What A Mystery Novel Taught Me About Architecture

TITLE: what a mystery novel taught me about architecture CHANNEL: Cathal Crumley DATE: 2026-04-17 URL: https://youtu.be/wNS8tmK2RSY ---TRANSCRIPT--- is it when I take the upper floor plan and I layer it directly above the ground floor plan like this? That dead space connects to the child’s room beneath the shelf to create a corridor. What a strange house? What’s going on with this house?

What is going on with this house? This is the central premise to the best-selling Japanese murder mystery, Strange Houses, a novel that I actually read in 2025. The novel was written by the writer and YouTuber Ukatsu. Who is Ukatsu? I don’t know. No one really knows. If you clicked this video, you would have noticed the thumbnail. And again, we have another photo of Ukatsu. Ukatsu is a YouTuber and not a best-selling author. And he’s sort of famous and iconic in a way for never revealing his identity. And he has a very successful YouTube channel where he begins these sort of strange, obscure investigations into odd things. And in many cases like Strange Houses, these curiosities translate into best-selling novels. So, Ukatsu is the author of the Strange series. Strange Houses is part of a series. I think we have Strange Pictures. I think we now also have Strange Buildings. But today I’m going to be exclusively talking about Strange Houses.

So, what is the premise to Strange Houses and how do we get onto the plans that I was just talking about? Strange Houses is a story about a writer who is basically sent a property listing for this house by a friend who is considering buying it. I love Strange Houses. I’m an architect and I love looking at floor plans and I love studying them and trying to find out what’s going on with them. Reading a floor plan is a skill that a lot of architects have. And sometimes you’ll be looking at floor plans and you’re trying to read the circulation. You’re trying to understand what makes it good. You’re trying to understand the scale of each of the rooms. You’re trying to understand the overall architectural concept for the house. And then sometimes you’ll just notice that something’s not quite right. That the house is actually really strange and possibly dangerous.

So, we’re going to look at this floor plan now. And this floor plan is for a house in Tokyo in Japan. And there’s some weird things going on with it the deeper and the more sort of focused you kind of look at it. So, this house here I’ve redrawn to highlight some peculiarities that we’re going to discuss. I’ve drawn the plan multiple times here. But if we just look at the ground floor plan, you’ve got your typical entrance. You’ve got a kitchen, dining, living, garage. And then on the upper floor, you have some bedrooms, a balcony, and a child’s bedroom, which I’ve highlighted here in red. And to the untrained eye, what you’ll probably still notice is that there’s no windows in this child’s bedroom. Furthermore, there’s two architectural details I want to bring to your attention. One is the room before the child’s room, which is the strange antechamber with two doors on either side. The other is this dead space that exists in the kitchen. What is going on? Like what are these spaces for? Sort of weird, right?

So, let’s look at it a little closer. Inside the child’s bedroom, we have a bed and we have two shelves. And if we take the upper floor plan with the child’s bedroom and we overlay it directly above the plan below like this. You’ll notice that that dead space and the shelf inside the child’s bedroom align to create a space a corridor of sorts. So, what does that actually mean? What’s going on with this house? It’s really weird, right? Well, let’s take a second to sort of draw this out. We have the… and we have this shelf detail. And in that, we know that that aligns with this dead space in the kitchen. And when we connect the two vertically, we know that creates a corridor here. And that corridor can only lead to one space. The guest bedroom. So, at this point, I’m beginning to ask myself, why would a child need to get access to the guest bedroom below without having to go through any of this space or any of this space? What’s going on in this house? Who designed it and why did they design it?

The writer, our protagonist, agrees. This is such a strange detail. What’s going on? So, he reaches out to his friend Kurahara, who in this story is the diegetic architect of sorts. Kurahara is a draftsman/architect and is very skilled at reading house plans. And Kurahara has a look at the floor plan that we just had a look at and agrees with the writer and the buyer that something’s going on here with this house. So, we have the writer, our protagonist, our hero with no name. And then we have the architectural draftsman Kurahara, who could may or may not be based on a real character. And the two of these characters begin investigating these weird, strange houses and are on the search sort of for the architect behind these strange houses.

But how does Strange Houses deliver its story? This is what’s really interesting to me. Strange Houses tells its story through architectural plans, diagrams, and drawings. And I find that just amazing. I think I wish more fiction did this. Like I know for example like Lord of the Rings has original maps and drawings by Tolkien. And a lot of authors do do this sort of thing. But I’m talking about like hardcore architectural floor plans, details, window details, casement studies, circulation diagrams, site plans, all of it. I mean, if you’re an architect and you haven’t picked this book up yet, like I recommend you checking it out. You’ll absolutely love it. But I mean, writers telling stories through architecture is not too dissimilar to how a lot of mainstream architects today tell stories to the public through diagrams.

The idea of the ghost architect though isn’t something that’s new to my channel. I’ve spoken at length about this idea before. In particular, I’ve spoken about it at length in my video on Resident Evil. The idea of a virtual building being a monster of sorts. I described this Spencer Mansion in this video as the sort of the architecture of horror. And behind the architecture of horror, you have the architect of horror, in this instance Shinji Mikami. And then through telling the story, Shinji Mikami has created the idea of the ghost architect through the fictional architect George Trevor. Again, the architect I describe as the diegetic architect. Resident Evil and Strange Houses have this very similar structure in the same way. If we take it back to Strange Houses, we have the author Ukatsu. We have the fake, unknown writer, the main character, who is in many ways a vector for Ukatsu. We have the fictional architect, the draftsman, the architect in the story who teaches us architecture through the drawings. And then we also have the mystery of the ghost architect himself or herself, who is designing these stay spaces in this murder mystery.

So, okay, so it’s great to see that we’ve got a virtual gaming analog for Strange Houses. But do weird houses like this actually exist in reality? Well, the answer is sort of yes and sort of no. I just want to bring your attention to very famous houses that are almost designed and built and exist as haunted houses in real life. We have the Winchester house here in California. A lot of people may be familiar with its dead ends, its weird windows, its stair details, and the haunted nature of it and its origin. And we also have, you know, in a more depressing nature, the HH Holmes murder castle in Chicago with the really gruesome floor plan here. These are like houses that are sort of famous in like architectural pop culture murder mystery discourse. But I’m not really going to get into too much detail about them. But I just want to highlight something. Ukatsu, my reading of Strange Houses is that Ukatsu was not actually inspired by any particular, say, house, but rather a house in culture of sorts.

Okay, so let’s go back to the original sort of strange house here that we’re looking at, the sort of house that kicks off the story of Strange Houses. And then let’s look at that detail again. And then let’s ask the question, are details like this really that strange? And this was the sort of question I asked when I was reading this book for the first time. And the answer to that sort of depends. So, now we’re going to talk about the Soane house. The Soane house is one of my favorite buildings. I’ve talked about this building at length before, but it’s relevant in the context of Strange Houses and Ukatsu. I wrote my dissertation on this house. And what I want to highlight here is that, you know, if we were to look at a house like this in the context of strange details, the Soane house is filled with them. You know, hidden walls, hidden depths, false depths, secret sneaky linings built into the walls. And it’s, you know, the Soane house is a very dramatic example of this sort of architectural technique of layering spaces inside spaces. But what’s really interesting is that the Soane house is grand and luxurious as it is, was built across a time period of about 60 years, I think. So, in many ways, it’s an architecture of sort of inheritance. Like you build on top of what’s already there. And that culture of building and refurbishing and repairing and restoring is ingrained in, you know, European, UK, and Irish building culture. It’s not just so simple to knock something down and build again. Every piece of architecture almost has a history and a story within it.

And that’s relevant for what I’m going to talk about in a minute in relation to Japanese housing architecture. So, I really want to talk about two ideas, the architectural inheritance, which is what I sort of just discussed, the idea that you know, a building is built upon a building and built within a building over a period of maybe 100 years. And contrast that with what happens more often in Japan and the idea of the architecture of intent, the idea of like knock it down and build again. Well, I asked the question, is this detail really that weird? But in the context of Tokyo and Japan and for to the eye of an architectural draftsman like Kurohara, the architectural hero of strange houses, a detail like this would stand out because Japan has a very particular housing culture that we’re going to get into now.

This is a screenshot from an article that was in the Guardian, I believe, “Raise, rebuild, repeat. Why Japan knocks down its houses after 30 years.” And there’s a good reason for this. Well, there’s a number of reasons for it. In Japan, it’s perfectly acceptable to sort of, you know, buy a plot of land, knock down the house, and rebuild it, and just go again and again and again. And some of that is related to culture, some of it’s related to post-World War II economics, and a lot of it there are a lot of hard factors involved in this too, Japanese construction culture, regulations brought in in response to earthquake conditions. And of course, part of the construction economy in Japan is built around the idea that like I mean, there are entire companies like that are set up to profit on this idea of knocking down a house and then rebuilding it again for a new client or a new customer.

So, I guess I’ve identified a series of hard factors here that will contribute to the the the sort of architectural narrative of strange houses, but what about the soft factors? Well, now we’re going to talk about this concept of jiko bukken. Jiko bukken, the idea of the accident property, and this culture in Japan of having to confirm the existence of a tragic event in a dwelling before selling it onwards to a new customer. So, for example, if somebody were to die in a house or a tragedy were to be committed in a house, you have to flag that and the cost and the value of the property can be dramatically cut as a result. This idea of, “Oh, I don’t want to buy a house. That house might be haunted based on something that happened in it previously.” And I mean, there’s a famous Simpsons episode entirely about this where Marge is working as a real estate agent and wants to sell this house where a murder had happened to the Flanders and she gets a, you know, guilty conscience last minute. Something like this can’t happen in Japan. You have to actually you have to you have to disclose the fact that something like that happened in a property.

And what are the consequences of that? Well, in entertainment, I mean, we’ve got an entire sort of genre of Japanese horror film built on the idea that a house is haunted by an incident that occurred in a by with a previous owner. But furthermore, I want to talk about this really interesting database called Ushimaland, which exists and is free to access, and it’s basically where you can see this is a map of Tokyo, and you can see how many properties are considered or flagged as stigmatized properties, you know, the accident property. And in each sort of district here, you can just see the amount of them that have been disclosed. And then you can go in even more depth into Tokyo and you can just see how many exist all throughout. And when you click on one of these properties, you’ll even be told specifically what has occurred. So, even here it says a woman committed suicide in room 205 in, you know, posting date. And then you can make a decision whether or not to buy that property and you’ll have all the information about it. So, then the decision’s really with you.

Now, why does this matter and why is it relevant to strange houses? We’ve identified this culture of scrap and repair, and we’ve identified this idea of jiko bukken, and Yukatsu sort of sits in between both of these with strange houses. The whole mystery here is who is the ghost architect designing these houses in which people are being killed in. And I find it really interesting and clever from Yukatsu in that he almost inverts these sort of cultural trends and actually manufactures a scenario where this ghost architect, this phantom antagonist for the novel, is actually creating and designing houses for tragic incidents to occur rather than reacting to tragic incidents that occur in different properties.

And it reminds me and really sells to me this idea that the sort of antagonist of strange houses isn’t so much a character, but a culture. Yukatsu has obviously designed a series of houses that are not designed for living, but are designed for dying. And I think there’s something really incredibly powerful about that inversion, and I’m really interested in that. And strange houses is a really good example and a lesson to architects or young students that might be watching this that every building has an author. If every building has an author, then every occupant is a reader of sorts, whether you’re an architect or not. And it’s really my way of saying I want to encourage anybody who’s watching this to study the plan of a building that they’re in. Everything is with purpose, whether it’s malicious or not, that is irrelevant, but I just think there’s a lot of value into being critical of all the architecture in which we we we we live in, in which we sort of enjoy, in which we experience.

So, if you’re sort of into murder mysteries and architecture, Strange Houses is an absolute must-read. But if you’re just an architecture nerd and you’re interested in sort of studying some plans for a bit, then I’m a big fan of it. I’m a big fan of Yukatsu. And yeah, I think this book is amazing. So, check it out. And I hope you enjoyed it.