Reviews
(3.89/5)Thematic warnings: murder, suicide
Basic plot: 八雲, a surly and unsociable college student, can see dead people with his red eye. 晴香 has an amazing knack for getting into situations that involve dead people and which are convenient little mysteries to solve.
Based on the character tropes and writing style I suspect this is aimed at high school students (or thereabouts).
I enjoyed this book a lot, albeit in a somewhat mindless way. If you already have the basic vocab of novels down, you will have fairly little to look up. The descriptive words are slightly wider of vocab than other similarly easy ‘feeling’ novels, though, so I am taking that into account.
There is minimal furigana in this book.
It’s written in a generally straight forward manner, nothing particularly flowery. However, if you’re not used to stereotypical ‘cop speak’ you might have trouble with one character’s dialogue.
There are a few different cases within this first volume, all neatly contained without a ton of overlap. You could put this down after one case and pick up the next one months later and not feel you’ve lost important context.
Overall I enjoyed it and will probably read some of the other volumes at some point.
Approachable mind-off reading
The only other novel around this level that I've read is the Japanese translation of Harry Potter and this book was much easier than that. I found the grammar to be pretty straightforward, and there was a lot of repetition in the vocabulary and turns of phrase that were used.
The story is entertaining and involves ghosts, so I had fun! The characters are fairly predictable (will 春香 ever get past 八雲's dismissive exterior to see his heart of gold??) but if you don't mind that it's an excellent beginner novel read.