Jim Rion (Translator), 2025

A thriller that cannot be put down.

Among the various shades of thriller, Strange Pictures (変な絵 Hennae) is a puzzle that hooks you to solve it. I don’t see a higher purpose besides undiluted entertainment. The thrill of finishing this book in an evening and probably won’t reread again, but I will 100% rent Uketsu’s Strange Houses when it comes out later this summer. Uketsu (雨穴) is a master of innuendos and impressions, in public events he drapes in a black cloak, wears a white mask, and uses a voice changer, leaving his gender unconfirmed for years (but it’s confirmed that he is a “he”). Elegant and sticky clues scatter throughout the four vignettes and, of course, the pictures drawn by the victims/culprits/witnesses in the case. Even after I have guessed the killer, I still couldn’t put the book down, being rolled into the impending pace of death like a heavy load convoluted in the washing machine.

*If you’re a detective spending a night out at the scene of a gruesome murder, years have passed and the scene is now desolated. You are slowly unraveling the investigative blunders, being at the scene now instead of under the office’s A/C, comparing evidences in the place of the victim. A suspect emerges and you drift into sleep because your brain has sucked up all the glucose. Lo and behold, guess whose voice it is, creeping up the instant you begin to wiggle out of sweet slumber? Have you guessed correctly, and more importantly, are you gonna end up another victim in déjà vu?

For thriller I like gruesome deaths, and there are definitely gory sequences in Strange Pictures. The drawing analyses also add a tactile, sensory dimension that differentiates Uketsu’s craft from the others’ text-based, literary instruments (e.g. thrillers by Ryu Murakami 村上龍 or Natsuo Kirino 桐野 夏生). Which is about time, I think. Why being snobbish about a cool orator when it’s good fun?

What else I look for, however, is really just a series of missed opportunities for intervention, to reduce the death count if it’s just by one. Also there is the reminder that unlike with Kirino‘s or Murakami‘s works, where the cross sections of social issues such as juvenile rehabilitation or domestic violence (at whatever levels, mi/ma-cro & meso) are more refined, Strange Pictures is definitely not the guiding beacon to form or shape opinions about these issues. It is pop psychology, with the clicks and ticks and snaps of a hit that completely engrosses when you’re inside the story. A puzzle awaiting a detective that you’ll finish in one sitting.  

Trigger warning: indirect reference of child abuse