What are my kids doing when I’m not looking right at them? Why am I so lonely? That one coworker drinks and says really inappropriate shit. My boss keeps putting me in dangerous situations. Could I have changed my whole life if one thing had been different? How can I balance my employers’ demands with my employees’ needs? WTF is that ungodly noise coming from next door?

People sometimes find Japanese movies difficult to parse because you have to dig underneath the region-specific folklore of an insulated society, but the movies all exploit our everyday concerns when you boil them down. I’m not interested in treating that unfamiliarity as evidence that Japan is weird, or pretending I can explain a whole culture. I’m interested in the stories themselves, and in the ordinary human anxieties hiding underneath all that supernatural business.

I realized today I’ve done seven J-Horror essays, totaling about an hour, and I’ve love it you’d give some of them a listen.