The Graveyard Apartment
Writer: Mariko Koike
Translator: Deborah Boliver Boehm
Publisher: St. Martin’s Press
Genre: Horror
A review by Amelia Wellman
Dead leaves are scattered over the ground, days are getting shorter, while nights get longer and colder, and Halloween creeps ever closer as you shiver in the dark. It’s the time of year to curl up under a blanket with something pumpkin spiced and scary, and on the latter I can heartily recommend Mariko Koike’s book The Graveyard Apartment for the spooks and scares that October makes you crave!
A young family moves into an apartment building that offers huge apartments at amazingly low prices. The building is sunny, new, and close to the heart of Tokyo. The only downside is that it’s built next to a graveyard and there are spirits that are not at rest. As strange and terrifying occurrences begin to pile up, other people in the building begin to move out one by one, until the one young family is left alone with something lurking in the basement. Originally published in Japan in 1986, Koike’s novel is a suspenseful tale of a family that believes they’ve found the perfect home, only to realize that the apartment harbours evil and that longer they stay, the more trapped they become.
The Graveyard Apartment opens with an advertisement for brand new luxury apartments priced to sell at ¥35,000,000 yen (about 350,000 dollars). Looking to escape a tiny, inner city apartment, a small family of three have bought one. Our first introduction to Teppei, the father, Misao, the mother, and Tamao, their young daughter comes after their first night in their new home. Right from the beginning, an unwelcome atmosphere is presented through Misao. She and her young daughter are unhappy. Before anything dangerously supernatural begins to manifest itself, Misao’s valid complaints of living next door to a cemetery and a continuously active Buddhist crematorium are ignored. Teppei just won’t listen because the price was right.
The imagery of this new apartment next door to a Buddhist cemetery is creepy right away. With an active crematorium not far away, the smoke from bodies that were cremated could blow in the apartment’s direction and, revealed in the book, the graveyard is one of the few in Japan that houses graves with bodies and not just memorial tombstones, something that we in the west aren’t familiar with, but chilling within the context of the story. When incidents begin to occur that can’t be ignored, Misao becomes determined to research what could be happening in her building. Some very creepy details are disclosed that begin to shed a little light on the mystery of the apartment complex.
The tale of The Graveyard Apartment is a fairly simple ghost story. There’s a graveyard in close proximity to a brand new apartment building, recent construction has awoken unhappy spirits, a family deals with the unhappy spirits as supernatural incidents escalate. A standard formula that can be chilling as hell when done right, and Koike does it right. Taking place over the course of three months, The Graveyard Apartment plays into a great many fears: the dark, basements, claustrophobia, graveyards, and isolation. It’s a lot of broad topics to cover, but it’s done without ever feeling like the story is spreading itself thin or waiting too long to reveal them and cramming the last few chapters with some thrills. It’s actually quite the opposite.
The Graveyard Apartment is a slow-burner, only revealing as much as it needs to keep you tense, scared, and eager to read more. By the end of the book, nothing is completely figured out. The mysteries concerning the abandoned construction project, the graveyard, and what’s haunting the building are left as unanswered as possible. The lack of definitive answers leaves a terrifying pit in your stomach. Your brain will struggle with trying to put it together: with trying to figure it out. But throughout the story, not enough pieces of the puzzle were given to you. It leaves you feeling as hopeless as the characters and that’s the superior way to tell a horror narrative!
Consider the last horror movie you watched. Did it have a moment where an exposition dump occurred to get all the mysteries out of the way and wrap everything up? I bet it did. What if it hadn’t given you all the information you needed at face value? Would you have felt more scared in the dark? It’s probably safe to say that you would have. Leaving a horror story up for interpretation is scarier than anything you can be shown. Your imagination will fill in the blanks and what you come up with will be your personal fears as opposed to what the author thinks you’ll be scared of. Koike offers very little to the reader and the terror comes back in spades because of that!
I do not scare easily. Sit me down to watch any horror movie and I guarantee that my ability to call out overused tropes before they happen, pick out when jump scares are coming, and what twists the ending will try and surprise me with, will astound you. I am a horror prophet. But I couldn’t do it with The Graveyard Apartment. I couldn’t do it and I found myself so tense while reading it that any little noise made me jump. I couldn’t do it and the ending hit me like a ton of bricks. I couldn’t do it and I found myself legitimately scared.
I couldn’t do it… and I couldn’t be happier!
The Verdict
Read It! The Graveyard Apartment is a slow-burner of a book but it is definitely worthy of investing your time. The atmosphere offers consistent dread throughout and the build up leading to the end is frightening, truly frightening. The despair you feel will be palpable and will leave you jumpy and tense for a long time after you’ve read the last page.
