In my Village of Eight Graves review, I mentioned how one of the reasons I felt I didn't find it majorly compelling was because other works have done the "creepy rural Japanese village" thing better. Those Who Bewitch Like Evil Spirits was one particular work I had in mind. It's a book about a creepy rural Japanese village (shocking, I know) but goes all-in on that premise, blending orthodox murder mystery with Japanese horror.
The fact that Those Who Bewitch Like Evil Spirits is both a fair-play murder mystery and a horror novel is probably its most unique feature and main selling point. It's not just using another genre as window-dressing to set up its mystery; the book is a full-fledged horror novel in its own right.
The book is set in the 1950s in an isolated mountain village known as Kagagushi with its own folklore, festivals, and religious beliefs. Kagagushi is a pretty freaky place that's absolutely steeped in ghost stories and strange happenings. The villagers generally stay indoors after dark for fear of encountering a malevolent spirit, and one of the town's nicknames is kamigakushi-mura—literally "spirited away village"—due to the frequency of mysterious disappearances.
There are several passages involving spooky encounters, almost like a series of vignettes interspersed throughout the book. Most of the horror comes from the tension of an encounter with the unknown rather than direct gore and violence, which makes it both more gripping and easier to get through. The horror feels like a supplement to the mystery—there is decidedly more "mystery" than "horror" in the book—but is still a core component of the book. There was one horror passage I particularly loved, which it set itself up to play out like a scene from a monster-of-the-week B movie—and then made an abrupt turn into something much more realistic and horrific.
Anyway, Genya Toujou, an itinerant writer and folklorist, decides to visit Kagagushi to study its belief system. Unfortunately while he's there people start getting murdered under seemingly impossible circumstances. Each corpse is dressed up like a scarecrow, the symbol of Kagagushi's main god, which gives the impression that these deaths are the result of divine retribution.
The expected angle would probably be for Genya Toujou to investigate the crimes to prove that they are the work of a human hand, but... the book isn't quite that cliché. While Genya does take an academic approach to folklore studies and acknowledges that they are beliefs that have been propagated by people and distilled through human culture, he doesn't disbelieve in the supernatural (which I found to be a bit of an odd combination). As a result, when Genya has a theory, he doesn't present it as the definitively correct explanation of what happened; instead it's just one possibility if the event in question doesn't actually have a supernatural explanation.
This approach is refreshing to a certain extent due to its uniqueness, but it also feels like Genya takes this stance so that Shinsou Mitsuda can go "Yes, everything happened as Genya explained... or was it actually evil spirits? oooooooooo" at the end and, while I can appreciate Mitsuda trying to maintain the "horror" element throughout the book, it feels a bit half-hearted and unnecessary because, c'mon, I'm obviously going to take Genya's explanation over magic.
That being said, the book actually leaves certain events unexplained, which I think is much more effective at maintaining mystique than pretending that Genya's solutions may not actually be the answer. And if that's the scariest thing you've heard so far this review—don't worry, because even without providing a full explanation of every strange event, there is still a full sense of closure.
I don't have much else to say about the horror in Those Who Bewitch Like Evil Spirits, so let's move onto the mystery component. I liked it a lot, although it had its faults.
The biggest sticking point to me is probably the pacing. Those Who Bewitch Like Evil Spirits is a relatively long book, but the first murder doesn't happen until nearly the midpoint. I've reviewed books on this blog that are shorter in their entirety than the segment before the first corpse appears in Those Who Bewitch Like Evil Spirits! Once the murders begin, however, the victims start dropping like flies. It's a very lopsided book, building and building and building up to the murders and then rushing through them.
That's not to say I didn't enjoy the "introduction." Part of the fun is immersing yourself in the bizarre world of Kagagushi in its natural state. We have atmosphere and ghost stories to hold us over until the murders start. And Mitsuda definitely succeeded at creating a backdrop of a creepy, isolated village.
For instance, one of my favorite elements of the setting is that there's six characters named Sagiri Kagachi. Yes, you read that right. The Kagachi clan has three generations of twins, and both twins in each set are named Sagiri. (The kanji differs for each, so they are distinct in written Japanese.) I think this is a fantastic blend of natural and artificial oddities. Three generations of twins in a row is something that no one had any control over, but, while obviously not impossible, is extremely unlikely. But naming all six twins "Sagiri" is something the Kagachis had full control over, and they decided to do it anyway. No part of the situation is actively malignant, but the entire set-up—both the things that people could and could not control—is eerie and unusual. Just how much is coincidence, how much is harmless tradition, and how much has a deeper (darker) meaning? These questions put you on edge despite there being no activate danger, and the whole town of Kagagushi is enveloped by this sort of atmosphere.
The book reminded me a lot of Raging Loop, since it's deeply grounded within the unique religious beliefs of Kagagushi but approaches it from an anthropological point of view, digging into the history of the culture and how it came about, rather than just taking the folklore as a backdrop for its mysteries without venturing beneath the surface. Although it feels a bit weird how Genya approaches folklore so academically; explicitly acknowledging that the beliefs have been passed down and molded by humans (and not merely a reflection of the true nature of the world) takes away a bit of their power, at least to me.
By the way, in addition to a map, at the beginning Those Who Bewitch Like Evil Spirits has a family tree of all major characters, which was extraordinarily helpful. A family tree is a unique feature that I haven't seen in other novels. Those Who Bewitch Like Evil Spirits centers around two clans (the Kagachis and the Kamigushis), but each clan has multiple families, since this is a creepy isolated Japanese village so it needs to have main and branch families, which makes familial relations a bit more complicated than your typical family drama murder mystery.
Keeping characters straight is especially important since Those Who Bewitch Like Evil Spirits rotates through four points of view: a narrator, Sagiri Kagachi (the youngest of the six), Renzaburou Kamigushi (the youngest son of the Kamigushi family), and Genya. The choice of Renzaburou and (this) Sagiri are narrators is actually pretty interesting since, while they are friends, Sagiri is a priestess for the Kagachi clan while Renzaburou hates superstition and the hold it has over Kagagushi, giving us two utterly contrasting points of view.
The denouement of the book was a bit of a ride. It went back and forth between brilliant and terrible, and in the final stretch seemed to be in a dizzying nosedive... yet managed to break through and come out the other side completely clean. The solution to each impossible situation is relatively mundane, which was initially disappointing to me, considering how much mystique permeated the set-up. Yet after just a few moments to consider it, I actually changed my mind and decided I really liked that contrast between the set-up and solution. Plus it ties into the book's theme of how religion can influence how one interprets things they experience.
I do acknowledge that there is a fair amount of room for the book to go horribly wrong, though. There's a lot of cluing, but that just means there's that many opportunities to break it open, and if you can see through the deceptions early I imagine the slow, atmospheric prelude will be a boring slog.
Those Who Bewitch Like Evil Spirits is an awesome book, presenting a creepy Japanese town absolutely inundated with atmosphere but giving the town's traditions their proper anthropological due rather than simply taking them for granted, and uniquely blending a traditional murder mystery with a healthy dose of Japanese horror.
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