Japanese Gothic

The novel alternates between two timelines connected by a single house in Chiran, a town in southern Japan's Kagoshima Prefecture. In 2026, Lee Turner, a college-age American, arrives at the old house to stay with his father, James Turner, an East Asian Studies professor who recently relocated to Japan with his girlfriend Hina. In 1877, Iwasaki Sen, the teenage daughter of the last surviving samurai from the failed Satsuma Rebellion, a doomed uprising against the emperor who abolished the warrior class, lives in hiding in the same house with her family.

Lee believes he has committed murder. He remembers killing his NYU roommate, James Baldridge, by smashing the young man's face against a stairwell railing, then fleeing to Japan. He cannot remember why or where he hid the body. Dependent on sedatives since childhood, Lee possesses an ability to detect lies. He knows his father loves him but does not like him. He notices anomalies in the house: flowers blooming out of season, a closet door that opens onto solid cement, and a bloodstain on the kitchen wall too high to be accidental.

Lee's mother disappeared eight years earlier during a family vacation in Cambodia. Police found suitcase wheel tracks near their hotel and theorized she was abducted by a human trafficking ring. Since then, Lee hears her voice repeating, "Let me out, Lee."

In 1877, Sen trains under her father, who raised her as a warrior because his sons were too young to fight. Her father returned from the rebellion hollow and changed; Sen privately believes he should have committed ritual suicide rather than return in disgrace. When Sen was seven, her father buried her alive in a wooden box to teach her what death felt like. She emerged fundamentally changed, never crying again. Sen discovers a similar bloodstain on the mat and paper door seam near the kitchen, as well as the same cement-backed closet door.

One night, light glows behind Lee's closet door. He presses his hand to the paper and feels warmth pressing back. A blade stabs through, cutting his arm, and Lee is elated: The wound proves the ghost is real. He flushes his sedatives and writes on the door in mirrored Japanese: "How did you die?" A response appears the next morning: "I will tell you tonight."

When they meet face-to-face, Lee deduces from Sen's clothing and surroundings that she lives in 1877. He tells her it is 2026, meaning she is the ghost. To prove it, he predicts a fire that will kill Chiran's mayor. When the fire occurs, Sen crosses into Lee's room and finds a sword guard she had hidden under a floorboard, now tarnished with age, forcing her to accept that she is dead. Lee discovers the door between their worlds opens only at low tide.

Lee finds newspaper clippings in his father's locked office revealing that his father moved to Japan to investigate a trafficking ring connected to murdered women, suggesting he expects to find Lee's mother's remains. In Lee's time, Sen reads the koseki, a family register, and learns her entire family will die in three days.

Sen's father kills a captured spy and orders Sen to behead the man on the porch while Lee hides underneath, blood pouring through the floorboards. Afterward, Lee confesses he has also killed someone. Sen does not judge him.

When Sen touches Lee, attempting to reach his mother's spirit, both are pulled into visions. Lee relives a memory where his roommate asks about Cambodia. Sen encounters Lee's battered mother, who whispers a truth Sen decides she will never reveal. The connection to the spirit world then closes permanently. Sen asks what Lee hopes the truth about his mother is; he describes a quick death, a body carried to sea. Sen asks what he will do if that is not the truth. Lee does not answer.

Tensions escalate. Hina attacks Sen with a kitchen knife during dinner, screaming that Sen will ruin everything. Lee receives a text from "James Baldridge," who should be dead. His father tells him police found his roommate's body in the well on the property. Lee notices a stain on his father's shirt identical to the one on his roommate's and stabs his own hand to stop himself from attacking his father. He flees through the closet into Sen's world, where Sen's father orders Sen to kill Lee. She refuses, calling her father a coward. Gunfire from arriving soldiers interrupts them, and Sen pushes Lee back through the door, then barricades it behind him.

As soldiers kill Sen's brothers and she hides beneath the porch, both she and Lee, in their respective times, dig into the earth and unearth a small jeweled box with a turtle carved on the lid. They open the boxes simultaneously.

Part IV restarts the novel from its opening lines, but this time Lee can smell the coffee. A splitting headache forces open his sealed memories. Lee's mother had a mental health condition, and his father refused to get her help. She repeatedly tried to take Lee away in the night, playing "games" that were actually escape attempts. On Lee's twelfth birthday, she baked him a poisoned cake; Lee was hospitalized. In Cambodia, what Lee believed was a dream was real: His father killed his mother, placed her in a suitcase, and wheeled her away.

The most critical revelation concerns the roommate: His name was Matt Baldridge, not James. Lee's father is named James. Lee conflated the two because the stain on Matt's shirt triggered the repressed memory of his father's crime, and his rage, meant for his father, was redirected at Matt. In the true present, Lee attacks his father. His father stabs Lee in the abdomen; Lee stabs his father through the heart and dumps the body in the well. Lee collapses from blood loss in front of the closet door.

Sen's timeline also restarts. She returns from chopping firewood to find her mother and brothers with their throats slit, killed by her father. He asks Sen to serve as his kaishakunin, the attendant who delivers a decapitating strike after a disgraced samurai disembowels himself in the ritual of seppuku. This, Sen realizes, is what he trained her for all along. Her father stabs himself. In anguished fury, Sen brings down her blade, then turns a tantō, a short dagger, on herself.

As both die, the closet door slides open. Sen places her hand in Lee's. "I remember you," he says. Sen feels his warmth and senses, distantly, that somewhere she lived a different life.

A penultimate chapter narrated by Otohime, the sea princess from the legend of Urashima Tarō (a myth woven through the novel), reveals she orchestrated the supernatural events. Sen's mother once placed young Sen in the sea as an offering to save her son from smallpox; Otohime kept Sen alive and took human form as Youna, the family's maid. Foreseeing Sen's death, she built the house as a palace outside normal time. Separately, Lee's mother once saved Otohime from drowning, so Otohime guided Lee's father to the same house and constructed a false reality: a devoted father, a safe home, and herself as Hina. At low tide, her powers weakened and the walls between eras grew thin, allowing Lee and Sen to find each other. Their connection unraveled the illusions, and both returned to their true fates.

The novel closes with Sen's letter to Lee, written during their final night together. She tells him she no longer fears death because he has shown her nothing truly ends. She leaves him the house and asks that when he is born, he come to Japan and find her. She signs the letter "Iwasaki Sen, The Last Samurai."