ふしぎな話 小池真理子怪奇譚傑作選

by Mariko Koike, 小池真理子

Paperback Bunko

About the author

小池真理子 Mariko Koike is a popular detective and horror novelist. Koike was born in Tokyo and graduated from Seikei University. Her first collection of essays was Recommendations to Women of the World and it became a bestseller. She has been a novelist since her novel came out in 1986. Several of her novels have been translated in to English by Deborah Boliver Boehm.

Reviews

[空 · Rating 2 out of 5]

A collection of stories from KOIKE Mariko (she of the 墓地を見おろす家 novel), with the only connection between most of these stories being something “strange” in them. Not necessarily ghosty.



The first three stories, 恋慕 (attachment), 花車 (flower cart) and 慕情 (yearning) all revolve around Ritsuko and her “strange” experiences as she grows up.

● In 恋慕, she sees her uncle’s ghost a year after he completes suicide. Her uncle, by the way, was deeply in love with her mother, while also managing to be very creepy towards an eleven-year-old Ritsuko. Congrats, bro, on being both pathetic and unsympathetic at the same time. But you know what? At least they did not have an affair.

● In 花車, she sees her younger sibs’ private tutor’s lover after she dies falling down the stairs. The private tutor — whose name I no longer remember and I refuse to find out — had a girlfriend, Sawako, who was pregnant but planned to keep performing in some theater until she was about to give birth. She falls down some slippery steps outside of the theater — it was not just two or three steps, it was a pretty serious fall — falls unconscious. She’s not found until hours later, and it’s likely she died due to exposure (it was winter) and blood loss. But Ritsuko sees her ghost watching the performance she, Sawaka, was supposed to star in.

● In 慕情, she may inadvertently have had a hand her mother’s illness, thereby causing her uncle’s ghostie to once again appear and maybe intervene, but most likely it was medicine and science what saved the day. Just sayin’. Also we have a long intro where a married man tricks Ritsuko into having an affair with him — by not telling her he’s married — and she finds out on her last date with him.

ふしぎな話 strange story

Youko has always liked her older relative, Uehara Mitsuo. (Thank god it’s only like 5 years’ difference.) She relates a story from when Mitsuo ran away from home and she thought he had returned one summer night. Only, no one else sees or encounters him. “So is he dead? Did she see a ghost?” you think.

But no, in the end, Mitsuo is alive and Youko gets to marry him. But he does have a burn mark on his hand that he’s never been able to explain the origin of — but we know what happened based on Youko’s story of meeting him that one summer night.

夏の雨 summer rain

A woman is spending the night with her lover, her husband’s secretary. Her husband sends his secretary home early on the days he’s off to spend the night at his mistress’ house. She reflects on her daughter shittalking the secretary, and she’s like, “What’s weird is idk why I like you.”

That’s it. That’s the strange part. Lol thanks?

Also, this married-people-having-affairs theme is one that Koike will constantly return to in this collection.

年始客 new year’s guest

Our narrator is visiting someone but they don’t know who it is or why. But something the old person says — “I really, really love this” — sparks a memory of a loved one: one, our narrator recalls, who died in an accident. 私だけ奇跡的に助かった。 And this old person is him! —But why did his ghost get so old?

I’m sure you can guess.

「あの時死んだのはね、あんたのほうだったんだ」

I’ll be real: this should have been the first, and only, time that Koike used the Sixth Sense twist. But alas, it was not to be.

旅路 journey

A woman is fondly remembering her lover Natsuo. We start out like she’s in her room sleeping, but then she starts to hear murmuring/rustling, and then someone lays a flower beside her. Turns out, she’s dead and this is her wake.

See? Immediately after the first “the ghost is you” story, we’re hit with another one. Not cool.

声 voice

This one is about a man who’s kidnapped and imprisoned a woman in his attic for some time — my impression is years — because he liked her voice. If that’s not enough to give you an idea of how mentally unbalanced he is, his idea for peaceful cohabitation will.

He doesn’t want her in the attic. No, of course not. He wants her in the house, with him. But see, he can’t stand her face: that’s why she can’t be outside in the daylight, when he can see. So his idea is to gouge his own eyes out.

Luckily, we get an ending where this psycho gets his comeuppance: an explosion occurs (I’m not clear but maybe his prisoner, the woman, had a hand in this) that leaves him deaf, and he wasn’t successful in putting out his eyes.

So the woman is free — and yelling for the authorities, although he can’t hear; you go, girl — and he can see her hated face, but no longer hear that voice he so craved to possess.

Good. Fuck you.

水無月の墓 June’s tomb

This is from the point of view of a woman who was a man’s mistress for some time before he died in a car accident. The man’s secretary, Hagiwara, is the one who counsels her to keep her distance from the family — she was raring to go to his funeral — to not cause distress to them, and also in the end asks her not to try and find (or visit) the man’s grave. Afterwards, all communication from Hagiwara ceases.

Years — a decade? — later, she once again gets a call from Hagiwara, inviting her to meet at a restaurant so they can remember the man, a sort of anniversary of his death. Arriving at the restaurant, she’s led “deeper and deeper” into it before she’s shown the room where Hagiwara is already drinking.

The final scene is where the creepiness sets in. Hagiwara describes what the man saw in his final moments. “The way you talk, it’s almost like you were there,” the woman says.

Hagiwara responds, “I was. I was sitting in the passenger seat.” Before the implications of that set in, he leaves the room.

The woman tries to go after Hagiwara, but every door she goes through just leads her to the same room, again and again and again, until she sees from afar the room she’d left, only — there’s another figure inside it, a man who isn’t Hagiwara. It’s the man she had an affair with. And this is where the story ends.

It reminds me a lot of folklore where people are bewitched or enchanted by foxes, led astray to later be found by other people or villagers at graves, laughing and talking by themselves. Except here she is led astray not by a fox but by a ghost — two ghosts? — and there’s no one to find her and awaken her from her enchantment.

やまざくら Mountain cherry

Ryōko returns to Tokyo after however many years in the countryside to attend the funeral of the wife of the doctor she had an affair with, while she’d been the doctor’s secretary.

The wife, Maya, also had a lover, another doctor who worked in the same clinic — Aizawa. She meets Aizawa along the way, they go to the funeral (wake?), she pays her respects.

She finds a taxi conveniently waiting outside and gets in, but is ignored by the driver. Then a group of funeralgoers approach the taxi, and among them is Masumi, a nurse that the good doctor also had an affair with. When she sees Ryōko she starts screaming; the taxi driver looks up, sees Ryōko, and jumps out of the car.

This is when Ryōko remembers she completed suicide by hanging on a mountain cherry tree some time after quitting her secretarial job. Aizawa also completed suicide by asphyxiation, some time before she did.


overall grade? D, for “don’t”

Partly it’s because of the difference in expectation versus reality: I was expecting something along the lines of ONO Fuyumi’s 営繕かるかや怪異譚, something fun and creepy but occasionally heartwarming. I also know Koike from 墓地を見下ろす, which was creepy and kinda sad, so I was like, maybe this will be ghosties galore!

Instead there are not enough ghosts, and I got people who are so messy, and not the relatable or endearing messy but the annoying messy, where I’m like, “These are all your decisions. Do you understand?”

That’s the other thing: the characters are so unlikeable or unrelatable for me. I despise almost all of them — the prisoner woman being an exception — and dislike being caught up or being made to read of their affairs.