[DeepL Translation - needs review] Volume 1 Introduction: One day, Natsuki Amakusa, a young hope in the Metropolitan Police Department, meets a mysterious high school student, Yuya Shikki, and is intrigued by him. While passing by, Yuya easily guessed the murderer in a complicated murder case. How on earth did he know who the murderer was? The two meet again when an incident occurs at Shikki's high school. ......
A highly anticipated new work by Seimaru Amagi, the hit maker of "Kindaichi Sho...
A fairly typical detective story so far. The first volume is three chapters long, with the first two chapters being the longest. The third chapter sets up the next murder mystery, but the volume ends before we get into the meat of it.
The art is pleasant with strong, clear lines, so it's easy to see what's going on in each panel.
Full furigana. The grammar was easy, but some sections have pretty high text density and long sentences due to the nature of explaining alibis, when things occurred, the nature of the murder, etc. A lot of niche vocabulary specific to detective stories, but if you've read a lot of them, you should have no difficulty with this at all. This is the first one I dipped my toes into in Japanese, so the vocabulary was my biggest hurdle.
The story is also set in Kyoto, so there's some minor dialect differences at some points, and one of the main characters has a housekeeper who speaks very formally. However, I didn't have any trouble understanding her.
I had a hard time with the difficulty ratings for this one. On the one hand, the grammar is fairly easy and there's very little slang and contractions to figure out. However, the text density in some places made it a mental workout, especially since I was unfamiliar with the vocabulary and had to look up a lot of words in order to understand what was going on. Overall, I'd put the grammar difficulty at around level 19-20, but the genre difficulty a few levels higher.
The story hasn't really grabbed me so far, but it hasn't lost me either. I feel like it might be the case that the first volume is more for meeting our main characters, getting a sense of who they are in in the setting, and giving little tidbits about a mystery subplot regarding one of the leads. I expect the second volume to be more intriguing, but we'll see.