Halloween Book Club 2026

Japanese Language Book Clubs
1

Nihonhorrorween (2)
Nihonhorrorween (2)851×315 347 KB

Welcome to Nihonhorrorween!

This is a special Halloween book club run by @Zakarius and myself. We wanted to share our love of old-school horror and figured the best way would be via a book club!

This book club will run the whole month of October. We intentionally selected works that are available on Aozora so that they can be enjoyed by everyone.

Our stories and timing will be as follows. Since the first week would run long, please feel free to challenge yourself with the bonus work here, Black Cat.

Original Name Translated Name Original Author Translator Link Vocab List (Renshuu) Timing
The Pit and the Pendulum 落穴と振子 Edgar Allen Poe 佐々木直次郎 :knot: Here! October 1-10
BONUS: Black Cat 黒猫 Edgar Allen Poe 佐々木直次郎 :black_cat: tba October 1-10
外科室 The Surgical Suite 泉鏡花 - :kimono: tba October 11-17
鏡地獄 Mirror Hell 江戸川乱歩 - :mirror_ball: tba October 18-24
The Haunter of the Dark 闇をさまようもの H.P. Lovecraft The Creative CAT :black_heart: tba October 25-31
10月
月 火 水 木 金 土 日
01 :knot::black_cat: 02 :knot::black_cat: 03 :knot::black_cat: 04 :knot::black_cat:
05 :knot::black_cat: 06 :knot::black_cat: 07 :knot::black_cat: 08 :knot::black_cat: 09 :knot::black_cat: 10 :knot::black_cat: 11 :kimono:
12 :kimono: 13 :kimono: 14 :kimono: 15 :kimono: 16 :kimono: 17 :kimono: 18 :mirror_ball:
19 :mirror_ball: 20 :mirror_ball: 21 :mirror_ball: 22 :mirror_ball: 23 :mirror_ball: 24 :mirror_ball: 25 :black_heart:
26 :black_heart: 27 :black_heart: 28 :black_heart: 29 :black_heart: 30 :black_heart: 31 :black_heart:

Content Warnings
Black Cat - animal abuse, domestic violence
外科室 - medical horror

Please let us know what you think as we read! Please take care to mark any twists or reveals with spoilers. You can do so by typing out this code [spoiler]your spoiler typed out here[/spoiler] or using the option under the plus button.

2

Could I just join for one story? I’d like to try 鏡地獄 .

3

I’ll pretty surely join. I have some commitments but also 2 weeks of vacation. Perfect time for some more aozora reads. I did enjoy the aozora calendar last year as well.
Goal is at least 2/5 stories.

4

Ooooh yay im so excited for this!!! :jack_o_lantern::jack_o_lantern::jack_o_lantern:

5

Of course! There’s no wrong way to really join. Although if you want to post about it before the designated week, please use spoilers よろしく!

6

I’m down for some spooky times. I haven’t actually read any of the Poe stories or the Lovecraft one in English so this should be interesting

7

And so it begins!!

8

I thought about giving it a try but this one is above my grade. You know you are in the weeds when Latin is more comprehensible than Japanese. To be fair, Poe likes to use words like tintinnabulation so I did not stand a chance. LOL

9

Shoutout to Phantom Island by King Gizzard & The Lizard Wizard for teaching me that word (linked to appropriate timestamp, but the song is worth listening to in its entirety)

10

Wow this guy likes his big blocks of text, huh?

This is going to be a challenge for me but I’m committed :flexed_biceps: Happy October!!

11

Happy reading! I’ll work on the vocab lists

12

I decided to see if Renshuu’s parser would handle the rest of the text after I finished the first paragraph and the opening quote and amazingly, it did! However, that means there are likely some erroneous items and missed words though. I had already found some missing words in just those 2 paragraphs I did manually though. If you find any errors, please feel free to suggest fixes!

13

I finally started reading the first story 落穴と振子. I quite like it so far. I’m roughly half way through the story. The atmosphere is great (if you can say this under the circumstances our protagonist finds himself in) and it is a surprisingly smooth read, so far, given the age of the story.

Granted I had to reread the first part of the story, until the protagonist regains consciousness in his cell, since I wasn’t used to the writing style yet and some parts were a bit abstract. But now I’m totally used to the writing and think I can follow everything well.

Will probably finish the story tomorrow; the latest the day after and update with my final impressions then.

The actual text is way easier to read then the short passage at the beginning.

14

I’m nowhere near done, but I love how dramatic the narrator is lol. It’s somehow enjoyable. Idr how I felt when I first read the Pit and the Pendulum in English, but I’m glad we picked it for the book club.

next paragraph: まったくとつぜんに、

Seconding! I feel like it gets easier after the 1st or 2nd proper paragraph

15

According to my What Day is it? Mofusand book, October 7th is Poe’s deathiversary. RIP Spoopy man. It seems fitting that we unintentionally picked this week for him.