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

The darkroom was hidden behind a folding panel carved with falling camellias. The floor dipped slightly as Yuriko stepped inside, her boots pressing into centuries of creaking wood. The air was dense with iron and chemicals, tinged with something more organic—like breath held too long.

Red lights glowed along the ceiling. Shelves of jars, reels, bottles. The walls were lined with photographs clipped to cords—dozens, maybe hundreds. Some still wet. Some curling at the edges.

Maboroshi moved among them with quiet efficiency, a soft cloth in one hand, a camera lens in the other. He sat at a bench, brushing the glass as though grooming a living thing.

"They always look like they're about to speak," Yuriko murmured.

He glanced at her, fingers pausing. "That's the point," he said. "Death only takes the motion. It leaves the shape behind."

She approached slowly. The smell of developer wrapped around her, strangely comforting, like childhood and chemicals fused into one.

"Did you photograph them all yourself?" she asked.

He nodded. "Each one posed. Each one remembered."

His hand hovered over a portrait. A woman half-submerged in a tub of flowers, eyes open.

"No one stays," he said. "But the pose holds them. As long as it's seen."

He gestured to another print—one she hadn't noticed before. A close-up of a child's hand, resting on a velvet pillow. The detail so crisp she could see the faint shadow of a birthmark on the index finger.

His eyes didn't flinch. "I touch them so they remember they were real."

The statement made something inside her twist—not from disgust, but from recognition. She had once felt that way behind her own camera. Not documenting, not recording—but restoring.

It was old. Sepia. Two girls, standing beside a pond. Both in funeral attire. Both staring straight ahead. One of them looked almost like Yuriko.

No names. Only the number: 11.

When she looked up, Maboroshi was watching her again.

He placed something on the table between them: a small brass key.

"To a room that hasn't been opened in years," he said. "But it was once yours."

He smiled, slow and sure, as if her forgetting only confirmed the truth.

His fingers wrapped over hers, just long enough to hold the shape.

The Room That Waits