Natsuhiko Kyogoku’s debut novel arrives with a genuinely compelling premise: a woman pregnant for twenty months, a husband who vanished from a locked room, and the shadow of an ancient Japanese spirit—the ubume, a ghost born of a woman who dies in childbirth—hanging over a crumbling clinic in postwar Tokyo. For readers drawn to the intersection of folklore and mystery, this setup promises something atmospheric and unsettling.
The novel’s greatest strength is, frustratingly, the source of its greatest weakness. Kyogoku is clearly a man of enormous intellectual curiosity, and his occult detective Kyogokudo is a vehicle for extended, elaborate meditations on the psychology of belief, the neurology of self-deception, and the philosophical underpinnings of why humans need the supernatural. These passages are not without merit—the central idea that the brain actively rewrites reality to protect itself from unbearable truths is genuinely fascinating, and it pays off in the novel’s twist. But Kyogoku does not trust his reader. He explains, and then he explains again, and then he explains the explanation. By the time the actual mystery accelerates, the narrative momentum has been thoroughly bled dry.
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Director: Abdullah Mohammed Saad
There are some Malaysian topics and issues that need to be written about and not just in the form of essays and articles, but as stories that allow for thorough exploration and interrogation as can only be done through fiction. Hanna Alkaf’s The Weight of Our Sky is such a story, as is The Accidental Malay by Karina Robles Bahrin. It’s no accident that both novels centre matters of race that all Malaysians are familiar with, in one way or another. Hanna’s book is set during the infamous May 13 race riots of 1969. Karina’s is about a woman who is raised Chinese but discovers that her mother is Malay.
Today I needed to write a paragraph on a book I’d recently read and it reminded me how long it’s been since I last updated this blog.
daphne lee 