Read The Grave Keeper | グレイブキーパー

PREVIOUSLY TITLED "ARE"

a previous-Tapas featured novel

NOTICE: CHAPTERS WITH THUMBNAIL THAT IS STILL TITLED "ARE" MEANS IT IS NOT REBOOTED AND SHOULD NOT BE READ.

Book 1 | Shinwa Tales Anthology

EPIGRAPH

❝Death steals everything except our stories.❞ —Jim Harrison, Goodbye Days by Jeff Zentner

DETAILS

Genres: Paranormal, Mystery/Thriller, Suspense, Angst

Rating: K

Status: Rebooting, Updating

Update Schedule: TBA

Length: 14 (plus Prologue and Epilogue)

Reading Time: 4-7 minutes/chapter

COMPLETE SUMMARY | MAY CONTAINS SPOILERS

Shinwa is a small Northern town, religious, reserved and dark, with a rich history of collied East and West tales. Shinwa is famous for many things: its lumberjack industry, its magic, its crime rates, its controversial crimes and its living myths. Myths, particularly, of the Death Goddess.

Whenever someone dies, a strange woman appears in front of their graves, lurking at the very back of the mourning crowd, listening quietly to the Father's prayer for the lost soul. Dressing in a black fleece cloak and wearing a ram skull on her head, she's the omen of death and afterlife guidance, treated like a goddess. People throws paper money and garlands of wilted flowers at her and watches as the objects disappear under the trawl of her cloak.

Once the funeral ceremony is done, she's gone. Vanished behind the stone marks.

They called her the Grave Keeper, the Weird Sister — the Forgotten One.

Kettei Fushigina believed none of the God and magic shit. Kettei was a failed-college loser, an aspiring-cop, a peculiar sore child of the street. As a young orphan, raised by his brother, Kyushi, after his parents got into a car accident, Kettei wore his sardonic mask with bitter pride, hardened from days of constant starvation, coldness and abandoned.

Constantly trying and failing to live up to his big brother Kyushi's shadow, Kettei turned to alcohol, chain-smoking and gambling as an escape. Kettei and Kyushi relationship strained with much more frequent physical fights as he became more hell-bent on destroying himself, along with expectation. Hateru's meagre intern cheques cannot fend off the debt collectors forever.

If anybody asks him, Kettei'd say all is well.

That was, until one day, returning from a heavy round of drinking, Kettei found his brother hanging from the ceiling.

Kyushi committed suicide. Leaving Kettei behind to deal with his own mess.

Kettei couldn't.

So he did the only reasonable thing: he hunted down the Forgotten One and bargained Kyushi's life in exchange for his own.

Instead, the Death Goddess teaches him how to live again.