Kylie Lee Baker's Japanese Gothic Unveils a Haunting Tale Across Time
In Kylie Lee Baker's new novel, Japanese Gothic, nothing is as it seems. Lee Turner, a college student at NYU, claims to be visiting his father's new home in Japan on a leave of absence from school, while in fact he's fled the country after violently murdering his roommate. But he can't quite remember why he killed him, and definitely doesn't know where he hid the body.
Even stranger, his father's old house in the countryside seems to be filled with a haunted presence. That presence turns out to be Sen, the daughter of one of the last samurai, living in 1877. Though her family is in hiding from imperial forces, Sen's father insists that soon, the samurai will rise again. He trains Sen to follow in his footsteps, convincing her of the nobility of their cause. Soon enough, Lee and Sen discover that a sliding paper door is all that separates them, and the intersection of their lives creates chaos on both sides of the novel.
Japanese Gothic isn't as bloody or as pointedly political as Baker's last novel, Bat Eater and Other Names for Cora Zeng, which follows a Chinese American woman who realizes that a serial killer is murdering Asian American women while working as a crime scene cleaner in New York City during the COVID-19 lockdown. In that novel, Baker, who has both Chinese and Japanese heritage, used horror to critique the anti-Asian racism that surged alongside the pandemic.
Japanese Gothic takes a more sideways approach to its political ideas, but those ideas are potent. In this novel, the family is not a source of safety or consolation but a site of violence and unease. As the book progresses, Baker shows more and more of Sen's family life, painting an increasingly damning portrait of her father, who physically and emotionally abuses his wife and children and lives in a state of delusion about the future of the samurai.
"I will always be a samurai," he grandly tells his more realistic wife. "If you don't accept that, leave. But leave my children, because they will always be samurai too." Later, when his wife criticizes him for not providing for the family, he instructs Sen to cut off two her mother's fingers. She complies.
As dramatic as these scenes may be, Sen is hardly alone in her plight: as Baker puts it, "My portrayal of the one American family in this book is also pretty negative." Lee's mother disappeared mysteriously when he was a young boy, while the family was on vacation in Cambodia, and he is obsessed with finding out what really happened to her. He believes Sen is the key to connecting him to his mother's spirit, since she is, in his timeline, already dead.
His father, meanwhile, has dated a series of Japanese women in the years since his wife's death, all the while pointedly failing to notice Lee's addiction to sedatives and avoiding discussion of his late wife. Lee's very presence seems to make his father uncomfortable: he "had a way of wincing at Lee like he was a sharp ray of sunlight. That was why his father never looked at him for very long."
Baker has not only created two vivid and unusual protagonists, but also a mood of unease and mystery that puts both her characters and her reader on edge throughout Japanese Gothic. What exactly happened to Lee's roommate, and why can't Lee remember it? How will Sen's and her family meet their inevitable ends? Why are Lee and Sen connected, and what will the connection between them reveal?
As Baker explains, she works to carefully include just enough questions and possibilities to keep the reader guessing, but not to overwhelm them: "The reader's going to expect to find out by the end why Lee [murdered his roommate]-or, if he didn't do it, who did. I love having those fishing hooks to pull readers along: you know this is going to be revealed by the end, and you're probably forming theories about it, and there aren't really that many options."
In our conversation, held over Zoom, we discussed writing Japanese characters against stereotype, the complexities of samurai culture, the possibilities of the horror genre, and more.
Morgan Leigh Davies: How did you balance writing historical fiction and characters living in the contemporary world in this book? Especially since they wind up interacting with each other.
Kylie Lee Baker: Historical settings have so much built-in ambiance. Particularly with samurai, people have so many preconceived notions. It feels more dramatic to me than many contemporary settings. For this book in particular, it was a lot of fun to bounce between two worlds. It was very heavily inspired by Chuck Wendig's The Book of Accidents, which doesn't go to a historical setting as much as to alternate universes, but I loved the way that everything tied together by the end.
It became a challenge for me to find commonalities with two very different people across two very different time periods. The guiding thread that helped me balance it is, What are these characters trying to achieve together?
