What Happens At The End Of About A Place In The Kinki Region?

Reading 'About a Place in the Kinki Region' was the sort of experience I anticipated from the get-go: it’s a fairly compact, relatively minor horror puzzle, a mockumentary-style thing told through a bunch of scattered articles, forum posts, interviews, and other pieces of research left behind by an editor called Ozawa who went missing some time ago. But it was a really good horror puzzle, and the end, in which all of the various pieces of research are used to complete the narrative of a particular place in the Kinki region and to reveal that Ozawa’s disappearance wasn’t an isolated incident, was great too. In particular, I found that instead of presenting us with some sort of tidy explanation for the events of the story, the text instead forced us to read through a whole load of seemingly minor, scattered details that, when taken collectively, presented a single, claustrophobic pattern of minor horrors. In terms of the physical book, this was served by the text’s framing of the research in the book as a sort of dossier or investigation into the whereabouts of a missing person, and by various design choices that presented some of the research bits in sealed evidence-like fashion. (It was also noted by a number of readers that the book was presented in a sealed packet or black envelope at the back of the book, which added to the “don’t open this” sensation of holding it.) As it stands, the ending of the book is sort of unclear: does it mean that Ozawa is gone for good, that he’s been completed as a missing person in the same way that the narrative of the place was completed? In either case, the impression is given that whatever was going on to cause the various instances of minor horror in the book continues to be going on outside of its pages, and that the reader has played a part in it. My own reaction on closing the book was a mix of admiration and unease: the author has handed us a cold case, and we’re left to work it out for ourselves in the dark.

About a Place in the Kinki Region pulled me in as it treats this book as a collection of all sorts of tiny, almost completely normal weirdness. Which, all together, becomes quite monstrous. I was rather expecting some sort of “case closed” but no, instead, after slowly accumulating all those stories and documents about strange places and occurrences in the Kinki region, the book just points to one locus, and there, in a place which is perfectly normal and very urban, in that place urban legends, sticker graffiti and deaths by strange circumstances seem to be merging – and the researcher for this book, editor Ozawa, went missing. He is never found in this book. I liked this book a great deal, and found it rather creepy. About a Place in the Kinki Region is published like a book of magazine-style research articles, all written in just the sort of style found on the net by a sleuth. The voice of the book is that of a found item. The book thus manages to build up and then resolve the plot in the most suspenseful manner. Manufacturing suspense is, after all, part of the design and packaging of a book, and here the author uses that in a very unusual but effective manner. Endlessly turning the pages of this completed case file, of this book of proofs, leaves one with a feeling of growing, slow dread, which is not at all resolved in this book.

I was left with only one impression from the last section of “About a Place in the Kinki Region.” And that was that the investigator’s curious digging had led him to a certain place and, in the end, he vanished there. The various fragments of narrative, testimonies, and on-line forum exchanges that comprise the body of the book were all building towards the book’s end where the story is wrapped up with a lot of archival-type material. Some editions even go so far as to seal off the end of the researcher’s notes. What I found particularly effective about the end of the book is that it doesn’t become a simple story about some monster which is then revealed to the reader in the climax. Instead the book shows how a system of horror is made up and it is a system that utilizes the attention and record-keeping of the curious. So, the emotional punch of the story is that the reader has been implicated in the horror as well. That was what I wanted to read, and it was effectively unsettling without being explained away.