A whodunnit by the masked Japanese YouTuber seems keen to validate the keyboard brigade
‘You can find anything on the internet these days,’ says one character in Strange Pictures. It’s the unintended motto of this enjoyable, clumsy whodunnit, populated by Wikipedia-educated crime experts and computer-chair psychologists. The shifting cast includes a student who is a member of his university’s paranormal club, a nursery teacher and a young newspaper administrator who aspires to be an investigative journalist. Each comes across a series of seemingly innocent drawings in which they find evidence of abuse and murder. The chapters at first appear unrelated but increasingly circle around a young boy and his relationship with the woman he calls ‘Mama’. What follows is a tutorial in amateur crime solving, as each narrator talks through their insights and hunches. Most pages are given over to the pictures, closeups of certain details in them, as well as needlessly explanatory graphs and diagrams.
Uketsu is a masked Japanese YouTuber who posts surreal, skewed parodies of explainer and unboxing videos, usually showcasing bizarre fictional products like toys made out of human teeth or fingernails. One 2020 post, about floorplans that suggested a house built for murder, led to a manga series and three bestselling novels, two of which – Strange Pictures will be followed by Strange Houses – are published in English this year. Given the sly, creepy tone of Uketsu’s videos, it’s possible that Strange Picture’s bumbling, overexplanatory narrators and clunky coincidences are really a send-up of both the mystery genre and online conspiracy nuts. But the book seems keen to validate the keyboard brigade: the one ‘expert’, actually trained in psychology, gets it all wrong; it’s the amateur sleuths, armed only with the internet and nothing better to do than poke around in other people’s lives, who solve the case.
The bigger culprit behind this mystery is the internet itself. Not just in how it shapes the structure of the book – the novel reading with the staccato rhythm and blithe condescension of how-to blogs – but also in the easy voyeurism and dubious expertise, hinting at how the internet makes nosey hack detectives of us all.
Strange Pictures by Uketsu, translated by Jim Rion. Pushkin Vertigo, £14.99 (softcover)
From the March 2025 issue of ArtReview – get your copy.
