Book Review: “Japanese Gothic,” by Kylie Lee Baker

JAPANESE GOTHIC, by Kylie Lee Baker

In 2026, Lee Turner flees to the centuries-old wooden house his father has just purchased in Kagoshima Prefecture, in southern Japan. He’s pretty sure he killed his college roommate back in New York, but he can’t remember how, or why, or what he did with the body. In 1877, a samurai-in-training, Sen, is hiding with her family in the same house after her father’s disgraced return from the failed Satsuma Rebellion.

Both carry heavy baggage. Lee is grieving the unsolved disappearance of his mother, who vanished during a trip to Cambodia a few years earlier, a suspected victim of sex trafficking. Sen idolizes her father and the samurai way of life, but he’s cruel and cold, even as he prepares her for what they both expect will be her death at the hands of the imperial officers who pursue him.

All is not well in this house, sheltered behind sword ferns. In Sen’s time, edible plants and prey animals have disappeared from the surrounding forest, and her family’s food supplies are dwindling fast. Lee can’t figure out what’s scratching at the walls of the house, or what his father’s girlfriend isn’t telling him. And then there’s the closet door in Lee’s room, which opens onto a concrete wall, except when it doesn’t. Sometimes, instead, it opens into Sen’s room in 1877.

Why can Sen and Lee visit each other’s times through the closet door, and why is it only accessible at low tide? Why can’t Lee remember what he did with his roommate’s body? What really happened to his mother? Did Sen’s father actually return from the rebellion that killed his fellow samurai, or is something else wearing his face like a mask? What brought Sen and Lee together, and what keeps them connected?

“Japanese Gothic,” Kylie Lee Baker’s second novel for adults (following last year’s “Bat Eater and Other Names for Cora Zeng”) is polished and surprising both in plotting and in execution. I’ve come to regard interesting, intricate structure as something of an endangered species in contemporary fiction — too many books are content to splash in thematic puddles rather than delving into deeper waters. But Baker has shown herself to be an author with the confidence and dexterity to carry a variety of story lines and ideas without stumbling; “Japanese Gothic” displays an elegant layering of character motivations, psychologies and motifs.

With dual-timeline stories, it’s easy for one story to overwhelm the other, but Lee and Sen’s narratives are well-balanced, and a Japanese folk tale provides some connective tissue between the two protagonists. As for the central mystery, Baker refrains from telegraphing exactly what’s going on until the final pages, and the reveal is a satisfying one. If the middle section drags a little in its pacing, it’s hard to hold that against the novel’s overall effectiveness.

Where “Japanese Gothic” really shines is in its mirrored portraits of two melancholy, isolated young adults. It’s difficult to create a character as damaged as Lee without letting his trauma overwhelm everything else about him. Lee moves through his life in a dissociative state partially fueled by Benadryl and Ativan. He has no friends, and his relationship with his father is strained at best. He knows things he can’t readily access, and the worst parts of his life haunt him from around corners and behind closed doors, but he’s kind and tenderhearted, not to mention capable and cleareyed when properly motivated.

Sen, meanwhile, knows her gender will prevent her from ever being fully accepted as a samurai, but still struggles to become the kind of fighter her father will be proud of. But allegiance to him comes with a cost: Her mother and siblings are afraid of him, and by extension, increasingly afraid of her, and not without good reason. Though Sen knows she has to harden herself to become a true warrior, she can’t quite shed the last of her humanity, nor is she entirely sure she wants to: “But her soul clung to her hands like tree sap, her fear screaming bright across the horizon every morning, shocking the birds away from the trees. It was her shadow, and it would not leave her, no matter how fast she ran.”

In a samurai house, Lee’s father’s girlfriend tells him, the ceilings are low to prevent a katana from being raised overhead to deliver a killing blow. Even so, the house behind the sword ferns has seen its share of violence, past and present. As strange similarities echo across Sen and Lee’s timelines, the truth emerges, jagged and harsh, yet cathartic. What connects these two characters is something deeper than romance and more tragic than death.

Japanese Gothic | By Kylie Lee Baker | Hanover Square Press | 352 pp. | $30