Strangers by Taichi Yamada

Hideo, the 48-year-old protagonist of Taichi Yamada's horror novel Strangers, is
experiencing an acute mid-life crisis. He struggles to pick up the pieces of his shattered
life after a painful divorce and a financial settlement that depleted his bank account. He
can’t even afford a car or apartment, and is forced to sleep in his office at night. Hideo's
son has sided with his mother, and won’t have anything to do with his father. Adding to
his disgrace, an influential business associate has told Hideo that they can no longer
work together, because he plans on marrying the ex-wife.

Ah, these are minor complications compared to
the problems Hideo faces with his parents. On
the surface, his relationship with Mom and Dad
is ideal. They praise him lavishly, fix him meals,
and keep him well supplied with beer. There’s
just one minor complication: they died 35 years
ago, and now have now reappeared under
mysterious circumstances. And they just might
be planning to kill their son.

Hideo’s parents died in a car accident when he
was just 12-years-old. After that he bounced
around to a grandfather, later an uncle, before
finally latching on to a career in the TV industry
as a scriptwriter—by coincidence, the same
vocation pursued by author Yamada. Now in
middle age, Hideo runs across a man, roughly
30-year-old, whose appearance matches exactly
his recollections of his dead father. When his
new friend brings him home to meet his wife,
Hideo is shocked to see that every aspect of her,
from her voice to her looks, reminds him of his
mother.

But how can this be? This couple is in their early thirties, so how can they be the parents
of a 48-year-old man. Yet the resemblance is so uncanny, and their attitude toward him
so warm and welcoming, that he finds himself calling them ‘Mom’ and ‘Dad’. Even more
bizarre, they accept the notion automatically, and willingly take on the role of parents to
the older man.

Yet there is no free lunch, as Robert Heinlein once proclaimed, and this bounteous gift
from the realm of the dead comes at a steep price. Every time Hideo visits his parents,
his body changes. His skin grows pale, he loses weight, he takes on a haggard appearance.
He can’t see these changes himself—when he looks in the mirror, he sees a healthy
robust man staring back at him. But all his friends and acquaintances are alarmed, and
fear he is seriously ill, perhaps even near death.

In this taut, psychologically-charged story, Yamada manages to evoke horror from the
least likely sources. Sometimes they are the familiar settings and symbols of suspense
fiction: the abandoned building, the deserted corridor, the uncanny coincidence. But
Yamada is even more skilled at discovering intimations of death and danger in the most
innocent situations. At one juncture, Hideo’s father asks his son if he wants to play
catch—something that never happened during the scriptwriter’s actual childhood, and
which he had lamented at the time. This should be a cause for celebration, an opportunity
to heal old wounds and reinforce dormant emotional ties. But the actual scene, as
presented in Strangers, is creepy in some indefinable way. The dead father, in the guise
of a young man, and the emotionally-starved middle-aged burnout, step out into a
Tokyo street, and try to pretend that the last 35 years never happened. I’m not sure
what rules of the horror genre this incident follows, but I have a hunch they are ones
Yamada invented on his own.

In this charged situation, Hideo doesn’t know what to believe or whom to trust. He
finds an unexpected ally in an eccentric young woman who lives in his building. But she
is melancholy at one moment, upbeat at the next; she is confiding at times, intensely
secretive at others. Their relationship becomes intimate, but Kei insists on keeping much
of her body hidden from view—she confesses that she has a severe burn scar that she
doesn’t want Hideo to see. This woman seems to have other secrets too—perhaps deadly
ones—but she is the only person the screenwriter trusts with the odd story of his
revivified parents.

I hesitate over ways of describing and categorizing this odd novel. Yamada somehow
manages to craft a tale that is both eerie and endearing, creepy and charming. Who
can complain when Mom and Dad act with such sincerity and devotion to a long-
missing child, but the very closeness of the relationship and unreality of their
reappearance imparts a chilling quality to scene after scene. Long before the conclusion,
the reader knows that this family reunion won’t end happily, but who can predict the
particular nastiness with which matter get resolved?

Perhaps every culture has its own preferred settings for terror. In many traditional
societies, tales of this sort took place in the Underworld, the land of the dead; in Europe
the dark and gloomy castle later emerged as the epicenter of horror; in the Northeast
of the United States it the haunted house came to the forefront of the genre; in the
Far West Ambrose Bierce captured the distinctive terror of the campfire and the
wide open spaces. Tokyo can’t just follow these role models, but needs to create new
ones of its own. Here Yamada comes to the rescue with a new breed of horror, suited
to high-rise buildings and crowded city streets.

Why can’t big cities have their special horror? Genre fiction master Fritz Leiber
speculated on this very possibility in his discussions of megapolisomancy, a discipline
he invented for his novel Our Lady of Darkness, and set forth as a study of the special
supernatural forces unleashed by urban life. Yamada takes that same notion, and adds
his own special twist to it in Strangers. He joins a small select group of authors who
grasped the particular horror of confined modern life, where he stands alongside Leiber,
J.G. Ballard and Robert Silverberg, as well as countrymen Kōbō Abe and Haruki
Murakami. Indeed, if the essence of strangeness resides in the multiplicity of strangers
densely packed into the smallest possible space, Tokyo just might be the scariest city of
them all. Certainly this novel will make you think so.

Ted Gioia writes about music, literature and popular culture. His latest book is How to Listen to Jazz from
Basic Books.

Publication Date: November 28, 2016

This is my year of horrible reading.
I am reading the classics of horror fiction
during the course of 2016, and each week will
write about a significant work in the genre.
You are invited to join me in my annus
horribilis. During the course of the year—if
we survive—we will have tackled zombies,
serial killers, ghosts, demons, vampires, and
monsters of all denominations. Check back
each week for a new title...but remember to
bring along garlic, silver bullets and a
protective amulet. Ted Gioia

My Year of Horrible Reading

Week 1:
Dracula
By Bram Stoker

Week 2:
T he Haunting of Hill House
By Shirley Jackson

Week 3:
T ales of Mystery & Imagination
By Edgar Allan Poe

Week 4:
Carrie
By Stephen King

Week 5:
The Passion According to G.H.
By Clarice Lispector

Week 6:
T ales
By H.P. Lovecraft

Week 7:
T he Exorcist
By William Peter Blatty

Week 8:
The Woman in Black
By Susan Hill

Week 9:
N ausea
By Jean-Paul Sartre

Week 10:
I Am Legend
By Richard Matheson

Week 11:
G host Stories of Henry James
By Henry James

Week 12:
Interview with the Vampire
By Anne Rice

Week 13:
A merican Psycho
By Bret Easton Ellis

Week 14:
L ast Stories and Other Stories
By William T. Vollmann

Week 15:
G host Stories of an Antiquary
By M.R. James

Week 16:
R osemary's Baby
By Ira Levin

Week 17:
T he King in Yellow
By Robert W. Chambers

Week 18:
Rebecca
By Daphne Du Maurier

Week 19
The Woman in the Dunes
by Kōbō Abe

Week 20
The Dark Eidolon
by Clark Ashton Smith

Week 21
O ff Season
by Jack Ketchum

Week 22
B ooks of Blood, Vols. 1-3
by Clive Barker

Week 23
The Silence of the Lambs
by Thomas Harris

Week 24
T he Orange Eats Creeps
by Grace Krilanovich

Week 25
S trange Case of Dr Jekyll & Mr Hyde
by Robert Louis Stevenson

Week 26
P sycho
by Robert Bloch

Week 27
F ledgling
by Octavia E. Butler

Week 28
D emons by Daylight
by Ramsey Campbell

Week 29
T he Complete Short Stories
by Ambrose Bierce

Week 30
P et Sematary
by Stephen King

Week 31
O ur Lady of Darkness
by Fritz Leiber

Week 32
G rendel
by John Gardner

Week 33
W hite is for Witching
by Helen Oyeyemi

Week 34
T he Wasp Factory
by Iain Banks

Week 35
K ing Kong
by Edgar Wallace

Week 36
T he Castle of Otranto
by Horace Walpole

Week 37
The J ohn Silence Stories
by Algernon Blackwood

Week 38
The M agic Toyshop
by Angela Carter

Week 39
The O ther
by Thomas Tryon

Week 40
N ever Let Me Go
by Kazuo Ishiguro

Week 41
G host Story
by Peter Straub

Week 42
J ohn Dies at the End
by David Wong

Week 43
T he Great God Pan
by Arthur Machen

Week 44
The C ipher
by Kathe Koja

Week 45
L et the Right One In
by John Ajvide Lindqvist

Week 46
T he Nameless
by Ramsey Campbell

Week 47
Horrorstör
by Grady Hendrix

Week 48
S trangers
by Taichi Yamada