Japanese Gothic
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Kylie Lee Baker on Japanese Gothic
In her own words: quotes and insights from the author.Why she wrote it
A sleepover nightmare, two decades laterThe book’s origin is a specific Halloween memory: Baker was ten years old, at a sleepover with friends, watching The Grudge, the American remake of a Japanese horror film about a vengeful ghost who kills anyone who enters her house. She had nightmares for weeks afterward. Her friends joked that she looked like the ghost because of her long black hair. That detail stayed with her, and when she returned to the film as an adult, she saw its premise from a different angle.
I found the premise very othering in hindsight.
Seeing the film’s framing as othering was the diagnosis; the book was the correction. She wanted to write a haunted house story equally frightening but built around a different center of gravity, and her solution was the American character, Lee, who arrives at the house carrying his own damage rather than innocence.
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.
The structural concept that would eventually carry the story had been developing separately, looking for the right vehicle. Reading Chuck Wendig’s novel about alternate timelines gave her the form, and the childhood memory gave her the content. The two found each other.
I’d also been tinkering with the idea of writing what I called a ‘mutual haunting’ for a while — a story that starts off like your typical haunted-house novel, but then you realize all the mysterious handprints and misplaced items and creepy shadows are happening in both timelines, and that the two characters are actually haunting each other.
How she wrote it
Two timelines, one compass, and a bureaucrat samuraiBaker’s usual drafting method is what she calls a zero draft: a version too rough to show anyone, written fast, its only value being that it exists. With Japanese Gothic, her first dual-timeline, dual-POV novel, that method broke down. She hadn’t worked out enough of one character’s arc before writing, and the structural complexity punished the shortcut. She describes her solution as having a compass before getting lost in the details.
I tend to plot my adult horror novels a bit more thoroughly than my young adult novels, just because the plots of my adult novels are a bit less linear, and the style tends to be a bit more experimental. So it’s important for me to have a compass before I get too lost in all the window-dressing.
Once she knew the shape of both storylines, she wrote them at the same time rather than sequentially. The decision was structural: the parallels between the two characters’ worlds only work as parallels if they’re built in tandem.
I really wanted the stories across the different timelines to flow into each other, cutting back and forth to show the parallels between their worlds, so writing them both at once was important for setting up that juxtaposition.
Her research into the 1877 samurai storyline began with a practical question about daily life and led her to the Hagakure by Yamamoto Tsunetomo, a text often described as a practical guide to samurai conduct. What she found there was less a definitive source than a window onto one man’s anxiety: Tsunetomo was a bureaucrat writing in peacetime, struggling with what it meant to belong to a warrior class with nothing to fight. The research taught her that no single source on samurai life could exist, and her response was to narrow the book’s scope accordingly.
I’m more interested in talking about the mistakes of one family who happened to be samurai rather than commenting on the samurai at large.
Woven between the main chapters is the Urashima Taro legend, a Japanese folk story Baker first encountered in a storybook her mother read to her as a child. One particular illustration of the legend’s ending stayed with her for decades, too disturbing to describe in an interview without giving away the novel’s conclusion. She had long planned to put it in a horror novel, and eventually did.
now I have made it everyone else’s problem. [paraphrased from audio]
The personal thread
What was colonized, what was keptBaker is part Okinawan, a heritage distinct from Japanese, and the samurai family at the center of the 1877 storyline would historically have been among those who colonized Okinawa: Japan forced Okinawans to abandon their language and their traditions, a loss her own family carries. This was not something she fully reckoned with at the outset of drafting. It arrived mid-process and required her to hold her own position in the story.
I have inherited Japanese cultures and traditions. I’m so aware we have these because of what has been lost and taken from us.
That awareness shaped how the book treats the samurai: not as romantic figures, not as villains, but as people whose power had specific victims. Baker named her own family’s place in that history when she spoke to CrimeReads, making explicit what the novel leaves the reader to feel.
I’m not descended from samurai. I’m descended from the Japanese people they colonized.
Her goal was a version of samurai history that could hold that contradiction without resolving it cleanly. Identity, she has said, is complicated, and the book refuses to simplify it.
What she wants us to sit with
Fear as the most honest formBaker has written about why horror, specifically, is where she goes when she wants to write about injustice. She doesn’t credit the genre’s capacity for shock or spectacle. Her argument is structural: horror’s extremity lets a writer push emotional truth further than realism allows.
Horror authors write about fear, but our stories are fearless.
Beneath the haunted house, the dual timelines, and the folklore is the simplest emotional situation Baker could construct: two people trying to earn love from fathers who withhold it. She sees this as the book’s organizing pressure, the thing that makes Sen, a samurai woman in 1877 Japan, and Lee, an American man in the present, legible to each other across the gap.
Wanting love from your parent is such a universal theme that really transcends any culture or time period.
What both characters find across the timelines, in each other, is the opposite of performance. Neither has to prove anything to the other. Baker describes the dynamic with a phrase that captures its strangeness and its relief.
They’re so strangely like two little aliens who’ve finally found each other.