan’s best-selling fiction is more than comforting stories about cats and bookshops. Strange Houses, Uketsu’s “spiritual companion” to Strange Pictures, is expected to appear in English translation by Jim Rion later this year.