Pathway to Japanese Literature

Discover Japan's stories—across time, across language.

Ghost TowerAuthor: Kuroiwa Ruikō

Original Title	幽霊塔
Author	黒岩涙香
Genre	Detective & Mystery
Author Type	Male Author
Summary	In a secluded estate shrouded in legend, an aging former attorney general purchases the infamous Ghost Tower—a decaying mansion entwined with his family’s name and whispered tales of spectral hauntings. His nephew, tasked with overseeing the acquisition, discovers more than crumbling walls: a labyrinth of secrets lies within the tower’s clockwork heart, said to guard an extraordinary treasure sealed by ancestral ingenuity. During an inspection, he encounters Matsutani Shūko, a woman of ethereal beauty and unsettling knowledge of the tower’s mechanisms, who moves through its shadowed halls like a phantom herself. As their paths intertwine, long-buried tragedies resurface—a murdered caretaker, a condemned foster daughter, and a web of deceit spanning decades. Yet Shūko’s true motives remain veiled, her cryptic warnings and enigmatic presence hinting at a perilous quest tied to the tower’s cursed legacy. Amid forged telegrams, vanished companions, and a lurking menace that defies reason, the nephew is drawn into a mystery where every revelation deepens the darkness—and where the line between the living and the dead blurs beneath the clock’s relentless gaze.