Hotel Tsubaki

Kenji Arata manages a love hotel in a neon-soaked corner of Tokyo, still hollowed out fourteen months after his wife's death. Then Shion starts on the overnight desk — beautiful, unsettling, impossible to look away from — and for the first time since his wife died, Kenji feels alive again.He tells himself the things he sees are tricks of bad light. A shine in her eyes that shouldn't be there. A way of moving that isn't quite human. He tells himself this even after the first body.Hotel Tsubaki is a slow-burn horror novel about grief, complicity, and the stories we tell ourselves to keep the people we love — even when we already know, somewhere past denial, exactly what they are.