52ヘルツのクジラたち

A bit tough to read in multiple ways

The core of this story is about a woman who was abused as a child, and had some other traumatic experiences during young adulthood. And how she finds some salvation as an adult, after moving to a new town and meeting a abused child there.

This can be tough to read about! At times I wanted to just give up and go read something else, because descriptions of people being awful and abusive to each other are just not fun! If I'd researched this book more thoroughly ahead of time, I would not have picked it to read. So, let this serve as a warning to others.

From a language-learning perspective, I think it's reasonable, with a few drawbacks. The vocabulary was on-level, with plenty of new words to mine and less-frequently-encountered words to practice recalling. The sentence structures and grammar were nothing too complicated; I was able to follow most everything. However:

• Many non-main characters, especially the older ones, speak in nonstandard dialects with tricky conjugations and unusual colloquial sentence constructions. Sometimes I just had to give up and throw the entire sentence into Google Translate for such characters.

• There are a lot of proper names introduced in the novel, including a very large family tree with multiple families of in-laws for the abused child, and three separate given names for an important person from the main character's past. Most of these characters do not show up very much (or sometimes are just talked about and never appear), so it's difficult to associate the kanji of their name with a specific mental image. I'd suggest taking copious notes every time a name shows up and updating them as you learn more about the character, because you never know when some random set of unreadable kanji is actually referencing a character from 60 pages ago.

Lives up to the popularity

The story flows really well constantly keeping you interested, and the writing style is consistently descriptive while also being easy to follow. Also a sense of mystery as it switches between present day and past flashbacks as you try to figure out what happened.

New Favourite Japanese Novel

This novel completely blew me away. The story isn't anything ground breaking, but it's been a long time since I read a Japanese novel so well written that I just couldn't put down.