Japanese Gothic: A Guest Post by Kylie Lee Baker

Kylie Lee Baker, author of Bat Eater and Other Names for Cora Zeng blends Japanese mythology with modern horror in this haunting tale of two lives from two time periods.

In this lyrical, wildly inventive horror novel interwoven with Japanese mythology, two people living centuries apart discover a door between their worlds.

I didn’t know it at the time, but the idea for Japanese Gothic began at a Halloween sleepover when I was ten years old. My friends and I watched a movie called The Grudge, which is about a vengeful Japanese ghost who attacks anyone who enters her house. The movie gave me nightmares for weeks, and also began my lifelong horror obsession.

I grew up in the early 2000s, when there was a huge boom in US remakes of Japanese horror films. Some of the remakes completely stripped the films of Japanese culture, while others featured American protagonists getting terrorized by Japanese ghosts. The US version of The Grudge is the latter.

I loved the film as a child. But as I grew up, I was less impressed with the way the story was framed: innocent white woman gets terrorized by a scary Japanese folkloric entity! Japanese folklore is senseless and brutal! In fact, my friends at that sleepover joked that I looked like “the grudge” because of my long black hair. I found the premise very othering in hindsight.

As an adult, I decided to write a Japanese haunted house story that was just as enthralling as The Grudge, but a bit more nuanced in its handling of Japanese culture.

The result was Japanese Gothic: a story about a haunted house in Japan that’s irrevocably steeped in Japanese legends and samurai history, but doesn’t romanticize or exoticize either one. The American who comes to the house is anything but an innocent victim of Japanese folklore—it’s not even clear if the reader should be rooting for him.

This was my first dual-timeline and dual-POV novel, and the most structurally complex book I’d ever tried to write. I started with my standard “zero draft” (a draft too unpolished to show anyone else, its only merit being that it exists) as I typically do, but then quickly realized that this book was too complex for fast-drafting. I spent a lot of time rewriting scenes to make sure both characters had arcs of equal weight. So much of this book hinges on the chemistry between the two main characters, since they’re both trying to play each other like instruments. I spent a tremendous amount of time working on the delicate choreography of their scenes together.

But no matter how challenging the process was, writing horror is always such a joy for me. I think it’s the best vehicle for writing about justice and experiencing catharsis.

A lot of people think the point of horror is just blood and gore, but horror elements like that are actually incredible tools to intensify the readers’ emotions. You can use these tools to make readers uncomfortable, show people how ugly the world can be, or punctuate a character’s pain. In horror, you never have to pull your punches. It’s such a raw, honest, art form. Horror authors write about fear, but our stories are fearless.