A new trailer for the live-action adaption of the popular BL manga series The Night Beyond the Tricornered Window has been released. The film features a stellar cast of actors, all of whom have had great track records with live-action adaptations of manga series. The film was originally intended to coincide with Halloween on October 30, but due to COVID-19 has been delayed to January 22.
The Night Beyond the Tricornered Window is a horror-themed BL manga series by Tomoko Yamashita, currently being serialized in the BL magazine Magazine BExBOY. The story follows a timid bookstore clerk, Kosuke Mikado (played by Jun Shison in the movie), who has the ability to see all kinds of supernatural entities; and a paranormal detective with zero social skills, Rihito Hiyakawa (played by Masaki Okada), who recruits Kosuke to help him work various cases involving supernatural entities.
In true to BL fashion, the main focus of the series is on the growing relationship between Kosuke and Rihito. Kosuke is terrified of ghosts and other supernatural entities. When he takes off his glasses, the only things he can still see clearly are ghosts, so he almost never takes off his glasses. In contrast, Rihito is not scared of anything and takes a very nonchalant attitude to almost everything he encounters. When Kosuke is with Rihito, his fears are subsided as they share senses and exorcise ghosts together.
According to Rihito’s explanation, when two psychics share senses via touch, their souls intersect. The feeling is very much like having sex. The series constantly uses very suggestive dialogue such as, “I’m going to enter you,” “Feel me inside of you,” and other such innuendoes. Keen BL fans will surely get a great deal of enjoyment out of such blatant teases.
As their relationship grows, Kosuke learns to trust Rihito more while growing more independent emotionally, and Rihito slowly opens up to Kosuke about his past. Rihito constantly displays a strong sense of possessiveness towards Kosuke, he gets very jealous whenever other psychics try to get close to Kosuke, and often claims that Kosuke belongs to him. Their tension is so obvious that many around them assume they are already a couple, which Kosuke vehemently denies, but their relationship is definitely becoming spiritually and physically more entangled as the series progresses.
Despite all the BL elements, the series is still a captivating read for non-BL readers. Tomoko Yamashita is particularly good at telling stories of complex relationships without explicit sex scenes. The Night Beyond the Tricornered Window can be read either as a BL manga, a horror/mystery manga or both. It's structured just like any traditional buddy cop story: two protagonists with opposite personalities team up to solve different cases. There's also an overarching narrative involving an evil antagonist with similar psychic powers going around cursing different people, leading to a lot of mayhem. This larger narrative adds a great deal of mystery and danger to the overall plot.
The series' style of horror is more psychological. Unlike, say, the hyper-grotesque works of Junji Ito, Yamashita has a simplistic art style and tries to avoid shocking or gory imagery. Her style of horror is a type that finds the terrifying within everyday life: the fear of being stared at by random strangers on the street, the feeling of seeing someone for the first time when you’ve known them for a long time, the uncanniness of hearing sounds in an empty room. Her ghostly creatures are not drawn grotesquely like something from Jujutsu Kaisen. They usually look like humans, but just slightly off in one way or another, giving off eerie uncanny valley vibes.
The true scare comes when you start thinking about the potential horror lurking behind the mundane occurrences that almost everyone has encountered at some point in their lives. What's even scarier is these occurrences often come without warning or reason. Of course, there are also plenty of deaths and murder mysteries within the story, but even death scenes are not presented jarringly or gruesomely, but disturbingly matter-of-fact.
Like Yamashita’s other works, the stories in The Night Beyond the Tricornered Window often contain subtle commentaries about serious social issues, such as isolation in modern life, the power of religion, the effect of bullying, and so on. However, they're never presented as preachy or even obvious. Readers need to look hard for these themes, but they lurk everywhere, just like the ghostly creatures in the stories.
Yamashita’s seamless blending of tropes from BL with atmospheric horror and a compelling mystery makes The Night Beyond the Tricornered Window a great entryway into BL manga even for non-BL fans. It can also appeal to BL fans who might not usually pick up a horror manga.