Uketsu books are the strangest publishing story in the world right now.
The author has never shown his face. He appears in a white papier-mรขchรฉ mask, a black bodysuit and a voice changer, gives press conferences dressed exactly like that, and his real identity is reportedly known to around thirty people. He was working in a supermarket when he started posting videos. Since then, he’s sold something close to eight million copies worldwide in thirty-six languages, and in 2024 he had three books in Japanโs top ten fiction bestsellers at the same time. The horror shelf he detonated sits on my Japanese horror books list. The full canon is ranked on my best Japanese novels list.
There are four Uketsu books. Three are in English. This covers all of them, explains the reading order, which is genuinely confusing, and tells you which edition to buy depending on where you live.
Who He Actually Is, as Far as Anyone Knows
The pen name behind the Uketsu books is ้จ็ฉด, which reads as Uketsu and translates roughly as rain hole.
He is from Kanagawa Prefecture, and he spent four years of his early childhood in a London suburb, which explains rather more about the books than it sounds like it should. He was working at a supermarket when he began writing for the Japanese entertainment site Omocoro and posting to YouTube around 2018.
The early videos are the thing nobody in the English-language coverage mentions, and they are the key to all of it. They are short, silent-feeling and deeply wrong. Asparagus that becomes severed fingers. Strips of raw meat pegged out on a washing line. Eight human ears mounted on a spinning wheel. No jump scares, no explanation, no framing. Just an everyday object presented with one detail altered until it becomes unbearable.
That is the exact mechanism of the Uketsu books. A floor plan that is almost normal. A childโs drawing that is almost normal. The horror is never a monster arriving. It is a small wrongness in something ordinary, held on screen slightly too long.
The turn came in 2020, when he posted a twenty-one minute video presenting a mystery built entirely around architectural floor plans, framed as a background check on a house a friend was considering buying. It went enormous. Publishers told him to make it a novel. He did, and that novel is Strange Houses.
His YouTube channel sits at over 1.7 million subscribers, and the channel and the books feed each other constantly. His translator, Jim Rion, argues that this is exactly why he broke out: the video and the text arrived together, and neither would have worked alone.
The Reading Order Problem
The order of the Uketsu books trips up almost everyone, so read this before you buy anything.
In Japanese, the sequence is Strange Houses (2021), Strange Pictures (2022), Strange Buildings (2023), Strange Maps (2025).
In English, Strange Pictures came out first, in January 2025. Strange Houses followed later the same year, Strange Buildings arrived in 2026, and Strange Maps has not been translated yet.
So the second book became the first, the debut arrived second, and the third English release is a direct sequel to the second English release, sharing its narrator and its investigator.
The order I would actually recommend: start with Strange Pictures, because it is the strongest and the most self-contained. Then Strange Houses, then Strange Buildings, which continues it directly. That happens to be the English publication order, which is a coincidence rather than a plan.
And check your territory before you order, because the Uketsu books come from two different publishers. In the United States he is published by HarperVia, an imprint of HarperCollins. In the United Kingdom he is published by Pushkin Vertigo. Both are legitimate, both use Jim Rionโs translation, and the two editions are physically different objects with different covers and page counts.
Strange Pictures
ๅคใช็ตต Hen na e ยท 2022 ยท translated by Jim Rion ยท English January 2025
Nine drawings. A childโs crayon sketch of a house. Diagrams on a pregnant womanโs blog. A scribble made by a murder victim in his last minutes.
The images are printed in the book, and the text asks you what is wrong with them. Sometimes you can see it. More often you cannot, and then a character explains it and you go back and look again and it has been sitting there in plain view the whole time.
It works because Uketsu never uses the pictures as decoration. They are the evidence. A drawing is a witness statement made by someone who could not or would not say the thing directly, and the bookโs method is to read them the way a detective reads a room. Four apparently unrelated stories run in sequence, and the connection between them arrives late and lands hard.
As with all the Uketsu books, the prose is plain and the characterization thin, and both are deliberate. This is a book that wants you looking at the pictures rather than at the sentences, and its Japanese sales, well past a million copies, suggest a very large number of people were happy to do that.
It was shortlisted for Waterstones Book of the Year in 2025 and nominated for a British Book Award in 2026. Start here.
Strange Houses
ๅคใชๅฎถ Hen na ie ยท 2021 ยท translated by Jim Rion ยท English 2025
His actual debut, and the one that came out of the twenty-one minute video.
A freelance writer who specializes in the macabre is asked by an acquaintance to look at the floor plan of a newly built house in Tokyo. The house is ordinary, except for one thing. Between the kitchen and the living room there is a sealed section with no doors and no windows. A dead space, built in deliberately and walled off.
The floor plan is printed for you. And the book proceeds by asking a single question with total patience: what would a family have to be doing to require a room shaped like that?
It is architecture as evidence and it is the purest of the Uketsu books. No detective, no crime scene, no body. A diagram, a growing list of anomalies, and the slow certainty that you are looking at something terrible rendered in straight lines. The investigator character, Kurihara, reads buildings the way other detectives read people.
Two honest notes. English readers consistently rate this below Strange Pictures, and the complaints are fair: it is much shorter, the final reveal involves a large cast with similar names, and several readers have found this translation stiffer than the other two. Read it second and you will enjoy it more than if you come to it expecting the first book again.
Strange Buildings
ๅคใชๅฎถ๏ผ Hen na ie 2 ยท 2023 ยท translated by Jim Rion ยท English 2026
This is a direct sequel to Strange Houses, not a standalone, and the English title hides that completely. Same narrator, same Kurihara, same method.
The writer receives eleven new files from readers, each describing an architectural anomaly. A hut deep in the woods. A hallway that goes nowhere. A shrine with no apparent purpose. A room with a door that should not exist. A prison that reads like a bad dream. Each is a small self-contained puzzle, and each is a piece of something larger that resolves at the end.
The eleven-case structure is a genuine improvement on the single-house model and the most ambitious thing in the Uketsu books so far. It lets him run the trick repeatedly at different scales, and the accumulation does work that one building could not.
It was an immediate New York Times and Times of London bestseller, which for a translated Japanese mystery by an anonymous author is not a normal outcome.
Do not read this before Strange Houses. The English title gives you no warning and you will lose a great deal.
Strange Maps, and what comes next
ๅคใชๅฐๅณ Hen na chizu ยท 2025 ยท English translation announced for April 2027
His fourth novel and the only one of the Uketsu books you cannot read. Same principle applied to cartography.
Given that his two English publishers recently celebrated a million copies sold between them, and that his work now exists in thirty-six languages, it is difficult to imagine this one staying untranslated for long. Thus, it was recently announced by HarperVia to be released in early 2027.
The Manga
There is a manga adaptation of Strange Houses, drawn by Kyล Ayano, serialized on Ichijinshaโs Comic Howl since January 2023 and running to seven volumes so far. Seven Seas Entertainment publishes it in English as The Strange House, under its HOWL Comics imprint.
I read it and wasnโt sold. The problem is structural rather than a failure of craft: the novels work by handing you a static image and making you sit with it until the wrongness surfaces, and a manga page is already doing that work for you. The floor plan stops being a thing you interrogate and becomes a panel you look at. If you want the story itโs there, but the method is the point and the method does not survive the move.
Strange Pictures has a manga of its own, drawn by Kikou Aiba and published in English by Titan. Strange Buildings has not been adapted.
Why He Matters, Beyond the Mask
It would be easy to file Uketsu books as a marketing gimmick that got lucky, and that reading does not survive contact with the work.
His English translator, Jim Rion, came to him directly from translating Seishi Yokomizoโs The Devilโs Flute Murders, a 1951 honkaku mystery, and has said that reading Strange Houses he immediately sensed ties to Japanโs older tradition of the macabre. That is the right frame. In Japan he gets called the Edogawa Ranpo of the internet, and the comparison is doing real work rather than flattering him: Ranpo built Japanese mystery fiction in the 1920s out of physical wrongness, bodies in furniture, obsessive confinement, the ordinary object that is not right. Uketsu is doing that with a YouTube channel and a floor plan.
What is genuinely new about the Uketsu books is the delivery. The books contain images because the videos contained images, and both grew out of a man in a supermarket job posting unsettling things online for free. That is a career path that did not exist twenty years ago, and it has produced the best-selling Japanese mystery writer in the world.
If you want to see where the tradition he is working in actually comes from, I have written about that over at the best Japanese mystery novels.
His first book in English has its own page: Strange Pictures, covering the YouTube persona behind it and why reviewers disagree so sharply about the writing.
