秋の牢獄

The author has nailed the atmosphere yet again

秋の牢獄 is comprised of three short stories:

• 秋の牢獄: The titular story finds us following a young lady who one day finds she's been trapped into a never-ending loop of November 7ths.
• 神家没落: A man one evening comes across an old house, and upon the former owner passing away, finds he can't leave said house unless there's another person there with him.
• 幻は夜に成長する: We follow the history of a young woman who can create illusions at will and is being kept prisoner by a group who revere her as a god.

I enjoyed each of these stories, though perhaps some more than others. (神家没落 was my favorite.) The biggest issue most will likely come across is pacing: these stories are unhurried, introspective looks at particularly unique and isolating situations. The author has some neat ideas, and they're not fussed about getting there quickly. It's all about the journey, not the destination, and if you vibe with that you'll likely like this book.

Furigana is scattered but generally not present, and the vocabulary tends to cover a wide variety of situations due to the nature of the stories. I feel like this would be a good intermediate book for those looking to get some more pages under their belt.

Interesting short stories, but not life-changing

This book comes with three short stories, all of which are written on very interesting concepts. However, the first two short stories just failed to grab my attention, and I ended up taking long breaks while reading them. I couldn't get off the ground, really. The third short story, though, was very good. I was enrapt in it from beginning to end. If the other two stories were as pregnant with dramatic irony and misdirection and genuine curiosity as this one was, I would have given the book 5/5 on entertainment.

For language learning, it's an ok book. There's nothing particularly special about it; it's a book written for adults and doesn't shy away from literary grammar, but it also doesn't go out of its way to be difficult to understand. If anything, I have to take a couple points off here because the stories, especially the second of the three, have a large number of old household items/old nouns that I just wouldn't expect a learner to know. It may be useful to learn them, but stopping to write them down/look them up just felt like it was hindering the reading I wanted to do.

A Rollercoaster of a Read

Although I thoroughly enjoyed the first story in this volume, it ended far too soon and the following two sadly paled in comparison. That being said, they still made for an enjoyable read, filled with mystery and that same page-turning I've come to expect from this author.

I found this novel to contain a fair bit of obscure vocabulary, and I did find myself settling to skim and get the gist of some passages, rather than look every word up. For that reason, I am giving it only three stars for language learning rating. However, someone with a slightly more developed literary vocabulary would probably find this to be five stars in the same category.