“Calamity”: Spine-Chilling Collection Chosen as Japan’s Top Horror Book of the Year

Eating Words

In June 2024, Wazawai (Calamity) by Oda Masakuni was selected as Japan’s best horror book of the year in the new guide Kono horā ga sugoi! (This Horror is Amazing!), a spin-off from the long-running annual Kono misuterī ga sugoi! (This Mystery is Amazing!) series. The 2024 edition considers books published from April 2023 to March 2024, ranking them based on the judgement of 41 readers. The bestsellers Kinki chihō no aru basho ni tsuite (Concerning a Place in the Kinki Region) by Sesuji and Ongoku (A Distant Land) by Kitazawa Tō finished second and third, respectively.

Calamity consists of seven short stories published by Oda from 2013 through 2021. In all of these intricately crafted tales, characters are drawn by some strange happenstance into another world where they become embroiled in an uncanny calamity.

In the opening story “Shokusho” (Eating Books), an author struggling with writing block observes a strange woman tearing pages from a book and devouring them. She tells him in parting, “If you eat one page, there’s no way back,” and he becomes obsessed by what this could mean. When he experimentally tears and eats a page, he tumbles into a terrifying, fictional realm and can no longer live in the real world.

“Mimi moguri” (Ear Crawling) is about a man who visits his girlfriend’s apartment after she goes missing and meets a suspicious character who says he is her neighbor. The self-proclaimed neighbor tells him about his talent for “ear crawling,” by which he can enter another person’s body, and the protagonist is caught up in a blood-chilling experience.

Horrifying Worlds

The collection has a physical theme with stories linked to different parts of the body: the mouth, ears, eyes, nose, and hair. When these parts alone are removed from a living person, they create a physiological disgust in the onlooker, which Oda uses to transport readers into a terrifying world. Even if petrified, however, they will find it impossible to put the book down, compelled to find out where each story will end.

Oda has said in an interview that “since I was a child, I’ve felt an indescribable aversion to seeing scattered hair on the floor of a barber’s shop.” His story “Hakka” (Hair Malady) derives from this young experience of distaste. A girl seeks to make some extra money by padding out the attendance numbers at the secret rituals of a religious cult that worships hair like a god. She is taken to the cult’s remote headquarters in the mountains where she witnesses a hell on earth.

In “Nōjō” (The Farm), a young person who fails to find a job ends up working on a farm that produces a mysterious substance. Masses of human noses float in a giant tank filled with reddish-black liquid, but what are they used for? There is no escape for the unfortunate young worker.

Absurd, horrifying worlds unfold throughout the collection, and to read them all leaves one with a chilling sensation like having swallowed something impossible to digest. Only the final story, “Sōshiki ki” (A Record of Mourning Colors), leaves a lingering sensation of hope.

Although the stories are categorized as horror fiction, Oda is not simply creating grotesque tales—he depicts dark human truths about greed and karma.

As well as the 2024 winners, This Horror is Amazing! includes lists of 20 all-time must-read horror fiction works. Edogawa Ranpo’s 1925 story “Ningen isu” (translated by James B. Harris as “The Human Chair”) tops the Japanese list. Major classics head the international list, with Mary Shelley’s Frankenstein at number one, followed by Bram Stoker’s Dracula.

(Originally published in Japanese on July 19, 2024. Banner image courtesy Shinchōsha.)