2005 seems a bit more recent than most "classic" novels.

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I hated it. The characters just didn't make any sense. Why are these five people who hate each other or barely know each other getting together for a bizarre wedding in an abandoned house in another country? The dialogue doesn't make any sense when you remove the POV character's internal monologue. How did they carry all their stuff - wedding clothing, random human-sacrifice themed jade statues, enough food for a feast and equipment to cook it - to this house in the middle of nowhere? And every two pages there's another reminder that one of the guys is very tall and handsome and strong and the other one is not. I actually love books with dislikable characters, but these ones weren't fun to dislike. They were just nonsensical.

But mostly what bothered me was the way the haunting is so closely tied with the architecture of the house, but the descriptions don't really make much sense for Heian-period Japanese architecture. The premise of the book is that there are years and years of dead women "buried in the walls," but buildings of that time tend to feature thick wooden framing posts and walls of either thin earthen plaster or light, movable fusuma. The walls aren't thick enough to "bury" one dead woman in, let alone centuries of them. And as the character are running through the house they are shocked when doors appear where no doors were before, but again, it would be more common for two or three walls of most rooms to be fusuma panels that are meant to act as doors and be moved or removed as needed. There are a lot of buildings from this period still around here in Japan and I've visited enough of them that I had an image of what the house should look like, but for me none of that matched with the descriptions of what was happening in the novella.

At least it is a novella, though - nice and short. If it were a longer book I probably would have abandoned it, but this was short enough that I could just power through it quickly, albeit with frequent pauses to roll my eyes.