About A Place in in the Kinki Region
By Sesuji
Translated by Michael Blaskowsky
2023, translated 2026
Yen Press
About a Place in the Kinki Region began as a web novel. After gaining a massive following among fans of mystery and psychological horror, it was published in book form in 2023. The main characters are freelance writers who work for entertainment magazines that feature tales of the uncanny and the macabre. The author of the book we hold in our hands, About a Place in the Kinki Region, is Sesuji, a male Japanese author, but the narrator who introduces herself a dozen pages into the text is a woman who also identifies as Sesuji, and she explains that here is where About a Place in the Kinki Region begins. The story she tells appears in installments, sometimes in draft form, sometimes revised, and it surfaces from time to time amid a heady stew of archival reporting, police reports, transcripts of interviews, newspaper accounts, drawings, and video. About a Place in the Kinki Region is archival horror, featuring an all-consuming dread of supernatural demons and an obsession with recovering lost, concealed, or long-forgotten media. When a younger writer who specialises in horror asks Sesuji for advice on a project that involves an exhaustive review of his employer’s archive of paranormal events, she agrees to mentor him. He reveals he has discovered reporting on a cluster of horrific unexplained events around a mountain in the Kinki region, and then, while investigating one of the “cursed” sites, he disappears. In Sesuji’s story, About a Place in the Kinki Region, she appeals to the reader to aid her in sifting through the bewildering collection of research materials left behind by her missing protégé, believing they alone hold the key to his whereabouts. This translation by Michael Blaskowsky is highly disciplined. His sentences and word choices are simple and unadorned. Sensationalism takes a back seat to a steady accretion of material that consists of human tragedy and the preternatural. About a Place in the Kinki Region is a compelling read that leaves the reader with some provocative ideas about the persistence of ghost and horror stories in our contemporary world while also suggesting that the re-sharing and re-telling of paranormal lore yields profoundly different outcomes than other narratives.
“Once I noticed it, I couldn’t get it out of my head. So I put aside the old magazines for a moment and started searching the internet. First, I checked an online map to see if the torii in ‘A Peculiar Comment’ actually existed. And sure enough, the street view showed a ruined torii and a set of stairs leading to the top of the mountain on the east side of the dam’s lake. From that, I assumed the ‘mountain’ mentioned in the stories was the one to the east of the area that had the dam, ruins, and tunnel. Next, I searched the internet for any similar stories related to a mountain in XXXXX, and this is what I found.”
With that, he handed me some printouts of online articles and forum posts. He had searched combinations of the keywords mountain, creepy story, ghost, and incident. The results of those searches surprised me.
“There’s a YouTuber’s live stream that went wrong, reports on suspicious people that have nothing to do with any urban legends or ghost stories, even an article discussing a suspected murder. And all of them are somehow related to this ‘mountain.’”
