Nothing but Blackened Teeth

Five friends reunite in Japan at a centuries-old Heian-era mansion, a decaying estate deep in a forest. Cat, the narrator, is a young woman recovering from severe depression and a recent hospitalization for suicidal ideation. Her best friend Faiz is engaged to Talia, who resents Cat for once urging the couple to break up during a rough patch. Their wealthy and charismatic friend Phillip has arranged and financed the trip as an extravagant wedding gift, securing dubious permits to spend a few nights in the abandoned mansion. The fifth member of the group is Lin, Cat's closest confidant and a sharp-tongued Wall Street financier.

From the moment Cat enters the mansion, something feels wrong. The tatami, woven straw floor mats, are impossibly pristine despite the building's age, and the interior smells as though no one has set foot inside for centuries. The walls are covered in painted images of yokai, supernatural creatures from Japanese folklore. Cat hears a girl's voice whispering a line from a Japanese poem: "Suenomatsuyama nami mo koenamu." She dismisses it as a hallucination.

Phillip tells the group the mansion's legend. A bride whose groom died before their wedding asked to be buried alive in the house's foundation, vowing to wait for his ghost. Every year after, a new girl was buried alive in the walls to keep the bride company, a practice known as hitobashira, in which a human sacrifice is sealed into a building's structure. Cat becomes absorbed in imagining the thousands of bodies embedded in the house and falls into a brief dissociative episode. She privately learns that Phillip and Talia were briefly involved after Phillip and Cat dated, and warns him to keep this from Faiz.

Lin arrives last, bringing food and drink for an elaborate hot pot dinner. Tension between Lin and Talia is immediate; she barely remembers him despite Faiz having served as a groomsman at Lin's wedding. Faiz and Talia present gifts to the group: jade figurines of a woman being buried alive. Cat wonders how Talia knew to buy hitobashira statuettes if the trip was supposedly a surprise, suspecting prior coordination with Phillip.

After dinner, Talia proposes the group play Hyakumonogatari Kaidankai, a traditional Japanese ghost-story game in which participants tell ghost stories and extinguish a candle after each tale, supposedly summoning spirits. They move upstairs to a small room where one hundred red candles are already burning, though no one can explain who lit them. A large oval mirror dominates the room. During the game, Lin needles Phillip about his feelings for Talia, and Phillip reacts violently, slamming Lin against a wall before regaining control and leaving to apologize.

Alone, Cat hears the ghostly voice again and feels invisible teeth close on her earlobe. She moves toward the mirror and sees the ghost bride standing behind her: a faceless figure with lacquered black hair, red lips, and teeth stained entirely black. This is the ohaguro-bettari, a yokai known for its featureless face and ink-dark mouth. The ghost embraces Cat, pressing fingers between her ribs, then vanishes without a trace. Talia finds Cat staring blankly at a wall, and their exchange turns hostile, ending with both women wishing the house would consume the other.

Cat, now heavily intoxicated, tells the final ghost story: a meta-narrative about their own situation in which she describes seeing a pale bride with a mouth full of ink. All the candles go out at once. Talia sprints into the dark corridors, and Faiz and Phillip chase after her. Lin restrains Cat, arguing that splitting up will get them killed. On a bridge over an ornamental pond, Cat and Lin share a raw exchange. She confronts him about not telling her about his wedding and not visiting during her hospitalization. Lin admits he stayed away because he was afraid of her unhappiness. They reconcile, and Cat explains that the others kept her going during her recovery.

They find the group in a hallway that did not exist earlier. Talia is dressed in a sumptuous jūnihitoe, a multi-layered Heian-era bridal kimono. Faiz wears a suit, and Phillip is in a priest's cassock, ready to officiate. Cat notices the door through which Talia entered was a solid wall minutes before. She warns the group, but no one listens. When Talia orders Cat and Lin to leave, they begin walking away, but Lin impulsively lunges back and tears off Talia's veil.

Beneath it stands the ohaguro-bettari. Her face is smooth, featureless flesh with only a wide mouth full of black teeth. Talia's kimono drains of color, turning entirely white, a bridal shroud. The ghost bride laughs. Throughout the mansion, the yokai painted on the walls come alive, moving across shoji, paper sliding screens, and clustering in doorways, whispering fragments of "hello." Faiz, devastated, demands the ghost return Talia. The ohaguro-bettari approaches him tenderly, stroking his cheek and sliding her thumb into his mouth before vanishing.

Faiz insists on searching the mansion's ruined library for instructions to bring Talia back. He produces a massive ledger and claims it contains a ritual requiring four sacrifices to directional spirits known as the Four Kings: blood, bone, semen, and organ. Phillip and Cat both see nothing but mold on the pages, but Cat decides not to contradict Faiz, calculating that if the legend is true, Talia may be buried alive beneath the house and running out of air. Faiz declares he will sacrifice himself, offering to cut out his own heart. Cat slaps him to stop him.

The group's tensions explode. Faiz wrenches out his own tooth for the bone component and injures himself to provide other elements. Phillip and Faiz escalate from argument to physical confrontation. Phillip punches Faiz, breaking his nose. Faiz pulls a knife and slashes Phillip across the abdomen, disemboweling him.

Lin holds Cat back, insisting Phillip cannot be saved, but Cat breaks free and goes to his side. Faiz insists the killing was accidental. Lin openly questions whether Faiz subconsciously murdered the man his fiancée used to date. Cat, privately doubting Faiz's claim, decides to use Phillip's death to complete the ritual. She reaches into his wound, removes his viscera, and the group buries the organs at a pillar's base. The manor sighs, and Talia reappears, propped against a wall in her wedding whites, smelling of earth and sunlight. Faiz takes her in his arms. At that moment, Phillip's heart gives out. He dies alone while the others' backs are turned. Cat reflects on the bitter irony: twenty-four years of being the center of attention, and Phillip dies unwitnessed.

In the epilogue, the survivors attend Phillip's memorial in Vermont. Before leaving Japan, they burned the mansion, impaled Phillip's remains on broken timber, and staged an accidental fire, repeating the lie until authorities closed the investigation. Talia remains hospitalized with nightmares. Phillip's mother gives Cat a box of his mint-condition comic books, gifts he had always promised her. Cat enrolls at Oxford to study economics. The group drifts apart, reduced to Facebook notifications. Cat begins to suspect the ohaguro-bettari followed them from the mansion. She catches glimpses of the ghost in window reflections, or perhaps it is only her own face, eyes smudged, mouth darkened so that it appears to contain nothing but blackened teeth.