The Girl from the Well by Rin Chupeco

Genre:  YA Ghost Story

Rin Chupeco's website

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Description (taken from Goodreads):

You may think me biased, being murdered myself. But my state of being has nothing to do with the curiosity toward my own species, if we can be called such. We do not go gentle, as your poet encourages, into that good night.

A dead girl walks the streets.

She hunts murderers. Child killers, much like the man who threw her body down a well three hundred years ago.

And when a strange boy bearing stranger tattoos moves into the neighborhood so, she discovers, does something else. And soon both will be drawn into the world of eerie doll rituals and dark Shinto exorcisms that will take them from American suburbia to the remote valleys and shrines of Aomori, Japan.

Because the boy has a terrifying secret - one that would just kill to get out.

We have a corporeal girl looking for vengeance.  This is our narrator and who we will follow throughout this tale.  She's a girl obsessed with numbers and filling a need that can only be filled by spilling blood.  But when a boy catches her attention, she'll put her vengeance on hold to protect him.  For he bears a curiosity that we're dying to figure out.

Tark has recently moved to Applegate where his cousin, Callie, lives.  There's been plenty of strange happenings with him, and he's trying to put his past behind him.  But as Callie tries to encourage her cousin, she notices something quite peculiar following him around.  And when she realizes it's a ghost that's following him, she's determined to keep her from hurting Tark.  So begins their journey into the realm of spirits and Japanese folklore.

For being a ghost story told from a dead girl with OCD (the numbers!), I thought this was a good read.  I was captivated pretty early on and kept going with the flow.  I saw so many correlations to those Japanese scary movies that I watched as a teen, and I think it was cool to read about something instead of watching it.  My imagination went wild.  But in the end, it's still a ghost story with a happy ending (how'd that happen?).

If you're not one strictly into Japanese folklore and are looking for a ghost story, I think you'll enjoy it.  It's a fun story that gives an introduction to a well-known ghost story (just like adaptations of fairy tales but it's ghosts here).