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Sayuri
Afin de se donner un nouveau départ, la famille Kamiki déménage dans une maison à la campagne. Mais, ce qui devait être un havre de paix se transforme lentement en un cauchemar !
La famille Kamiki avait désormais tout pour être heureuse. Après des années et des années d'économies et de sacrifices, elle peut enfin être propriétaire ! Certes, la maison est ancienne mais la vue depuis le haut de la colline est tellement belle ! Trois générations de Kamiki s'installent alors sous le même toit... Les accidents inexpliqués s'enchaînent les uns après les autres, avant que la grand-mère ne découvre la terrible vérité. Mais la vieille femme et son petit-fils n'ont clairement pas envie de se laisser abattre par les esprits malins qui hantent la demeure. La riposte se prépare et elle sera très violente...
La famille Kamiki avait désormais tout pour être heureuse. Après des années et des années d'économies et de sacrifices, elle peut enfin être propriétaire ! Certes, la maison est ancienne mais la vue depuis le haut de la colline est tellement belle ! Trois générations de Kamiki s'installent alors sous le même toit... Les accidents inexpliqués s'enchaînent les uns après les autres, avant que la grand-mère ne découvre la terrible vérité. Mais la vieille femme et son petit-fils n'ont clairement pas envie de se laisser abattre par les esprits malins qui hantent la demeure. La riposte se prépare et elle sera très violente...
384 pages, Paperback
Published November 12, 2020
4 people are currently reading
72 people want to read
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Displaying 1 - 30 of 97 reviews
Review of advance copy received from Netgalley
Final Review: Sayuri by Rensuke Oshikiri is the first ever horror manga I have read and it most definitely will not be my last. Many thanks to this author for getting me interested in the genre. This manga reminds me of various horror films from Vietnam and Thailand that I have seen in the best possible way. The atmosphere, the intrigue, combined with a passive but impactful dialogue about various Japanese cultural tropes. This story was tragic and but ends on note of hope… but the sadness remains.
Normally, I approach my manga reviews Chapter by chapter, but as this review will be posted before release date I will skip that here. I did take rather detailed notes, which made me smile as I looked back to write this review. Initially, I wasn’t so keen on the narrative but at a certain point I was just locked in and the twists took me. Without spoilers , I stan the grandma. With spoilers: Back to the story, this story opens as the multigenerational Kamika family moves into their new home. A big house that the father had saved for years to afford, but may have gotten a bargain on (geez, I wonder why…). In the family there are 3 children: Norio the eldest boy and middle child (), Keiko the eldest and the sister and Shun a sweet little baby brother, as well as their mother and father, grandfather and a perhaps Alzheimer’s having grandmother.
This story is overflowing with trauma… SOOO much loss. It comes punch after punch, but that is also why it was so hard to put down. It was a lot of emotional labor to finish, and might be trigger, but I found it worth it. Beyond the trauma, Norio’s school friend () Sumida had a bit of hoodoo going on; she can see ghosts. Overall, for someone who doesn’t read horror much this blend the emotions of loss and intrigue of spirits very well.
4 stars!
Initial Thoughts:RTC!! This is sad… ripped my heart out and made me cry. But there is a hope for a future . I should say there is a relative amount of hope!
Thank you to Rensuke Oshikiri, Kodasha Comics and Netgalley for the opportunity to read this manga before its release.
💞
Normally, I approach my manga reviews Chapter by chapter, but as this review will be posted before release date I will skip that here. I did take rather detailed notes, which made me smile as I looked back to write this review. Initially, I wasn’t so keen on the narrative but at a certain point I was just locked in and the twists took me. Without spoilers , I stan the grandma. With spoilers: Back to the story, this story opens as the multigenerational Kamika family moves into their new home. A big house that the father had saved for years to afford, but may have gotten a bargain on (geez, I wonder why…). In the family there are 3 children: Norio the eldest boy and middle child (), Keiko the eldest and the sister and Shun a sweet little baby brother, as well as their mother and father, grandfather and a perhaps Alzheimer’s having grandmother.
This story is overflowing with trauma… SOOO much loss. It comes punch after punch, but that is also why it was so hard to put down. It was a lot of emotional labor to finish, and might be trigger, but I found it worth it. Beyond the trauma, Norio’s school friend () Sumida had a bit of hoodoo going on; she can see ghosts. Overall, for someone who doesn’t read horror much this blend the emotions of loss and intrigue of spirits very well.
4 stars!
Initial Thoughts:RTC!! This is sad… ripped my heart out and made me cry. But there is a hope for a future . I should say there is a relative amount of hope!
Thank you to Rensuke Oshikiri, Kodasha Comics and Netgalley for the opportunity to read this manga before its release.
💞
December 28, 2020
Bad call
Akio managed to save enough so the Kamikis can move from their cramped flat in the suburbs to a spacious house towering above an affluent district over the hills. At long last, grandparents, children and their children's children can enjoy a peaceful environment. Deceptively peaceful, that is. Gruesome sights are seen and terrible events happen in short order. And not in short supply at that.
Author Rensuke Oshikiri knows how to mingle all the traditional elements of Japanese horror and while the bulk of this one-hour read goes a taddle... over-the-top, the core message still hits hard.
To be plain, I'd observe that the build-up felt a bit rushed to me, but you have to remember that this manga was initially published in two installments, which certainly affected the overall pace of the work as a one-shot.
Another feature that brought substantial power to the work was the gritty undertones, left intact and even enhanced by the frenzy, itself providing a consistent incentive and a mighty drive to the story throughout.
RECOMMENDATIONS:
Hideout
L'île de Hôzuki 1
Reset
Duds Hunt
SOUNDTRACK:
Blood Starved Beast - Bloodborne OST
Akio managed to save enough so the Kamikis can move from their cramped flat in the suburbs to a spacious house towering above an affluent district over the hills. At long last, grandparents, children and their children's children can enjoy a peaceful environment. Deceptively peaceful, that is. Gruesome sights are seen and terrible events happen in short order. And not in short supply at that.
Author Rensuke Oshikiri knows how to mingle all the traditional elements of Japanese horror and while the bulk of this one-hour read goes a taddle... over-the-top, the core message still hits hard.
To be plain, I'd observe that the build-up felt a bit rushed to me, but you have to remember that this manga was initially published in two installments, which certainly affected the overall pace of the work as a one-shot.
Another feature that brought substantial power to the work was the gritty undertones, left intact and even enhanced by the frenzy, itself providing a consistent incentive and a mighty drive to the story throughout.
RECOMMENDATIONS:
Hideout
L'île de Hôzuki 1
Reset
Duds Hunt
SOUNDTRACK:
Blood Starved Beast - Bloodborne OST
February 1, 2026
An excellent horror manga in two large volumes - first the horrific haunting and destruction of an extended family that moves into their dream home, only to find it haunted by a vengeful ghost, and second the brutal familial revenge tale of Granny and her surviving grandson. As brutal and devastating as this was, it was able to achieve a charming, sweet ending. Very well done, and recommended.
January 3, 2026
Thank you to Netgalley and Kodansha Comics for the opportunity to read Sayuri by Rensuke Oshikiri. This was a profoundly impactful read. I was initially unsure, even prepared to give it up midway due to the stark art style. However, persisting revealed a story that transformed into a deeply psychological and philosophical exploration, cloaked in the guise of a slice-of-life horror.
As an empath, I found this manga both triggering and painfully close to the heart. The narrative’s unflinching gloom weighed heavily on me, as I felt the profound suffering of its characters. Yet, I am incredibly glad I continued. Through the grandmother’s arc, the story delivers a powerful, poetic lesson. It illustrates how surrendering completely to grief, trauma, and sadness allows a metaphorical devil (here, the entity Sayuri) to feed on that pain and ultimately destroy you and everything you love.
The brilliance lies in the solution it portrays. Survival comes from the disciplined, steadfast acts of living. By choosing to feed herself and her grandson, by maintaining strict routines and performing simple chores, the grandmother finds the strength to confront the source of the horror and reclaim their lives. The core message resonated deeply. It is okay to grieve, but one must not allow it to haunt and consume everything. Healing is found in picking oneself up and doing one thing at a time, even if that thing is simply preparing a meal. This was a harsh, beautiful, and unforgettable read that taught me a great deal about the quiet strength required to endure.
As an empath, I found this manga both triggering and painfully close to the heart. The narrative’s unflinching gloom weighed heavily on me, as I felt the profound suffering of its characters. Yet, I am incredibly glad I continued. Through the grandmother’s arc, the story delivers a powerful, poetic lesson. It illustrates how surrendering completely to grief, trauma, and sadness allows a metaphorical devil (here, the entity Sayuri) to feed on that pain and ultimately destroy you and everything you love.
The brilliance lies in the solution it portrays. Survival comes from the disciplined, steadfast acts of living. By choosing to feed herself and her grandson, by maintaining strict routines and performing simple chores, the grandmother finds the strength to confront the source of the horror and reclaim their lives. The core message resonated deeply. It is okay to grieve, but one must not allow it to haunt and consume everything. Healing is found in picking oneself up and doing one thing at a time, even if that thing is simply preparing a meal. This was a harsh, beautiful, and unforgettable read that taught me a great deal about the quiet strength required to endure.
March 27, 2026
I recieved a digital copy of this ARC thanks to NetGalley and Kodansha Comics. All opinions below are honest and entirely my own.
This story starts off like any classic haunted house story, if not a little fast-paced. where it really shines, though, is the second half. It was unexpected, and gratifying. I would have liked to have seen the story a little drawn out and slower, but that's my only complaint.
This story starts off like any classic haunted house story, if not a little fast-paced. where it really shines, though, is the second half. It was unexpected, and gratifying. I would have liked to have seen the story a little drawn out and slower, but that's my only complaint.
January 22, 2026
This was amazing and had no business being this heartwarming lol
That’s why Japanese lit is superior, they always make gory, dark stories also cute and heartwarming, so you actually care about the characters and there’s actual stakes!
That’s why Japanese lit is superior, they always make gory, dark stories also cute and heartwarming, so you actually care about the characters and there’s actual stakes!
March 27, 2026
Very spooky and atmospheric, the art style was very creepy which worked well with the genre and the storyline kept me hooked and wondering what would happen next
February 15, 2026
Sayuri - Rensuke Oshikiri
Thank you Kodansha Comics and NetGalley for providing a copy of this manga in exchange for an honest review.
Don't Let Her See Your Fears
The Kamiki family finally move into their dream home; beautiful hilltop views, big enough to include grandma and grandpa, and no more squishing into a shoebox apartment. But it doesn't take long for things to take a turn for the worst.. Strange noises, horrific nightmares, and the feeling of being watched.
This story was disturbing, full of dread, and surprisingly emotional. I couldn't tell where the story would go next, and it kept me hooked right until the end. If you enjoy J-Horror, it's a must read!
Thank you Kodansha Comics and NetGalley for providing a copy of this manga in exchange for an honest review.
Don't Let Her See Your Fears
The Kamiki family finally move into their dream home; beautiful hilltop views, big enough to include grandma and grandpa, and no more squishing into a shoebox apartment. But it doesn't take long for things to take a turn for the worst.. Strange noises, horrific nightmares, and the feeling of being watched.
This story was disturbing, full of dread, and surprisingly emotional. I couldn't tell where the story would go next, and it kept me hooked right until the end. If you enjoy J-Horror, it's a must read!
February 10, 2021
Pas mal du tout, j'aime bien ce genre d'horreur et la postface du mangaka est intéressante 😊
Review of advance copy received from Netgalley
Rating: 4.25
Thank you to Rensuke Oshikiri, Netgalley, and Kodansha Comics for an e-arc of this manga in exchange for an honest review.
I've heard of the author of this manga before as I know they also released a very DIFFERENT series called Hi-Score Girl but when I saw they were also releasing a Horror I was vey interested! Sayuri follows a close family in Japan who move into their dream home only to discover it is haunted. Various tragedies befall them and in the end it is down to two of the family members to fight back against the ghost torturing them all.
The art in this manga is certainly unique and whilst it's a style I'm not hugely fond of normally, with it being much less expressive but I think this works really well for the horror aspects of the book and the body horror moments rival Junji Ito in terms of scare factor. There was surprisingly a lot of heart in this book too and you really got to know the family members and feel for their situation. The author's note about why they wrote this book and about how they didn't feel many horror stories had the people being haunted fight back was also very interesting.
Overall, I would definitely recommend this horror, and I'd be interested to see what other horror the author might write in the future,
Thank you to Rensuke Oshikiri, Netgalley, and Kodansha Comics for an e-arc of this manga in exchange for an honest review.
I've heard of the author of this manga before as I know they also released a very DIFFERENT series called Hi-Score Girl but when I saw they were also releasing a Horror I was vey interested! Sayuri follows a close family in Japan who move into their dream home only to discover it is haunted. Various tragedies befall them and in the end it is down to two of the family members to fight back against the ghost torturing them all.
The art in this manga is certainly unique and whilst it's a style I'm not hugely fond of normally, with it being much less expressive but I think this works really well for the horror aspects of the book and the body horror moments rival Junji Ito in terms of scare factor. There was surprisingly a lot of heart in this book too and you really got to know the family members and feel for their situation. The author's note about why they wrote this book and about how they didn't feel many horror stories had the people being haunted fight back was also very interesting.
Overall, I would definitely recommend this horror, and I'd be interested to see what other horror the author might write in the future,
February 8, 2026
Sayuri by Rensuke Oshikiri is a chilling and emotionally charged horror novel that blends supernatural terror with family tragedy. What begins as a seemingly typical haunted-house story quickly deepens into something far more disturbing and unsettling.
Oshikiri’s strength lies in his ability to create sustained dread. The horror does not rely solely on jump scares, but on a slow accumulation of fear—through atmosphere, psychological unease, and the gradual unraveling of a family pushed to its limits. The presence of Sayuri is haunting, and the sense of menace grows heavier with each chapter.
Beyond the horror, the novel explores themes of grief, helplessness, and generational trauma. The emotional weight of the story makes the frightening moments hit harder, grounding the supernatural elements in very human suffering. The pacing is tight, keeping the reader engaged while allowing tension to build effectively.
Some scenes are intensely dark and may not be suitable for all readers, but for fans of Japanese horror, this intensity is part of the appeal. Overall, Sayuri is a powerful and disturbing read that lingers in the mind, offering horror that is both shocking and deeply affecting.
Oshikiri’s strength lies in his ability to create sustained dread. The horror does not rely solely on jump scares, but on a slow accumulation of fear—through atmosphere, psychological unease, and the gradual unraveling of a family pushed to its limits. The presence of Sayuri is haunting, and the sense of menace grows heavier with each chapter.
Beyond the horror, the novel explores themes of grief, helplessness, and generational trauma. The emotional weight of the story makes the frightening moments hit harder, grounding the supernatural elements in very human suffering. The pacing is tight, keeping the reader engaged while allowing tension to build effectively.
Some scenes are intensely dark and may not be suitable for all readers, but for fans of Japanese horror, this intensity is part of the appeal. Overall, Sayuri is a powerful and disturbing read that lingers in the mind, offering horror that is both shocking and deeply affecting.
January 8, 2026
The art style of this Sayuri was exquisite. It was creepy, horrific and will definitely haunt my nightmares.
The story itself wasn’t anything ground breaking and was a little predictable. I wished there was a little bit more to it because it felt like I read two panels and then everyone was dead.
There was also a big pacing problem where things raced at 100 miles a minute and then randomly slowed down for a few pages.
As a quick, hour long read, it definitely isn’t a bad read but I just think it could have been developed into so much more.
Thank you to Netgalley and the publisher for the arc in return for an honest review.
The story itself wasn’t anything ground breaking and was a little predictable. I wished there was a little bit more to it because it felt like I read two panels and then everyone was dead.
There was also a big pacing problem where things raced at 100 miles a minute and then randomly slowed down for a few pages.
As a quick, hour long read, it definitely isn’t a bad read but I just think it could have been developed into so much more.
Thank you to Netgalley and the publisher for the arc in return for an honest review.
February 22, 2026
3.5 Stars
Thank you NetGalley for the ARC in exchange for an honest review.
This one was unfortunately a bit of a miss for me because of the art style. I can understand the art style being weird/creepy to fit the theme of the story, and it wasn't as if the artist is untalented, it just wasn't my cup of tea. I enjoyed the story, but it felt a little rushed. I think it would have benefited from being another volume to be able to slow down the story. It felt like every scary thing happened so fast after the other that tension didn't have a chance to build up. I really enjoyed the plot itself and message behind the story though and would still recommend for horror manga enjoyers!
#IndigoEmployee
Thank you NetGalley for the ARC in exchange for an honest review.
This one was unfortunately a bit of a miss for me because of the art style. I can understand the art style being weird/creepy to fit the theme of the story, and it wasn't as if the artist is untalented, it just wasn't my cup of tea. I enjoyed the story, but it felt a little rushed. I think it would have benefited from being another volume to be able to slow down the story. It felt like every scary thing happened so fast after the other that tension didn't have a chance to build up. I really enjoyed the plot itself and message behind the story though and would still recommend for horror manga enjoyers!
#IndigoEmployee
December 6, 2025
⭐ Manga | Horror
Thank you to Kodansha Comics for this ARC in exchange for my honest review!
Sayuri is a horror story that begins when a family moves into what the father believes is their dream home, a larger space with a beautiful view. But it doesn’t take long before unsettling and tragic events start piling up. Strange deaths, eerie occurrences, and disturbing visions plague the household, and the locals soon warn the surviving family members that the home is cursed.
The characters are not draw with typical faces & look odd. The atmosphere is undeniably creepy, but the pacing can feel uneven at times. I found it a bit difficult to stay fully engaged because of the pacing along with the story frequent blurring the line between reality and madness. Many scenes depict characters losing their grip on what’s real, which adds to the horror but also makes the narrative harder to follow.
Overall, Sayuri has eerie visuals and unsettling tension. Those into horror might enjoy the cursed-house, even if the pacing can feel disorienting.
Thank you to Kodansha Comics for this ARC in exchange for my honest review!
Sayuri is a horror story that begins when a family moves into what the father believes is their dream home, a larger space with a beautiful view. But it doesn’t take long before unsettling and tragic events start piling up. Strange deaths, eerie occurrences, and disturbing visions plague the household, and the locals soon warn the surviving family members that the home is cursed.
The characters are not draw with typical faces & look odd. The atmosphere is undeniably creepy, but the pacing can feel uneven at times. I found it a bit difficult to stay fully engaged because of the pacing along with the story frequent blurring the line between reality and madness. Many scenes depict characters losing their grip on what’s real, which adds to the horror but also makes the narrative harder to follow.
Overall, Sayuri has eerie visuals and unsettling tension. Those into horror might enjoy the cursed-house, even if the pacing can feel disorienting.
Read
December 15, 2025*Thanks to NetGalley and Kodansha Comics for early copy for review*
So I requested this because I love horror manga, but the art style in this was not good. I think that it made some of the scarier panels feel childish because of it. I felt the characters looked to similar and alien like. The actual story was not that bad, but art plays such an important part in manga.
So I requested this because I love horror manga, but the art style in this was not good. I think that it made some of the scarier panels feel childish because of it. I felt the characters looked to similar and alien like. The actual story was not that bad, but art plays such an important part in manga.
December 29, 2025
One of the more unsettling stories I’ve read! The images in this are haunting! Super creepy and unique art style. It’s a quick read with a well fleshed out story. Even when it’s all wrapped up there’s an eerie energy after! Really enjoyed this one.
January 10, 2026
Thank you to Netgalley, the publisher and the author for providing me a copy in exchange for my honest thoughts. When initially started this I was drawn in by the artwork but ultimately thought this would just be another haunted house manga. Instead, we find a haunted house that is deeply affecting its occupants and causing their untimely deaths. There was such a profound, growing sense of unease while reading this but, the most impactful bits were the latter half. I absolutely loved the ending and the fighting back against this malevolent spirit. Highly recommend
This entire review has been hidden because of spoilers.
February 23, 2026
Thank you NetGalley for the digital ARC of this title.
Norio and his family have finally saved up enough money to buy their dream home. The whole family moves in to the huge house. However, rumor has it that people don't stay in this house for very long. It is cursed. No one believes the rumors until people in the home start acting strange. Then, all hell breaks loose.
I thought that this was a good story. It was suspenseful and scary. However, the art was not terribly impressive. Most of the characters looked alike and it was hard to tell who was who.
Norio and his family have finally saved up enough money to buy their dream home. The whole family moves in to the huge house. However, rumor has it that people don't stay in this house for very long. It is cursed. No one believes the rumors until people in the home start acting strange. Then, all hell breaks loose.
I thought that this was a good story. It was suspenseful and scary. However, the art was not terribly impressive. Most of the characters looked alike and it was hard to tell who was who.
September 3, 2021
I’m not sure I fully grasped what happened except creepy things in a house a family recently moved into, but I liked it! The art was eerie!
April 28, 2026
Interesting premise/plot, some good scares, art is so so
March 17, 2026
Why “Sayuri” Lingers: Rensuke Oshikiri’s Horror Story of Memory, Blame, and the Cost of Erasing a Child
By Demetris Papadimitropoulos | February 23rd, 2026
“Sayuri,” by Rensuke Oshikiri, begins with one of horror’s oldest bargains: a family buys a house, and the house answers back. The bargain is familiar enough that a reader can feel, at first, the contour of the genre in advance – the spacious hilltop home, the atmosphere of unease, the little frictions of domestic life that become a seam for something older and crueler to enter through. What Oshikiri does, and does with unnerving confidence, is use that familiarity not as a resting place but as a trapdoor. The story drops. It keeps dropping. By the time “Sayuri” reaches its late revelations, it is no longer merely a haunted-house tale. It is a book about what a family does to one of its own in order to preserve the appearance of being a family at all.
This is what makes “Sayuri” more than a clever exercise in dread. It is not content with apparitions, or with the spectacle of fear. It wants to know what fear is made of. It wants to know who gets named monstrous, who gets hidden, who gets buried in the yard and then in memory. It wants to know what kind of household can produce a ghost so furious that she can only speak in blows, distortions, repetitions, and the mangled playback of old scenes. In that sense, the book’s violence is not ornamental. It is evidentiary.
The narrative is built around Norio Kamiki, the boy who survives the initial implosion of the Kamiki family and is left standing in the wreckage. Around him, the story arranges a devastating sequence of losses: his father, his grandfather, his mother, his siblings, the ordinary scaffolding of family life stripped away one by one. Oshikiri stages these deaths and disappearances with an almost feral theatricality, but he is too sharp a storyteller to let the book remain at the level of shock. The emotional center is Norio’s disorientation: not simply terror at what he sees, but terror at what he is becoming in response to it. He is frightened, guilty, dependent, defensive, and often ashamed of all of it. He tries to “man up.” He repeats instructions to himself. He tries to be the boy the surviving adults need him to be. He fails. He survives anyway.
And then there is the grandmother – one of the strangest, funniest, and most unexpectedly moving figures in recent horror. In lesser hands, she might have been a comic relief machine, a foulmouthed elder dropped into the story to puncture tension. Oshikiri gives her that energy, certainly: she is all command voice, bat-swinging ferocity, improvised cosmology, and practical doctrine. But he also gives her a metaphysics, and that is what elevates her. Her concept of the “life flame” could have come off as a gimmick. Instead it becomes the book’s blunt, stubborn counter-philosophy to annihilation. Eat well. Sleep. Clean the house. Move the body. Keep the rooms in order. Don’t surrender the mind. In another genre, this might read as self-help. In “Sayuri,” it reads as an ethics of survival.
Oshikiri is very good on the way the mundane can become sacred once terror enters a home. A bowl of food. A scrubbed floor. Fresh air after panic. A notebook of recipes. These details recur not as sentiment, but as resistance. The grandmother’s insistence that “the inside reflects the outside” is the kind of line that could sound simplistic if detached from the story that bears it. Within the book’s logic, it is a worldview forged against chaos. She cannot undo what has happened. She cannot resurrect the dead. She cannot make the world fair. But she can refuse to let the ghost dictate the terms of reality. She can keep a room clean. She can make breakfast. She can tell a boy to keep his soul clean even if the world around him is not.
That “soul” language matters, because “Sayuri” is in many ways a story about moral contamination. The haunting is not random. The house is not simply “bad.” The book’s turning point comes when Norio and his grandmother uncover the buried remains of a teenage girl and, with them, the literal identification card that names the ghost: Sayuri Kujo. The revelation is handled with Oshikiri’s characteristic flair for grotesque timing – a comedy beat, a practical observation, a skull in the dirt – but the effect is bracing. The ghost is no longer an abstraction. She was a child. She had an age, a birthday, an address. She had a family. Someone buried her like contraband. The house, from that point on, is no longer just haunted by the dead. It is haunted by a crime and by the social machinery that made the crime livable for its perpetrators.
The sections in which the grandmother tracks down the Kujo family are among the book’s best. They broaden the story beyond the Kamiki house and reveal the true source of its horror: adults who recoded cruelty as necessity. Oshikiri does not make Sayuri’s parents and relatives subtle villains. They are evasive, self-justifying, and morally shabby in ways that feel painfully recognizable. They describe Sayuri as “rotten,” a problem to be managed, a threat to the rest of the household. Their language has the greasy quality of people who have told themselves the same exonerating story so many times that they no longer hear what it reveals. This is one of the book’s sharpest insights: the ghost is terrifying, yes, but the people who made her and then denied her are in some ways more terrible, because they are ordinary. They live by the sea. They kept going.
At this point, “Sayuri” begins to resemble not only Japanese ghost fiction but a broader tradition of domestic horror in which the supernatural is less an intrusion than a return. One can feel faint echoes of “Ju-on” in the way place becomes a pressure chamber for grievance, of “Ringu” in the insistence that an image can transmit damage, of “Dark Water” in the association between maternal failure and damp, enclosed domestic space. But Oshikiri’s real achievement is more unruly than homage. He writes in a mode that can pivot, within the span of a few pages, from slapstick grotesquerie to genuine pity. A taunt lands like a joke, then recoils as a wound. A rant becomes a confession. A monster becomes a child. It is a tonal high-wire act, and he does not always stay perfectly balanced, but the risk is part of the book’s voltage.
The most surprising and, in its way, most haunting thing “Sayuri” does is allow Sayuri herself to change shape. Early on, she appears as rage, distortion, assault – a force that repeats the family’s own cruelties back at them in warped form. But as the grandmother confronts the Kujo parents and drags the buried truth into speech, the ghost’s fury begins to crack. Oshikiri literalizes this in startling visual and narrative terms: the murderous apparition regresses toward the child she was, grief and need surfacing beneath vengeance. It is an extraordinary choice, because it refuses the easy satisfactions of both exorcism and revenge fantasy. Sayuri is not purified. She is not excused. She is not simply defeated. She is recognized.
Recognition, in “Sayuri,” is a kind of violence too. To be seen is to be exposed, and to expose is to hurt. The grandmother’s method is not gentle. She is less therapist than avenger, less priest than prosecutor. She forces the Kujo family to encounter the damage they created. She forces Sayuri to face the fact that the people she hates are still, impossibly, the people from whom she once wanted love. Oshikiri knows that the deepest wound here is not murder but deprivation – the starvation for ordinary care, for a parent’s regard, for the dull, daily affirmations that make a life feel inhabitable. When the grandmother accuses Sayuri of being “starved for love,” the line risks bluntness, but the book has earned the bluntness. It lands.
If “Sayuri” has a weakness, it is that Oshikiri sometimes cannot resist stating the moral charge of his scenes twice, then again at a higher volume. The book’s emotional logic is often crystalline, but its dialogue can be intentionally over-insistent, its declarations repeated until they become incantatory. There are moments when the thematic scaffolding shows. Side characters, too, are unevenly drawn. Some exist primarily as functions of plot or as conduits for exposition, and the story’s appetite for forward motion can flatten what might have become richer secondary textures.
Still, there is a compelling argument to be made that this excess is not a flaw so much as the book’s native grammar. Oshikiri writes horror not in whispers but in surges. He wants repetition. He wants the line to echo because trauma echoes. He wants the reader to feel the pressure of the same words returning in a new mouth, a new scene, a new emotional key. The result is a style that can seem almost coarse when paraphrased and surprisingly precise when experienced. It has the rhythm of panic and the rhythm of obsession. It also has, crucially, the rhythm of adolescence – everything is too much, too loud, too immediate, and yet beneath that volume is a genuine vulnerability the book never mocks.
What makes “Sayuri” feel particularly alive now is how directly it speaks to contemporary anxieties without reducing itself to allegory. The book nods toward the social stigma around withdrawal and isolation – the gossiping neighbors, the muttered “hikikomori” label, the way a struggling child becomes a local rumor before she becomes a person. It understands housing as aspiration and trap, a “dream home” purchased at enormous psychic and financial cost, then turned into a site of debt, dread, and inherited disaster. It stages family violence as something both hidden and structurally ordinary, not an exotic aberration but a private catastrophe that can sit undisturbed, literally buried, for years. It is also, unexpectedly, a book about caregiving: the labor of feeding, cleaning, driving, tending, worrying, improvising, and carrying on after loss. The grandmother is not just a warrior. She is a caretaker who knows that care can be profane, repetitive, unglamorous, and holy.
The friendship thread between Norio and Sumida is another quiet strength. In a story this relentless, it would have been easy for Oshikiri to sacrifice every softer social bond in favor of pure escalation. Instead he gives Norio a witness, a person who wants to help and whose presence complicates his idea of strength. Their scenes are awkward, tender, and often interrupted by terror, but they matter because they offer the book an alternative social logic. Norio’s instinct is to isolate, to become self-sufficient in the way frightened boys often imagine they must. The story keeps punishing that instinct. Help is dangerous, yes. But refusing help is also dangerous. “Sayuri” never resolves this tension into a slogan. It lets Norio live inside it.
The final movement of the book is quieter than one might expect from a story that has spent so much time in shrieking registers. There is still horror. There is still anger. But what emerges most powerfully is aftermath. The house is eventually gone. The dead remain dead. Norio and his grandmother move forward not because they have “healed” in any clean sense, but because life has continued to demand its ordinary terms. School. Commuting. Food. Memory. The grandmother’s late monologues about death, fairness, prayer, and the possibility of reunion in the afterlife are among the book’s most affecting passages, and also among its most revealing. She is not a saint. She has done ugly things and knows it. She is not speaking from moral purity. She is speaking from a battered but unsurrendered belief that how one lives still matters.
That ethical insistence gives “Sayuri” its unusual emotional aftertaste. Many horror narratives are satisfied to leave the reader with an image, a final twist, an implication that evil persists. Oshikiri leaves us with something less elegant and more difficult: a practice. Keep your life in order. Feed the flame. Clean the house. Live in a way the dead might recognize as an answer to what was done to them. It is a hard-won, imperfect philosophy, and the book never pretends it can redeem the violence at its center. But it can make a survivable world around that violence. In the end, that is the most radical thing “Sayuri” does. It makes survival feel like an art.
There are places where the book lunges instead of glides, where its melodrama spills over, where one wishes for more silence and less declaration. Yet to fault “Sayuri” for its intensity is also to miss how carefully Oshikiri has calibrated what that intensity is for. He is not merely trying to frighten us. He is trying to force a recognition that horror often begins in the family’s management of shame – in who gets blamed, hidden, disbelieved, or written out of the story. The ghost is terrifying because she is the return of what everyone wanted to keep unnamed.
As a work of horror, “Sayuri” is brutally effective. As a story of grief, it is rougher, stranger, and more interesting than its premise suggests. As a moral fable about the cost of burying a child and then pretending the burial solved anything, it is unforgettable. I’d put it at 86 out of 100, not because it is polished into perfection, but because its imperfections are often the very seams through which its fury, pity, and humanity keep breaking through.
What lingers after the last page is not just the ghost, or the blood, or even the house. It is the grandmother’s cracked doctrine, half practical wisdom and half spiritual dare: live well enough that the dead do not own the shape of your days. In a genre built on possession, “Sayuri” is, finally, about repossession – of a name, of a crime, of a life, of a future. It earns its place not only among modern haunted-house stories but among those rarer works of horror that understand terror as a social fact before it becomes a supernatural one.
By Demetris Papadimitropoulos | February 23rd, 2026
“Sayuri,” by Rensuke Oshikiri, begins with one of horror’s oldest bargains: a family buys a house, and the house answers back. The bargain is familiar enough that a reader can feel, at first, the contour of the genre in advance – the spacious hilltop home, the atmosphere of unease, the little frictions of domestic life that become a seam for something older and crueler to enter through. What Oshikiri does, and does with unnerving confidence, is use that familiarity not as a resting place but as a trapdoor. The story drops. It keeps dropping. By the time “Sayuri” reaches its late revelations, it is no longer merely a haunted-house tale. It is a book about what a family does to one of its own in order to preserve the appearance of being a family at all.
This is what makes “Sayuri” more than a clever exercise in dread. It is not content with apparitions, or with the spectacle of fear. It wants to know what fear is made of. It wants to know who gets named monstrous, who gets hidden, who gets buried in the yard and then in memory. It wants to know what kind of household can produce a ghost so furious that she can only speak in blows, distortions, repetitions, and the mangled playback of old scenes. In that sense, the book’s violence is not ornamental. It is evidentiary.
The narrative is built around Norio Kamiki, the boy who survives the initial implosion of the Kamiki family and is left standing in the wreckage. Around him, the story arranges a devastating sequence of losses: his father, his grandfather, his mother, his siblings, the ordinary scaffolding of family life stripped away one by one. Oshikiri stages these deaths and disappearances with an almost feral theatricality, but he is too sharp a storyteller to let the book remain at the level of shock. The emotional center is Norio’s disorientation: not simply terror at what he sees, but terror at what he is becoming in response to it. He is frightened, guilty, dependent, defensive, and often ashamed of all of it. He tries to “man up.” He repeats instructions to himself. He tries to be the boy the surviving adults need him to be. He fails. He survives anyway.
And then there is the grandmother – one of the strangest, funniest, and most unexpectedly moving figures in recent horror. In lesser hands, she might have been a comic relief machine, a foulmouthed elder dropped into the story to puncture tension. Oshikiri gives her that energy, certainly: she is all command voice, bat-swinging ferocity, improvised cosmology, and practical doctrine. But he also gives her a metaphysics, and that is what elevates her. Her concept of the “life flame” could have come off as a gimmick. Instead it becomes the book’s blunt, stubborn counter-philosophy to annihilation. Eat well. Sleep. Clean the house. Move the body. Keep the rooms in order. Don’t surrender the mind. In another genre, this might read as self-help. In “Sayuri,” it reads as an ethics of survival.
Oshikiri is very good on the way the mundane can become sacred once terror enters a home. A bowl of food. A scrubbed floor. Fresh air after panic. A notebook of recipes. These details recur not as sentiment, but as resistance. The grandmother’s insistence that “the inside reflects the outside” is the kind of line that could sound simplistic if detached from the story that bears it. Within the book’s logic, it is a worldview forged against chaos. She cannot undo what has happened. She cannot resurrect the dead. She cannot make the world fair. But she can refuse to let the ghost dictate the terms of reality. She can keep a room clean. She can make breakfast. She can tell a boy to keep his soul clean even if the world around him is not.
That “soul” language matters, because “Sayuri” is in many ways a story about moral contamination. The haunting is not random. The house is not simply “bad.” The book’s turning point comes when Norio and his grandmother uncover the buried remains of a teenage girl and, with them, the literal identification card that names the ghost: Sayuri Kujo. The revelation is handled with Oshikiri’s characteristic flair for grotesque timing – a comedy beat, a practical observation, a skull in the dirt – but the effect is bracing. The ghost is no longer an abstraction. She was a child. She had an age, a birthday, an address. She had a family. Someone buried her like contraband. The house, from that point on, is no longer just haunted by the dead. It is haunted by a crime and by the social machinery that made the crime livable for its perpetrators.
The sections in which the grandmother tracks down the Kujo family are among the book’s best. They broaden the story beyond the Kamiki house and reveal the true source of its horror: adults who recoded cruelty as necessity. Oshikiri does not make Sayuri’s parents and relatives subtle villains. They are evasive, self-justifying, and morally shabby in ways that feel painfully recognizable. They describe Sayuri as “rotten,” a problem to be managed, a threat to the rest of the household. Their language has the greasy quality of people who have told themselves the same exonerating story so many times that they no longer hear what it reveals. This is one of the book’s sharpest insights: the ghost is terrifying, yes, but the people who made her and then denied her are in some ways more terrible, because they are ordinary. They live by the sea. They kept going.
At this point, “Sayuri” begins to resemble not only Japanese ghost fiction but a broader tradition of domestic horror in which the supernatural is less an intrusion than a return. One can feel faint echoes of “Ju-on” in the way place becomes a pressure chamber for grievance, of “Ringu” in the insistence that an image can transmit damage, of “Dark Water” in the association between maternal failure and damp, enclosed domestic space. But Oshikiri’s real achievement is more unruly than homage. He writes in a mode that can pivot, within the span of a few pages, from slapstick grotesquerie to genuine pity. A taunt lands like a joke, then recoils as a wound. A rant becomes a confession. A monster becomes a child. It is a tonal high-wire act, and he does not always stay perfectly balanced, but the risk is part of the book’s voltage.
The most surprising and, in its way, most haunting thing “Sayuri” does is allow Sayuri herself to change shape. Early on, she appears as rage, distortion, assault – a force that repeats the family’s own cruelties back at them in warped form. But as the grandmother confronts the Kujo parents and drags the buried truth into speech, the ghost’s fury begins to crack. Oshikiri literalizes this in startling visual and narrative terms: the murderous apparition regresses toward the child she was, grief and need surfacing beneath vengeance. It is an extraordinary choice, because it refuses the easy satisfactions of both exorcism and revenge fantasy. Sayuri is not purified. She is not excused. She is not simply defeated. She is recognized.
Recognition, in “Sayuri,” is a kind of violence too. To be seen is to be exposed, and to expose is to hurt. The grandmother’s method is not gentle. She is less therapist than avenger, less priest than prosecutor. She forces the Kujo family to encounter the damage they created. She forces Sayuri to face the fact that the people she hates are still, impossibly, the people from whom she once wanted love. Oshikiri knows that the deepest wound here is not murder but deprivation – the starvation for ordinary care, for a parent’s regard, for the dull, daily affirmations that make a life feel inhabitable. When the grandmother accuses Sayuri of being “starved for love,” the line risks bluntness, but the book has earned the bluntness. It lands.
If “Sayuri” has a weakness, it is that Oshikiri sometimes cannot resist stating the moral charge of his scenes twice, then again at a higher volume. The book’s emotional logic is often crystalline, but its dialogue can be intentionally over-insistent, its declarations repeated until they become incantatory. There are moments when the thematic scaffolding shows. Side characters, too, are unevenly drawn. Some exist primarily as functions of plot or as conduits for exposition, and the story’s appetite for forward motion can flatten what might have become richer secondary textures.
Still, there is a compelling argument to be made that this excess is not a flaw so much as the book’s native grammar. Oshikiri writes horror not in whispers but in surges. He wants repetition. He wants the line to echo because trauma echoes. He wants the reader to feel the pressure of the same words returning in a new mouth, a new scene, a new emotional key. The result is a style that can seem almost coarse when paraphrased and surprisingly precise when experienced. It has the rhythm of panic and the rhythm of obsession. It also has, crucially, the rhythm of adolescence – everything is too much, too loud, too immediate, and yet beneath that volume is a genuine vulnerability the book never mocks.
What makes “Sayuri” feel particularly alive now is how directly it speaks to contemporary anxieties without reducing itself to allegory. The book nods toward the social stigma around withdrawal and isolation – the gossiping neighbors, the muttered “hikikomori” label, the way a struggling child becomes a local rumor before she becomes a person. It understands housing as aspiration and trap, a “dream home” purchased at enormous psychic and financial cost, then turned into a site of debt, dread, and inherited disaster. It stages family violence as something both hidden and structurally ordinary, not an exotic aberration but a private catastrophe that can sit undisturbed, literally buried, for years. It is also, unexpectedly, a book about caregiving: the labor of feeding, cleaning, driving, tending, worrying, improvising, and carrying on after loss. The grandmother is not just a warrior. She is a caretaker who knows that care can be profane, repetitive, unglamorous, and holy.
The friendship thread between Norio and Sumida is another quiet strength. In a story this relentless, it would have been easy for Oshikiri to sacrifice every softer social bond in favor of pure escalation. Instead he gives Norio a witness, a person who wants to help and whose presence complicates his idea of strength. Their scenes are awkward, tender, and often interrupted by terror, but they matter because they offer the book an alternative social logic. Norio’s instinct is to isolate, to become self-sufficient in the way frightened boys often imagine they must. The story keeps punishing that instinct. Help is dangerous, yes. But refusing help is also dangerous. “Sayuri” never resolves this tension into a slogan. It lets Norio live inside it.
The final movement of the book is quieter than one might expect from a story that has spent so much time in shrieking registers. There is still horror. There is still anger. But what emerges most powerfully is aftermath. The house is eventually gone. The dead remain dead. Norio and his grandmother move forward not because they have “healed” in any clean sense, but because life has continued to demand its ordinary terms. School. Commuting. Food. Memory. The grandmother’s late monologues about death, fairness, prayer, and the possibility of reunion in the afterlife are among the book’s most affecting passages, and also among its most revealing. She is not a saint. She has done ugly things and knows it. She is not speaking from moral purity. She is speaking from a battered but unsurrendered belief that how one lives still matters.
That ethical insistence gives “Sayuri” its unusual emotional aftertaste. Many horror narratives are satisfied to leave the reader with an image, a final twist, an implication that evil persists. Oshikiri leaves us with something less elegant and more difficult: a practice. Keep your life in order. Feed the flame. Clean the house. Live in a way the dead might recognize as an answer to what was done to them. It is a hard-won, imperfect philosophy, and the book never pretends it can redeem the violence at its center. But it can make a survivable world around that violence. In the end, that is the most radical thing “Sayuri” does. It makes survival feel like an art.
There are places where the book lunges instead of glides, where its melodrama spills over, where one wishes for more silence and less declaration. Yet to fault “Sayuri” for its intensity is also to miss how carefully Oshikiri has calibrated what that intensity is for. He is not merely trying to frighten us. He is trying to force a recognition that horror often begins in the family’s management of shame – in who gets blamed, hidden, disbelieved, or written out of the story. The ghost is terrifying because she is the return of what everyone wanted to keep unnamed.
As a work of horror, “Sayuri” is brutally effective. As a story of grief, it is rougher, stranger, and more interesting than its premise suggests. As a moral fable about the cost of burying a child and then pretending the burial solved anything, it is unforgettable. I’d put it at 86 out of 100, not because it is polished into perfection, but because its imperfections are often the very seams through which its fury, pity, and humanity keep breaking through.
What lingers after the last page is not just the ghost, or the blood, or even the house. It is the grandmother’s cracked doctrine, half practical wisdom and half spiritual dare: live well enough that the dead do not own the shape of your days. In a genre built on possession, “Sayuri” is, finally, about repossession – of a name, of a crime, of a life, of a future. It earns its place not only among modern haunted-house stories but among those rarer works of horror that understand terror as a social fact before it becomes a supernatural one.
December 7, 2025
Hello! Whoever is reading this. I thought the art style was creepy at times. Which is good since this story is a horror story. But I don’t think this story was for me even though I didn’t enjoy the creepy art style. I was also confused with the story at times.
Even though this read wasn’t for me I would recommend this story to others who need a quick read. Or want to enjoy some creepy art!
Even though this read wasn’t for me I would recommend this story to others who need a quick read. Or want to enjoy some creepy art!
December 4, 2025
Thank you Net Galley for the e-arc!
It was an interesting horror manga about a family that moves into a nice big house, but then encounters one dreadful event after another. The art was good in giving off a peaceful and then gruesome and creepy vibe as the horror events occurred.
A fun spooky read, but very short so not a lot of build up just from the length of it.
It was an interesting horror manga about a family that moves into a nice big house, but then encounters one dreadful event after another. The art was good in giving off a peaceful and then gruesome and creepy vibe as the horror events occurred.
A fun spooky read, but very short so not a lot of build up just from the length of it.
February 9, 2026
This was a great horror story, centering on a kid whose innocent family unfortunately pays the price of another family's sins. The art style can be a little confusing when it comes to distinguishing between characters in my opinion, but the horror elements and the hauntings are so brilliantly done it makes up for it. Norio is also so sympathetic - he's young enough that he's easy to root for, but in my opinion grandma is the real standout here. Great omnibus volume, totally worth the read if you love a haunted house!
Thanks to Netgalley and the publisher for the ebook!
Thanks to Netgalley and the publisher for the ebook!
January 27, 2026
Thank you to NetGalley and Kodansha Comics | Vertical Comics for making this available to Read Now.
A horror manga about a haunted house and the family that lives there. The plot was pretty simple, with few surprises in the characters' development. The story of the haunting was not that good, to be honest. My main drive to read horror manga is usually not the story, but the drawing style. And this is what I’m most disappointed about here - the drawings were lacking detail and I was very confused of who was who. The characters were not distinct enough and after another set of characters was introduced, I completely got lost. I feel like there were some elements that were underdeveloped, like the TV and the actual reason behind Sayuri’s fate. There was less horror and more violence, which I don’t prefer. This is a fast read, so if you’re interested, you can give it a try.
A horror manga about a haunted house and the family that lives there. The plot was pretty simple, with few surprises in the characters' development. The story of the haunting was not that good, to be honest. My main drive to read horror manga is usually not the story, but the drawing style. And this is what I’m most disappointed about here - the drawings were lacking detail and I was very confused of who was who. The characters were not distinct enough and after another set of characters was introduced, I completely got lost. I feel like there were some elements that were underdeveloped, like the TV and the actual reason behind Sayuri’s fate. There was less horror and more violence, which I don’t prefer. This is a fast read, so if you’re interested, you can give it a try.
May 4, 2026
Read more graphic novel reviews at The Graphic Library.
A family move into the father's dream home and tries to settle in, but the soon find out it is haunted by the ghost of a vengeful teenager girl. Norio, the teen son, tries to keep his family safe and together, but instead is forced to watch as everything unravels in front of him. This is a creepy, psychologically taxing book as readers watch Norio experience one traumatic event after the other, and Oshikiri doesn't pull any punches as many of the events take place right on the page. Serious horror fans, take a look here.
Reviewed for Booklist Magazine.
Sara's Rating: 8/10
Suitability Level: Grade 10-12, Adult
A family move into the father's dream home and tries to settle in, but the soon find out it is haunted by the ghost of a vengeful teenager girl. Norio, the teen son, tries to keep his family safe and together, but instead is forced to watch as everything unravels in front of him. This is a creepy, psychologically taxing book as readers watch Norio experience one traumatic event after the other, and Oshikiri doesn't pull any punches as many of the events take place right on the page. Serious horror fans, take a look here.
Reviewed for Booklist Magazine.
Sara's Rating: 8/10
Suitability Level: Grade 10-12, Adult
May 3, 2024
I think I expected too much from this little manga that I got from the library just because it had a pretty cover. The art was nice but the plot... What?
The first half had a lot of potential, but it fell apart in the end and I jhst ended up frustrated. Several characters in this book deserved better (Sayuri especially), and others deserved much, much worse.
Recommended only if you're looking for something that's essentially the Grudge but like...not as compelling. 1.5 stars on SG rounded up to 2 on GR.
The first half had a lot of potential, but it fell apart in the end and I jhst ended up frustrated. Several characters in this book deserved better (Sayuri especially), and others deserved much, much worse.
Recommended only if you're looking for something that's essentially the Grudge but like...not as compelling. 1.5 stars on SG rounded up to 2 on GR.
February 2, 2021
Effectivement Stéphane Plaza n'achètera PAS cette maison !
March 5, 2021
I liked this take on classic haunted house stories. But sadly I found myself confused a lot of the times.
March 24, 2021
Je ne lis pas énormément de manga, mais j'ai adoré celui-ci ! Les dessins sont effrayants et l'histoire est diabolique. Un manga d'horreur à lire le soir seule dans son lit …
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