I was expecting a ghost story, and I guess I kind of got one? But it wasn’t at all the ghost story I was expecting.
The book goes back and forth between its two main characters. We start with Lee Turner in October of 2026 (yes, part of this book takes place after it was written). Lee has just murdered his college roommate, but he doesn’t quite remember how or why. Most importantly of all, he doesn’t remember what he did with the body.
So he flees New York City to escape justice, taking refuge in his father’s new house in Japan. But he keeps an eye on the news to see if the police are on to him. But there’s no report of a student turning up dead or even going missing. Lee is on the run, but no one is looking for him.
His dad’s new house is the perfect place to hide out. It’s hidden from view by sword ferns and wild ginger, but something seems off. For starters, animals never seem to come near the house. Then there’s the window that is sometimes there and other times just a wall. Last, but certainly not least, is the woman who sometimes appears in the yard with a sword.
Even before he murdered his roommate, Lee’s life was one of tragedy. His mom was Japanese, so he’s half Japanese, and his white dad seems to have a fetish for Asian women. His mom disappeared when they were on vacation when Lee was a child. She left no trace, other than a pair of suitcase wheeltracks in the sand outside their hotel. The best guess the authorities could make was that someone killed her and stuffed her in a suitcase, which seems like a pretty outlandish conclusion to jump to.
The woman with the sword is Sen, the last samurai. Although she’s a girl, she convinced her dad to train her in the ways of the samurai so they would be ready when it was time for the samurai to rise up.
Sen is living in October of 1877, right after the failed Satsuma Rebellion when the samurai, having been legally abolished, tried to rise up and fight for their place in Japanese society.
It did not go well for the Samurai, either in the history books or in this book. Sen’s father was one of the men who fought in the rebellion. When he returns home in defeat and moves his family into this remote house where no one can find them, Sen knows her father has died and been replaced by a demon because there’s no way her father would accept defeat and bring shame on himself and his family.
Nevertheless, he is still her father and she is determined to make him proud, despite the atrocities he commits and forces her to commit.
Shortly after moving into his father’s house, Lee discovers the door to his closet sometimes acts as a door to Sen’s world and the two can see and talk to each other and even cross the closet’s threshold and into each other’s world/timeline.
Sen, of course, thinks Lee is a demon.
Lee quickly figures out that Sen is a ghost. He asks her how she died, but since she hasn’t yet died in her timeline, she has no idea.
SPOILER ALERT!!!
I’m going to spend the rest of this blog post talking about the end of the book with serious spoilers, so if you have yet to read the book and you don’t want the ending spoiled for you, consider yourself warned.
You know that book where someone thinks they’re being haunted by ghosts, but it turns out they’re the ghosts and the “ghosts” they think are haunting them are the living people who moved into their house after they died?
This book is kind of like that but it turns out both of them are ghosts.
We learn fairly early on that Sen’s mother took her to the ocean when Sen was a child and tried to drown her, but apparently didn’t try hard enough because Sen washed back up on shore and made her way home and neither she nor her mother ever spoke of the incident.
What we don’t find out until the end is that the goddess of the sea took pity on Sen and refused to take her life, instead making sure she made it safely back to shore.
It was later, when her father cut her down, that Sen died.
Except Sen doesn’t realize she died, because the sea goddess once again came to her rescue, bringing her to the secluded Japanese house that exists in its own reality and its own timeline.
Similarly, when Lee gets into a fight with his roommate and tumbles over the handrail and dies, the sea goddess takes pity on him and takes him to the same house where she has been sheltering Sen. Since the house exists in its own reality, Sen and Lee are able to communicate, but it takes them a while to figure out the truth of who they are and how they got there.
What I don’t understand is that, when Lee arrived at the house in Japan, his dad’s girlfriend, Hina was there. But when Sen crosses over into Lee’s world and spends some time with him and his family there, Hina attacks Sen, saying she’s going to hurt Lee.
At the end of the book, we find out that Hina is really the sea goddess, which means she knows everything that happens in all the timelines for the house, so she should know that Sen never attacks Lee in any of those timelines. Also, she started this whole thing by bringing Sen to the house to protect her, so why is she now attacking her?
Apparently she didn’t think through the repercussions when she brought another spirit from another timeline to a house that exists outside of time.
I did find myself eager to keep reading this book to find out how it ends, but once I got the end, I was disappointed. I wanted a ghost story and this isn’t a ghost story. At least, not in the way I normally think of ghost stories.
It is well written though, so don’t let my misconceptions turn you off. You may very well enjoy it more than I did.