Kylie Lee Baker’s Japanese Gothic (2026) is a psychological horror novel that blends Western Gothic traditions with Japanese folklore. The story follows Lee Turner, a university student who flees to an old family home in Japan, believing he has murdered his roommate. Haunted by suppressed trauma, Lee discovers the house is a portal connecting his present to the year 1877. There, he meets Sen, a young female samurai whose family is hiding after a failed rebellion. As their timelines converge, their intertwined fates force both to confront the violent legacies of their families. The novel explores themes including The Destructive Myth of Samurai Honor, The Impact of Trauma on Memory and Perception, and Family Loyalty as a Destructive Bind.

Baker, who is of Okinawan and Chinese American descent, uses the novel to deconstruct romanticized portrayals of the samurai. As she explains in her Author’s Note, her ancestors were colonized by the Shimazu clan, the very feudal lords Sen’s family serves, adding a layer of historical critique to the narrative. The book blends the architectural horror of the Western Gothic tradition with the psychological dread and vengeful spirits of Japanese horror, or J-horror. Its structure is explicitly framed by the classic folktale of Urashima Tarō, a story of manipulated time and tragic destiny. Baker is the author of the young adult fantasy duology The Keeper of Night, which was a YALSA Top Ten Best Fiction for Young Adults selection. Japanese Gothic follows her adult debut, Bat Eater and Other Names for Cora Zeng (2025).

This guide refers to the 2026 Hanover Square Press edition.

Content Warning: The source text and this guide feature depictions of graphic violence, physical abuse, emotional abuse, child abuse, child death, death by suicide, death, illness, suicidal ideation, self-harm, racism, antigay bias, mental illness, substance use, and animal cruelty and death.

Plot Summary

Lee Turner arrives at his father Jim’s old house in Chiran, Japan, on a supposed semester off from New York University. He heavily uses sedatives like Ativan to suppress a secret: He believes he murdered his roommate, James, though he cannot remember why or what he did with the body. The old samurai house feels strange; Lee notices a faint bloodstain on the kitchen wall, a window in his bedroom that sometimes disappears, and an inability to smell or taste his food. He meets his father’s kind girlfriend, Hina, who tells him ghost stories about a servant girl who was murdered by a samurai on the property.

The novel shifts to the year 1877, when a teenage girl named Sen trains to be a samurai in the very same house that Lee will live in years later. Her father, Iwasaki Itaro, is a survivor of a failed rebellion who subjects Sen to a brutal traditionalist regimen. The connection between the two timelines reveals itself when Lee, after seeing a vision of Sen in the yard, discovers that his closet door is a gateway to Sen’s time. After Sen stabs through the gateway with her katana and cuts his arm, confirming her reality, Lee flushes all his sedatives, determined to understand the anomaly.

Lee proves they live in the same house 149 years apart by predicting a historical fire that Sen later witnesses. Sen confirms Lee’s claim by hiding a turtle-engraved sword guard under her floorboards; she then crosses over and finds the same guard, tarnished with age, under Lee’s floor. Shattered by the revelation that she is a ghost in Lee’s time, Sen visits the town hall with Lee and finds a copy of her koseki (a family register), which states that she and her entire family are fated to die in three days. Their connection deepens when they discover that physical contact transports them to a surreal, ashen beach world dominated by a black ocean. Sen has also seen visions of Lee’s mother, who vanished in Cambodia eight years prior, in this dreamscape, causing her to paint portraits of her. Lee becomes obsessed with using Sen as a “bridge” to find his mother, while Sen, desperate to change her fate, asks Lee for modern weapons to fight the imperial soldiers she believes are coming for her family.

As Lee continues his sobriety, he begins receiving cryptic text messages from his supposedly dead roommate and experiencing vivid, repressed memories. While visiting Sen’s time, he witnesses Itaro’s paranoia lead to violence. Itaro captures a government spy, and Lee is forced to hide under the porch while Sen decapitates the man at her father’s command, drenching Lee in blood and leaving him shaken. Later, when Sen places her hand through Lee’s chest, it triggers a powerful shared vision. Lee relives a memory of his roommate, and realizes that he has conflated his roommate’s identity with his father’s. Lee’s roommate was Matt Baldridge, not James, but Lee confused him with his father, Jim, when Matt had asked him about Cambodia. In her perception of the vision, Sen is shown the event of her family’s brutal slaughter, during which Lee’s mother appears and whispers a terrible secret to her. The fragile alliance between the living and the dead fractures when Hina, believing Sen is a danger to Lee, attacks her with a kitchen knife during dinner. Lee’s father forces Hina to leave. When Lee tries to get Sen to leave her home to survive her death, Sen deduces that he knows how she will die and that he hid this knowledge from her to continue searching for his mother. Feeling used, Sen tells Lee, “I would rather die for my father than live for you,” (274) and severs their connection, blocking the closet door from her side.

Left alone, Lee watches his world collapse. His father confronts him, revealing that he knows Lee’s roommate is “dead” and cruelly taunts Lee by claiming the body was found in the well. Lee sees a stain on his father’s shirt and feels the impulse to attack him with a knife, but controls it and ends up stabbing himself. Soon, the police arrive, causing Lee to realize that his father called them to arrest him. He forces his way through the closet back into Sen’s time, where he is confronted by Itaro. Itaro prepares to kill Lee, but Lee is saved by Sen, who realizes that she should have been loyal to Lee over her father all along. In defiance, Sen disobeys Itaro’s order to execute Lee and calls Itaro a coward. This confrontation is interrupted when the imperial army attacks, killing Sen’s brothers. Sen pushes Lee back into his time and hides, believing herself a coward. Both Lee and Sen dig into the earth beneath the house, unearthing an underground stream where two jeweled boxes, carved with turtles, float to the surface. Opening the boxes resets the timeline. The narrative begins again, with Lee making coffee, but this time he is lucid and remembers everything.

Stepping out of the house triggers Lee’s full, unadulterated memory: His father, James “Jim” Turner, murdered his mother in Cambodia and staged her disappearance. The “murder” of his roommate was a drug-fueled hallucination; Matt is alive and was texting out of concern. Enraged, Lee attacks his father in a brutal fight that ends with Lee stabbing him to death and throwing his body in the well. Mortally wounded himself, Lee crawls toward his closet to return to Sen. In her timeline, Sen returns home to find that her father has murdered her mother, brothers, and all their servants to spare them from dishonor. He asks Sen to act as his kaishakunin (ritual assistant) as he dies by suicide during seppuku. When she refuses, he begins the ritual anyway. In a moment of pity and rage, she mercy-kills him but botches the ritual by fully decapitating him. Guilty and devastated, she dies by suicide. As she dies against the closet door, it opens, revealing the dying Lee on the other side. They touch hands in recognition as they both perish.

A final reveal clarifies that “Hina” is Otohime, a sea goddess from the legend of Urashima Tarō. She created the house as a temporal pocket dimension to save both Lee (from an accidental overdose and fall) and Sen (from being killed by her father in a separate timeline) from their original tragic fates. Her power waned at low tide, allowing their worlds to bleed together. When they rejected her protection, their timelines collapsed and reset to their violent, unavoidable ends. The turtle boxes contained their “borrowed time.” The novel closes with a letter Sen wrote to Lee, asking him to find her again in the next life and declaring herself the “Last Samurai.”