Jounetsu Tairiku Trails Horror Writer Suneji Ahead of Midsummer Season
The program's close-up look at Suneji's daily life and creative process, including her view that horror's main characters are people, not ghosts, frames the writer behind the boom's biggest hit as a subject of mainstream documentary interest.
Reporting from 1 source: KAI-YOU.
TBS's documentary program Jounetsu Tairiku will feature horror writer Suneji, who became a symbol of the recent horror boom after her debut web novel, About a Certain Place in the Kinki Region, surpassed 22 million page views and later sold over 1 million copies as a book. The show followed her since May, capturing her daily life and work during the busy midsummer horror season. It airs August 30 at 23:10 on MBS/TBS, with streaming on TVer.
The documentary follows Suneji through meetings with publishers, writing at home, and walks with her dog, finding no horror atmosphere in her routine. When staff pressed her about it, her answer pointed to her stated approach: she does not deliberately seek scary things, and she sees people, not ghosts, as horror's true main characters.
The program has tracked her since May, as her schedule filled ahead of the horror season. Her debut work, About a Certain Place in the Kinki Region, used mockumentary techniques and became a film by director Koji Shiraishi in August 2025, recording 1.56 billion yen at the box office. Her later works include About a Pilgrimage to Defiled Sacred Sites, A Survey About Mouths, and Eyes, with a film adaptation of A Survey About Mouths directed by Takashi Shimizu due in July 2026.
Synthesized by Yomimono from the 1 cited source below, including Japanese-language reporting where cited, then editorially reviewed before publishing.