The Graveyard Apartment (review)

The Graveyard Apartment by Mariko Koike

Set in the late 80's, a young family moves into the home of their dreams. The price is right, the location is central to everything, and the neighborhood is quiet. But that's because their new apartment building is surrounded on three sides by a graveyard, a crematorium, and an ancient Buddhist temple. Think it's the perfect setting for a terrifying Japanese horror novel? You bet it is.

Being a huge fan of Japanese horror films, I chose this book to be my first step into the world of Japanese horror novels. At the time, I knew nothing about the author, Mariko Koike. I knew nothing about the book, other than what the cover mentioned. And even though I've watched a good amount of Japanese films, I didn't know if a novel would carry the same elements that I find effective in movies. I was happily surprised to find that it did. The Graveyard Apartment is filled with many of the classic cornerstones that make a good Japanese horror film.

1. Isolation
   Many of the Japanese horror stories I love are set in damp or dark isolated areas. It's practically a key element in the genre. Remember the little girl in the well? Or the creepy boat, floating "dead" in the water? The Graveyard Apartment takes place in a near empty multi-story building and much of the supernatural activity takes place in the dark, damp, and super-creepy basement. I'm telling you, this is why people are afraid of the dark!

2. The Adversary
   The baddies in Japanese horror tend to fall in one of three categories of adversary. There will always be the lunatic with a naked man in a burlap sack or the chef who feeds his customers the last guy who didn't pay. These fit into the psycho-killer category. But when it comes to the supernatural, the classification are youkai and yuurei. The youkai are like the monsters from Western horror stories. They are the wolf-men or the creatures from any creepy lagoon. They're the creepy little critters or blob-like oooze monsters that squish themselves under locked doors while we sleep. While these are extremely popular in American fiction, the heart of the Japanese horror story is the yuurei. The yuurei are malicious spirits with unfinished business. They're the dead hitchhiker, always thumbing a ride home, or spurned lover who clings to the back of the boyfriend that caused her death. This is the spooky specter that drives some of the best Japanese tales of terror. This is what haunts the halls, basement, and elevator of The Graveyard Apartment.

3. The Rules
   There are always rules in Japanese horror stories. It could be that three knocks on a bathroom stall door is the thing that raises the spirit of a tortured student. Or maybe building a shopping mall on the mass grave of Hiroshima bombing victims is the thing that unleashes a combined evil hellbent on getting revenge. But it's always something. The thing is, in Japanese horror, not everyone knows the rules, and the all the psycho-killers and yuurei and youkai could care less. That's another thing that makes this genre so terrifying. In Western Horror, you can call up Bloody Mary by looking in a mirror in a dark room and saying her name three times. We know that this is how the game works. But the element of rules in Japanese horror dictates that we don't have to know how the rules work. We can stumble upon the things that go bump in the night. They can kill us or torment us eternally and we might never know why. In fact, the rules say that it might even be something out of our control. This is when you get to thank the housing developers from 1960 for waking ghosts that forever devour anyone who resides within their bounds. Oh, and forget about getting rid of them. There is no way to get rid of them.

The Graveyard Apartment incorporates all of these elements. Mariko Koike is great at weaving these things into the story and making them seem peripheral. She makes horror sneak up to scare us. She gives it a subtle path right into our fear receptors so that the yuurei in the apartment leaves us afraid to stay, afraid to go, and afraid for the future, knowing that there could possibly be no end to the terror it may inflict.

I'll always recommend The Graveyard Apartment to fans of horror. If they aren't familiar with the sub-genre of Japanese Horror, I let them know that the violence is minimal, the terror builds slowly, and that all of it is designed to make us afraid even after we've stopped reading. I also let them know that there are incidents in this book that they may never have the answers to. Just like in real life, there are some things we will never understand. These things are put in the story to unsettle us; to make us uneasy, so that when the big scares happen, we are doubly frightened. The Graveyard Apartment by Mariko Koike is the only horror novel I've read that made me shout out loud while reading and sadly, no amount of yelling to the characters in the story can keep them from doing the things we know they shouldn't do.

This book is going on my list of favorites. It'll always be on my bookshelf and I hope you manage to find a spot for it on yours. -Eblison Grun

Graveyard Apartment
Author: Mariko Koike
Publisher: St. Martin's Press
ISBN: 9782150060549