Bring Uketsu to the Beach This Summer

Some of the kids may be back in school, but it’s still technically summer for another month and I insist we make the most of it. If you’re going to get in some last minute beach time and try to suck the last drops out of summer, I have a suggestion for reading material.

The beach is both a wonderful and terrible place to read. I tend to do my best reading at home, in my bed or on my big comfy chair. The beach has no bed or big comfy chair. It has no privacy. It also has the nonstop distraction of the beauty of the ocean itself. It’s exhilarating and it makes me tired. I want to sit there all day and stare at the water, but I also get bored easily. 

To deal with all of these factors, a good beach read needs to be absorbing, but easy to put down. You should be able to read it quickly, so you don’t keep reading the same dense page over and over again. It should transport you, so when you put it down for a while you get the pleasant whiplash of realizing you’re back at the beach. It should be a vibe.

So many beach read recommendations are for books about rich white people at the beach. I do not understand this. I do not want to read about beach people while I am at the beach. I’m already there. Who cares about these other beach people? Who wants to read about beach drama when you go to the beach to get away from drama? The best beach reads, in my opinion, are counterprogramming. Something creepy and extra-readable is called for.

That is why I recommend that for your next beach trip you bring a copy of Uketsu's Strange Pictures, translated by Jim Rion. This is part of a series of super popular Japanese novels from a mysterious anonymous author who always wears a horror-movie-worthy papier-mâché mask. Along with his novels, he also maintains a Youtube channel that I cannot understand but that fascinates me nonetheless.

Strange Pictures is written in the style of what we in the States would call Creepypasta. It is early internet horror, with an old-school blog starting off the action. The novel is made up of a set of interconnected stories, which in many cases would not make a good beach read. But here, each story revolves around a Strange Picture, many of them drawn by children. There is something off in these pictures, something that a character may question in one story, only to get a more detailed explanation in another. The pictures and stories build upon each other in a puzzle-mystery kind of way, but not so intricately that you’ll have to use a lot of brain cells to keep track of it. The book is not scary, but it can give you a creepy vibe. 

Because of all the pictures and the blunt style of the prose, you can easily breeze through this whole book in a day. You can also pick it down and put it back up without having to do much work. This book will happily explain to you exactly why this new thing relates back to this old thing, even if it’s very obvious and you don’t need it to. Maybe this could be annoying, but in a book this breezy, it just means you turn pages even faster. Or, even better, stare out at the ocean for a while, ponder existence, feel the sand on your toes, and then dive back in. 

Strange Pictures: A Novel

“A labyrinthine and multilayered horror mystery, full of cryptic images . . . wonderfully complex and carefully crafted . . . This is a story where revelations and new questions wait around every corner, and Uketsu keeps readers guessing until the very end.” - New York Times Book Review“Delightfully macabre and fiendishly clever. Seemingly unconnected stories tie themselves into a complicated knot, which Uketsu masterfully unravels.”—G. T. Karber, author of the national bestseller MurdleThe spine-tingling “triumphant international debut” of the New York Times bestselling author of Strange Buildings and Strange Houses— a series of seemingly innocent pictures draws readers into a disturbing web of unsolved mysteries and shattered psyches.An exploration of the macabre, where the seemingly mundane takes on a terrifying significance. . . .A pregnant woman’s sketches on a seemingly innocuous blog conceal a chilling warning.A child’s picture of his home contains a dark secret message.A sketch made by a murder victim in his final moments leads an amateur sleuth down a rabbit hole that will reveal a horrifying reality.Structured around these nine childlike drawings, each holding a disturbing clue, Uketsu invites readers to piece together the mystery behind each and the over-arching backstory that connects them all. Strange Pictures is the internationally bestselling debut from mystery horror YouTube sensation Uketsu—an enigmatic masked figure who has become one of Japan’s most talked about contemporary authors.A great read for spooky-season nightsA perfect addition to any Halloween reading listTranslated from the Japanese by Jim Rion.Supplemental enhancement PDF accompanies the audiobook.

HarperViaUketsu and Jim Rion

Best of all, this is just the first of four books. The first three have already been translated into English and published in the US, so you can find Strange Houses and Strange Buildings at bookstores, too. The fourth book, Strange Maps, will be out in April, 2027, just in time for next year’s beach trip. 

I recommend reading them in translation order and starting with Strange Pictures. It has the most variety in its story and images of the three translated so far. Technically, Strange Houses was the first one published in Japan, but there is one important thing: Strange Houses is by far the most ridiculous of the three. If you started with it, you might not bother finishing it, because it becomes deeply absurd around page 10 and decides to stick with it through the end. I thought it was the most bananas thing I’d ever read and I finished it in a few hours. Yes it was very silly, but also I couldn’t stop reading it. What can I say? It commits to the bit. 

Strange Buildings relies only a little on the events of Strange Houses so feel free to skip straight to it if you’d like, but honestly, I think if you know that Strange Houses is ridiculous fun, you can have a pretty good time with it. And I suspect that, like me, once you start reading Uketsu you’ll find his work an addictive and singular experience. When every other page has a blueprint, you get to flip through them so quickly and it’s very satisfying. Especially for the final section when all the pieces are being put together, with each piece of the puzzle being contextualized for you yet again just in case you forgot it from 5 pages ago. So if you got distracted by the girls doing TikTok dances on the next blanket over or spotted a cool looking crab, that’s fine! Uketsu is gonna explain everything to you and you’re gonna be just fine, no matter how much you spaced out. 

Is the solution to the puzzle satisfying? At this point, does it matter? The vibes are impeccably disconcerting. By the end you care much less about the destination than you do the journey. And who needs a perfect destination anyway? You’re already at the beach. Life is good. You’re not wearing shoes. There’s a layer of sand across all of your exposed skin. There’s a cold drink in the cooler right over there. While you’re up, would you get me one?