黒い森の記憶

Content warnings: murder, reference to sexual assault

Overall one of 赤川次郎's better books. The mystery is intriguing, the tension is held tight, and the ending is rapid fire without a long wrap up. The ending was actually a little bit too rapid fire, but I enjoyed it immensely anyways due to the aforementioned long tension.

This is harder than most other books I've read by the same author. I wouldn't call it a particularly difficult book, but compared to his other works it uses a wider range of vocabulary and expressions and leans less on dialogue scenes.

I really wish this had been made into a movie.

An entertaining mystery, as can be reliably expected from Akagawa, but nothing more.

The book was fun to read and kept me guessing to the end. There was a nice gradual build-up of suspense that almost felt like horror at times, which was, surprisingly, interspersed with some slapstick elements here and there.

That's also my criticism of the book. It felt unbalanced and even undecided in terms of genre. The mix of humour and horror-ish tension didn't quite work for me. The beginning of the chapters was very atmospheric and heavy on descriptions, then these descriptions led nowhere. The plot develops slowly for most of the book, and so much time is spent on describing mundane everyday tasks, then the final part is bursting with new information that you have barely time to process before the next twist. It almost felt like several books in one, with the author undecided on the way he wants to tell his story.

The language difficulty is also uneven. The beginning of the book feels very dense, but it soon settles into much more everyday language. There may be less dialogue than the average Akagawa book, but the vocabulary is mostly slice-of-life, as we watch the protagonist go about his daily life in his isolated wooden cabin by the forest.