A review by waclements7
The Graveyard Apartment by Mariko Koike

4.0

Really enjoyable and convincing. I think the translation was pretty smooth (sometimes it's sort of clunky--I always wonder about nuance, regardless, but there wasn't anything jarring or that seemed out of place to me). The blurb sounds reminiscent of Poltergeist, but it's really quite different. It's made me curious about how death and cemeteries are viewed in Japan--obviously not too differently than here, as it's mentioned by one of the characters as a hesitating point to buying the apartment. I liked it enough to get another of the authors' works. I don't know how attached I felt to the characters at first, but I was definitely on their side as the novel progressed. It's complicated by an event in their past. Is that why it ends the way it does? I don't know!!