Talking books | Shinen no Telepath
Ever had a story ruin your life?
I was obsessed with creepypasta when I was young. Shocker, I know. This was back when the odd movement of amateur internet horrors stories written for forums and obscure blogs was really starting to take off, before it had hit the mainstream consciousness where movies and TV series were being based off of these modern myths and back when Slenderman was a just a digital legend yet to escape into the real world. A lot of my middle school years were wrapped up in them, in a whirlwind of horror. And though I probably read hundreds, by now they’ve all faded into a vague fog of memory for me, a tone of the past rather than a collection of stories.
All except for one. Its shape has shifted, its details obscured, but one story out of the countless still sits with me, reaching out from the fog.
It’s a story about stranger staring into a man’s window every night.
That’s all. That’s everything I remember, narrative burned down to zero.
Nothing has ever scared me more. I am not exaggerating when I say reading those couple hundred words ruined me. For what must’ve been close to a decade, I developed a genuine phobia of windows at night. Years on years were spent convinced nothing could be scarier than pulling open the curtains or opening up the blinds and seeing a stranger’s face staring back. I got in a habit of sleeping with the lights on.
Shinen no Telepath (also known as The Bright Room) is a novel about a woman who hears a story that ruins her life. It begins with a young sales manager, Karen, who finds herself in the audience of a university ghost story show, members of an occult club taking the stage to tell their stories. It’s mostly bad, acting host to the kinds of people and kinds of tales found in the forgotten gutters of creepypasta: overly obvious empty calorie hauntings, amateur tales cooked up in a hot pot of cliches and awkward exposition. But then a strange woman takes the stage. After scanning the audience, she looks directly at Karen. And then, never breaking eye contact, never acknowledging anybody else in the room, she tells Karen her story.
A few days later, and Karen is sleeping with her lights on. She can’t bring herself to ever turn them off.
With Shinen no Telepath as their debut novel, Kazuki Kamijou is still a fresh face in the world of horror. And while they haven’t had the time to hit the wider consciousness with the same force as some contemporaries like Sesuji or Uketsu (both of whom I’ve written about here and here, respectively), they’re certainly making waves, immediately slotting themselves comfortably within the ever expanding new generation of horror in Japan — a new golden age born from medium twisting authors and the ever expanding influence of YouTube creators and the explosion of indie game developers capturing horror with a memetic virality. This is a generation raised on the proliferation of fake documentary and the faux-reality created by creepypasta on the internet; one trained on horror through process and meta-reflections.
a handful of representative works of modern Japanese horror (from top left: Fake Documentary Q, Strange Houses, About a Place in the Kinki Region, Exit 8
That certainly seems to be the case with Kamijou, too. Shinen no Telepath buries itself in the world of YouTube paranormal investigations and enthusiast live shows, in occult theory and speculation. Just look at the back of the book for proof: a bibliography of real texts on the science of ESP and psychic phenomenon, and an insistence that “the depiction of paranormal investigations and psychic abilities here are based on the results of actual experiments.”
While I don’t believe in the supernatural and I don’t think Kamijou does either (not to put words in his mouth), this is a novel with one foot in the real world — or at least one foot in a world beyond typical make believe — drenching the story-based haunting of Karen in as serious an examination of the paranormal as there can be.
And that haunting certainly is scary. Over time, no matter how much Karen tries convince herself she doesn’t believe, the story she heard starts seeping into her reality. From any dark place in her room — from the shower, the closet, a half-closed cabinet — she hears the wet thump of footsteps, smell rotting sewage, see puddles of muddy water form. It’s stress, it’s pipes, it’s her brain playing tricks because that’s what brains do; no matter how she tries to explain it, the sound and the water only ever gets closer.
It’s spooky stuff, told with the elegant brevity of a campfire story. Shinen no Telepath presents a nightmare of suggestion pushing up against reality, a horrorshow of the unknowable drenched in hopeless gestures towards science and psychology.
At least, that’s what it seems like at first. Because it isn’t long before Karen calls up YouTube paranormal investigator, Haruko, for help and Shinen no Telepath snaps its own tonal premise to pieces.
Haruko is an absolute slam dunk character, the real lifeblood of the novel. If there’s justice in the world, she’s a new iconic horror character in the making. A brash, hyper-confident and competent woman seemingly nonplussed by any enemy or challenge, be it from our world or the afterlife, she crashes into the story like a speeding truck through a gas station window. She laughs at hauntings, threatens ghosts, big dogs her verbally abusive boss at work, and casually lies and blackmails her way into getting what she wants. And most importantly, she’s so damn charming that nobody cares a lick. The horror Shinen no Telepath suggested with Karen simply has no chance against her, melting away like nighttime concerns facing the sunrise.
This is not a bad thing! Under Haruko’s control the book transforms into an energetic romp of a occult procedural as she cheats college students for info, strongarms psychics, steals archival footage, and teams up with extra-legal detectives, the truth (or untruth) of the case getting closer and closer through a dogged collection of information. She’s someone who doesn’t believe in the supernatural, but doesn’t not believe, less interested in supporting any belief than finding out what exists beyond it.
The result of her detective-like presence is only a deepening of Shinen no Telepath’s ideas on fiction, using the skeleton of the mystery genre to zoom in on truth as it relates to media, reality as it relates to medium, and honesty as it relates to words. It becomes a book about itself, peeling back its own narrative — its own insistence on presenting a logical reality, its own use of a bibliography — to explore how stories propagate and twist themselves into reality. We turn the lights on to quell the fear and suddenly we can’t turn them off or the footsteps get louder. We talk about Slenderman enough and one day he manifests in the corner of the eye and in violence committed. We look at a window after reading a scary story online and every night is wrapped up in terror. Reality has been changed.
Shinen no Telepath is a story about the truth, but that truth remains hazy until the very end. As its scope expands to take on even larger and more pointed concerns with regard to stories (for another very Baxter comparison, this ends up in a place reminding me a lot of a section in the PS1 game Twilight Syndrome) threads are left hanging, contradictions make themselves known, and alternative solutions bubble up. A definitive answer remains elusive, hanging just out of reach in the fog.
It couldn’t be told any other way.
Because in the end we’re all just being told stories that ruin us. It doesn’t matter if they’re true or some cheap flight of fancy from a bored college student. It doesn’t matter if we insist fiction is fiction, chant to ourselves that none of it is real. Somewhere, somehow, deep inside, we believe.
PS the book doesn’t have an English release yet, but I’ve heard rumblings that one might be on the way! Believe me: I’ll be yelling about it when it happens.
Music of the Week | JPN by Perfume
Sometimes I just gotta be obvious with it. After 25 years, J-pop icons Perfume have gone on “cold sleep” (basically their sci-fi way of saying we’re done but idk maybe we’ll do something again someday), which means I am coping by listening to more Perfume than usual lol. They’ve got multiple albums you could argue are their best, and JPN is one of them, both for the unending string of bangers, but because it’s one of their strongest in terms of functioning as a cohesive album. “Natural ni koi shite” in particular is one of my favorite pop songs of all time. The flittering, playfully stuffed beat has a permanent place on the radio in my brain. If you don’t love Perfume…listen to them until you are.
Book of the Week | Slayers by Hajime Kanzaka
A titan in the 90s that helped solidify high fantasy into the perpetual otaku rotation, I spent most of my life kind of assuming I knew what was up with Slayers. But then I actually read the book. It’s a joy. Pulling the magical balancing act of making fun of itself while also treating itself seriously. The protagonist Lina, spunky and conniving and annoying in the absolute best way, is also one of the great characters. Truly, she’s one of the few who is so good she kind of ruined entire genres and mediums forever, everyone in her wake imitations unable to lay a finger on the original. Short, breezy pulp fantasy of the highest order; a snack for the soul.
Movie of the Week | Keizoku: Beautiful Dreamer (dir. Yukihiko Tsutsumi, 2000)
The film finale to TV drama Keizoku, Beautiful Dreamer has the unenviable task of coming after not just one of the great shows but one of the great endings, the last three or so episodes of the original run a profound masterclass of paranoia, tragedy, and rot. And while it might not be as perfect as the show, it’s not an ounce less bold, this new ending providing as much hope as the original does pain. What starts here as a comedic take on a Yukito Ayatsuji bizarre mansion mystery eventually cracks itself open into a flood of surreal symbols and metaphysics as the insides of its cast make their way to the outside. Suda51 fans in particular simply have no choice but to dive in — Beautiful Dreamer out Kill The Pasts just about anything not called The Silver Case.
Have thoughts about anything covered this week? Got a recommendation you’re dying to share? Want to tell me how handsome and cool I am? Leave a comment below!