Strange Pictures by Uketsu Review

SPOILERS

Strange Pictures is a seeming collection of crime short stories linked by a theme of weird drawings that reveal shocking twist endings - but it’s actually a novel and all of the stories are linked, albeit they’re out of order chronologically.

I didn’t know this originally - I knew nothing about this book beforehand - and actually the book would’ve been better as a series of standalone stories with a connected theme. Because once the author Uketsu (a nonsense word that translates as “rain hole”) starts trying to stick them all together at the end, it just gets very tedious, convoluted and messy.

The prologue sets the tone of the book well. It’s a short piece about a drawing a child made after killing her mother and what the drawing says about her mental state. Cool, disturbing - alrighty.

The first chapter, The Woman in the Wind, is kinda brilliant too. The framing device is two university students who belong to a “paranormal club” who search for weird stuff online and they stumble across an old blog about a guy called Raku. He starts off detailing his everyday life, then it becomes centred around his wife Yuki’s pregnancy and how happy he is to be a father. Things go badly towards the end, he stops posting for some time, and his final entry is a suicide note. The students start looking into what went on in “Raku’s” life and the answer is revealed through a series of odd drawings his wife made.

The stories become less interesting from this point on. The Smudged Room has its moments - when the mother and child are being stalked by a stranger, and the meaning behind the, yes, weird drawing - but it’s lacking the creepiness of the first story.

The Art Teacher’s Final Drawing is basically the last story because the final chapter is all about explaining, at length, how all of the stories are connected in a years-long narrative. In this story, a seemingly beloved art teacher is murdered while on an overnight camping trip and his murderer is never caught. It turns out he wasn’t as beloved as initially presented. A few years later, one of his students - a budding journalist - decides to investigate his former teacher’s mysterious death and dies the same way. Both of them leave behind scratchy drawings of the same landscape.

Ok: the stories are definitely unique and intriguing. I wanted to find out the solution to each of them and I flew through the book. The writing isn’t bad although it feels quite often that you’re reading a logic puzzle book rather than a novel or short story collection. This impression is accentuated with the abundant visuals - not just the drawings but the numerous tables and diagrams to make sure the reader is following along with the characters’ reasoning.

Which I didn’t mind actually as the parts of the book that felt the least interesting to me was when it was trying to be a real novel. Uketsu’s characters are incredibly weak and uninteresting - when they were thinking about their unconvincing lives, it was dreary. Take me back to the bonkers mystery! Oh and the dialogue. I’m thinking specifically of the part in the final chapter when one character begins his speech with “Give it up, bitch” when he’s trying to blackmail the character into sex which just made me laugh because everything he was saying was so silly and cartoonish - it was the total opposite of the dramatic tone the writer was clearly shooting for.

But let’s also be honest: the stories’ explanations are completely bananas! Every single one is insane. The “evidence” is always entirely circumstantial, and how the characters reach these conclusions - I mean, all fiction is contrived, but the art is in obscuring it to make the lie feel real; at no point does any of Uketsu’s fiction feel anything more than obvious construction. The kind of brushed-over contrivances where the cops are ultra-stupid for the sake of convenience - “oh this suicide note was typed on a brand new computer - nothing suspicious about this, case closed!”.

The solution to the art teacher’s death hinges on the apparently incontrovertible fact that food takes 3 hours to digest in the stomach - for everyone, everywhere - and so the killer force-feeds her victim to throw off the timing of the police pathologist, who would only use this to determine the time of death.

But that’s just the beginning of this madness: the art teacher draws a picture of a landscape badly on the back of a receipt while tied up in his sleeping bag, being killed by his wife, to throw off any suspicion that it was her killing him - because he wants her to raise their kid and she can’t do that if she’s in prison - by giving her an alibi so that people would look at the drawing and assume he drew it while it was light out because if it was night then he wouldn’t see the view to draw it.

Whaaaaaaaaaaaaat.

Or how about the first story where the pregnant woman suspected that her mother-in-law was slowly poisoning her with salt pills when she had high blood pressure so instead of, oh I don’t know, talking to her husband or going to the cops or talking to a real doctor OR STOP TAKING THE FUCKING PILLS, she drew a series of cryptic drawings that, interpreted “correctly” could, if you were a paranoid person, suggest that the mother-in-law had engineered her daughter-in-law’s death by childbirth because she wanted to be a mother again, and not a grandmother, because she liked the feeling of being a nurturing figure like when she was besties with a bird when she was a kid.

Was this book written by a complete weirdo!?

Author photo:

Nope, totally normal by 21st century standards - it’d be abnormal if he didn’t have a papier mache mask or have a fake name that meant nothing.

So then he either doesn’t know how normal people talk and act or he had to ignore that to make his shakily-conceived stories work. Got it.

Even if the stories’ explanations are beyond batshit crazy, the book was fun to read. The stories are original, at least a couple of them are quite inspired, and even the lesser ones contain moments of intrigue that keep you turning the pages. The writing is acceptable - it’s fine when going through the steps of the mysteries’ reasoning, but is clearly lacking in skill when trying to convey real characters and dialogue that sounds halfway normal and not like they’re featuring in a hackneyed story.

Uketsu’s Strange Pictures is a flawed but entertaining curio of a crime novel - parts of it feel breathtakingly stupid and clumsily written but I’d still say it’s worth a look for crime fiction fans for the novelty of the experience.