When human beings are deprived of their normal freedom of movement, they need to latch onto any shred of hope. As long as there is some action to take or some solution to explore, even if those options ultimately come to naught, the mere illusion of possibility can keep people from tumbling into the abyss of despair.
Though I tend to read a lot of horror, I am nowadays tired of delving
into the conventional ‘scary’ read. So I was wary about Mariko Koike’s The
Graveyard Apartment which occupied a place in numerous lists referring to
horror fiction in translation. The set-up as the title implies is very basic
and familiar: a young family of three moves into a new apartment complex in
Tokyo, which overlooks an ancient graveyard and situated next to a crematorium,
and a Buddhist temple. Validating our expectations of an allegedly haunted
place, things start going south with ceaseless occurrences of chilling
unexplainable phenomena.
Horror fiction always makes a big thing about living near
cemeteries. It makes an assumption that condos closer to graveyard won’t sell
at all. Residential locations lying adjacent to cemetery are a common thing and
people living there aren’t saddled with ‘spooky’ episodes. But if you could
accept such presumptions or narrative underpinnings and picture in your mind
the supposed spookiness of an old graveyard, this one would be a grimly fascinating and a
leisurely read. What I liked about Graveyard Apartment is its slow-burn tone
with a penchant for building psychological chills. Furthermore, I liked Koike’s
decision to avoid explanations regarding the motivations of the demonic
entities.
Originally published in 1986 (and translated to English by
Deborah Boliver Boehm), Mariko Koike’s novel is set in 1987. The book opens
with the death of Kano family’s pet finch. They dismiss it as bad luck, but
having read numerous horror novels we know it’s just the first in a series of
eerie occurrences. Husband Teppei is happy to own an apartment in the middle of
Tokyo and closer to his office (an advertising firm), provided if they can perceive the graveyard as just a community park of sorts. Wife Misao has some
reservations about the place but she is rejoiced to have a friendly neighbor of
same age. Once their five-year old daughter Tamao is enrolled in the
kindergarten, Misao is also hoping to start working from home.
Though Teppei and Misao looks like a ‘normal’ couple we
gradually get to discern the skeletons in their closet. The guilt they carry
over due to a grim event in the shared past show that the psychic wounds may
open up if a boiling point is reached. The sparsely populated eight-storey
Central Plaza Mansion with a sprawling basement space also withholds a
supposedly darker past. Misao hears about a abandoned underground shopping
plaza project. In fact, the only remainder about the shelved construction
project is an underground road that runs through the graveyard into the
building’s basement. Hence the terror starts unfolding from the basement which
also comes with a structural flaw that doubles up as the perfect horror story-trope,
i.e., the basement is only accessible by the elevator which breaks down at the
most inopportune moments.
Despite the tad cliched escalation of haunting tactics
(commencing with pet’s death and moving to dark figures in TV), Graveyard
Apartment largely works due to the dynamics between Misao, Teppei, and Tamao.
And the tension between the couple when subjected to supernatural occurrences
is also organically developed. Moreover, the dark secret of the past plays a
pivotal role in coloring the two central characters’ perceptions. The novel
falters a bit in the middle and some of its elements do seem to have got lost
in the translation. Yet the pacing and scary quotient picks up very well in the
last-third.
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