The Graveyard Apartment: A Novel Kindle Edition

Any realtor will tell you the same old thing - "Location, Location, Location!"But in the late 1980s a young family throws caution to the Tokyo wind and moves in to a great apartment overlooking a graveyard. After all, it's a graveyard where people visit and picnic on the weekends, despite the fact there is a crematorium also in evidence. Even so, Mom Misao, Dad Teppei and daughter cheery little Tamao settle in with their dog and bird.The novel meanders along, setting us up for something creepy. The whiny Teppei's competitive relationship with his brother, Misao's distasteful sister-in-law, the elderly couple managing the building. These relationships unfold in a mundane manner as we, and Misao, have trouble concentrating on them as incidents begin to pile up. Four-year-old Tamao's pet bird Pyoko is discovered destroyed in his locked cage. The building itself is half-empty and foreshadowing stretches across the mundane daily activities as the remaining tenants begin to move out. What IS happening in the stair-less storage basement? Some kind of horror is seeping through the building. And dead Pyoko keeps returning.It's a slow-paced story and settles over the reader like a suffocating grey blanket - alternately too hot and freezing cold. The ending will twist you and keep you awake. Think about that before reading. I'm not even sure I am recommending the book. I can only tell you, Dear Readers, it scared me and was worth the price.

A horror novel first published in Japan in 1993, and set six years prior in 1987, The Graveyard Apartment is the story of several residents who move into a newly opened apartment building that bizarrely sits in the midst of a Tokyo graveyard. The sole building ever to get built from a plan years before that would have seen the graveyard and adjacent temple moved to make way for a whole new subdivision, rents in the building are going cheap, drawing in residents despite the creepiness of its location. The central characters in the book are the Kano family, consisting of dad Teppei, mom Misao, four year-old daughter Tamao and the family dog, Cookie, and the book starts the morning after they moved in. An early omen of bad fortune awaits them on the morning of that first day: the family's pet bird Pyoko is dead in his cage, apparantly the victim of some great violence, although the cage itself remains undisturbed and locked. It's not long before little Tamao is convinced that the dead bird still visits her though, and that she, Tamao, can now speak bird language. Her parents put this down to Tamao's imagination and trauma over losing a beloved pet, and put the reports of Pyoko's ghost visitations out of their minds. Over the next little while, the family gets used to their new home, meets some of the other residents of the building, and everything seems to be alright aside from vague, but growing, feelings of uneasiness on Misao's part regarding the building and especially its basement.The large storage basement shared by the apartment building's inhabitants has an oddity: it's accessible only by the building's elevator; there is no stairway or other way in or out. One day when Tamao and the two children of their neighbors, the Inoues, are down playing in the basement, Tamao is injured under mysterious circumstances, and she and her friend Kaori are trapped down then when the elevator abruptly stops working. It's at this point that the novel begins transitioning from vague feelings of uneasiness to a more sinister form. Things start happening that make the various residents feel highly uncomfortable about their homes, and people start moving out of the building, leaving the Kanos more and more isolated against whatever threat dwells there.The chief shortcoming for me was that I found it hard, especially in the early chapters, to connect to two of the main characters, Teppei and Misao Kano. In Misao's case this gradually changed over the course of the book, but Teppei remains, to be blunt, quite unlikeable. I think he's meant to be that way though. I had an easier time connecting with the Inoues and the building's resident supervisors, the Tabatas. If the novel had been a little longer to allow for some scenes that were centered on those characters's perspectives, it would have made it even better. Little Tamao is a very easy character to like. Overall it was a good book though, with a number of scenes that were suffused with intense, albeit ambiguous, menace. Recommended.

Finished reading this last night. The more I think about it the more I like it. With that being said this book is not bad but it's not good either. I read this book after I seen it highly praised on multiple horror lists, which I suppose has lead me astray more than once. The book is slow paced, which is not personally for me, we are all different I just get board if it's to slow of a pace. I love the general idea of the story and loved even more when they combined something abandoned into the story since I love spooky abandoned things, I truly loved that part. Maybe some of the story was slightly lost in translation, it is told in painstakingly proper English which at times feels like half the story is just jazzed up with a thesaurus. Initially it did not scare me but the more I think about it the more it hits the target. Again I didn't love or hate it it's somewhere in between and it at points it can be slow enough it's frustrating. It's just good enough but not great.

When I saw that this book was written in 1987 by a Japanese writer (that won prizes no less), I was really excited. I mean, the Japanese are really good at doing scary. But I was very disappointed with this story. First off, for the first 50% (read on Kindle) of the story, not much is happening. And then, boom! The action is non-stop, and that is not necessarily a good thing. I also did not connect with any of the characters. I don't know if it's a translation thing or because the book was written over 30 years ago, but I just did not enjoy it that much.

Uma autentica ghost story japonesa, a historia começa lenta e simples, porém, quando voce descobre mais sobre os personagens, prende sua atenção. Muita atmosfera, boas descrições do terror que a familia enfrenta, tornam a leitura obrigatória para quem gosta desse genero.

Good creepy atmospheric read

I knew Mariko was very popular in Japan and decided to give it a go. What can I say. For the weird factor it is definitely five stars. For what happens in the end...well, I would like it slightly different. Japanese horror stories are not like Western stories, it is subtler and a lot deeper. You may face more questions than answers. Were they caught in it because their love affair lead to the death of a person? But then why their daughter too? She is surely innocent? Or may be it is karma because of her parents?Like many other novels by Japanese authors this one starts slowly and goes so for a while, and most of it happens closer to the end. But it becomes pretty scary there. Hold this: an old temple in the middle of Tokyo, old graveyard and the cheerful development project that involves construction of an underground shopping street running under the temple grounds. It was abandoned, of course, and the shopping street gets filled in..Or does it? So, what is behind this concrete wall in the basement of the apartment building?I have a feeling that Japanese ghosts don't go to the light. They stay in the dark and become a threat to anybody who happens to come too near.

This book was for me quite underwhelming. It's mostly quite boring and not too much happens. I found the characters quite uninteresting. The central plot is quite good and the descriptions of the Tokyo suburb where the story takes place is quite enjoyable. The supernatural elements really only take off in the last 20% of the book but I found this part all a bit silly. Overall I really did not enjoy the book too much at all.