MorriganBlackwood

When photographer Yuriko Hoshino receives a mysterious invitation to a secluded mountain village, she expects a strange job. She doesn’t expect a man who knows her name, her face, and a childhood she cannot remember.

Maboroshi is beautiful, ageless, and unsettlingly tender. He poses the dead like lovers, preserving them in haunting, intimate portraits. His studio is a house of velvet silence and covered mirrors. And in its halls, Yuriko begins to find photographs of herself—posed beside corpses.

As fainting spells stir buried memories, Yuriko’s grip on truth begins to slip. Who is she really? What did she promise long ago beneath a white tree? And why does part of her long to surrender to Maboroshi’s quiet, possessive hands?

But when Daichi, a gentle scholar from her past, reappears with questions and feelings she thought buried, Yuriko is forced to choose: between love and longing, freedom and fixation, forgetting… and being remembered forever.

In this hypnotic, sensual horror romance, death is not the end—only the final pose.

Photographs for the Dead

Yuriko returned to her room in silence, the camera still clutched loosely in one hand. The sensation of Maboroshi's arms around her lingered—an echo more than a memory, like an aftertaste of something sweet and forbidden.

She left the camera on her desk and sat by the window. Outside, the garden lay hushed under the thick weight of fog. No breeze. No birds. Only the stillness of a place that did not recognize the urgency of time.

She didn't remember falling asleep.

But when she opened her eyes again, the sun had shifted, and the light through the curtains was thick with amber.

They wore long black gowns and veils so sheer they moved like smoke. Their bodies glided as if not touching the floor, their hands folded at their waists, perfectly synchronized.

They did not turn, did not acknowledge her.

She slowed—just a breath—and leaned in slightly.

"Don't let him pose you."

And then she was gone, her footsteps fading with the other two, swallowed by the corridor's curve.

Only the pulse in her ears remained, loud and singular.

She turned back to her room, but the mirror from earlier now stood beside her door.

Her reflection blinked when she did.

Later, in the studio's side chamber, Maboroshi met her with two glasses of dark tea.

"Your hands are steadier," he said.

She didn't take the glass. "There were women in the hall," she said. "Three. In black."

He smiled faintly. "Yes. Assistants. They help with dressing. Veiling. Soft touches."

"They tend to forget their silence around you."

"No." He paused, offering the tea again. "They used to watch us, too."

She didn't ask what used to meant.

The Girls In Black