マリアビートル

Can’t say I loved it. There’s a certain character who the author really wanted to focus on who was interesting enough to be a unique addition to the zany cast, but not nearly as interesting as the author seemed to think. It feels like Isaka is trying to explore some sort of moral philosophy through this character, but the philosophical “payoff” at the end just feels kind of trite.

Some have complained about tonal inconsistency, but that doesn’t inherently bother me. I think the disconnect comes from the fact that the characters’ motivations feel entirely disjointed and don’t feed into any coherent theme. The teenage sociopath trying to understand morality and the single father fighting alcoholism might be interesting character concepts in their own right, but setting the former up as a foil to the latter provides almost no additional value. Perhaps it would have been more interesting if other characters represented competing moral philosophies, but as it stands each character just has their own backstory and personality quirks that they mostly work through on their own.

There were moments that were genuinely funny and characters that I found amusing or even grew to care about. I can imagine a stripped down version or a rebalanced version of this book where these characters really get their chance to shine, but as it stands by the time we got about halfway through I had mostly lost interest. Reading felt more like studying and I wanted to get through it so I had more time to read other things.

I’ve seen bits and pieces of the movie and it seemed enjoyable and very different, so I’m excited to watch that again and compare.

Very mediocre, and very uneven.

A shinkansen full of shady characters working at cross purposes - it certainly sounds like a fun premise. I was expecting a fun, fast-paced thriller full of amusing shenanigans and mindless violence - basically some good honest light entertainment. And there was some of that too, to be fair. It wasn't especially fast-paced, but there was some action and lots of amusingly out of place dialogue (which was fun in the beginning but got repetitive very soon).

My problem with the book was that it t also tried (and failed) to be deep. With all characters being two-dimensional caricatures, the long diversions on ethics, human nature and evil, or on one particular character's sad past, were just tedious and annoying, not deep and meaningful as the author probably intended. I know this is a popular author with several books under his belt, but to me these diversions (or were they the main theme of the book after all?) felt incongruous at best, and amateur hour at worst. Much like a certain character of this very book, I felt that major parts of this book were brimming with the misplaced over-confidence of someone who still has a lot of learning and growing up to do.

great premise, but the book the author wanted to write wasn't the one I wanted to read

The premise for this book is great -- a lot of hired killers end up on the same shinkansen. I was expecting a light hearted action story, with everyone getting in each others' way, accidentally foiling plans, stealing items back and forth from each other, and so on. Parts of this book are like that (and those parts are great!), but unfortunately what the author really wanted to write about was the most unpleasant character in the book, in a much more serious tone. That character is a teenage psychopath who loves to psychologically manipulate everybody around him and thinks he's super clever, and the book spends way too much time looking at things from his point of view, and he turns up a lot in the other parts as well. I absolutely hated those sections and only got through them by treating them as a speed reading exercise.

I think the good parts of this book are probably four star worthy, but the bad parts are one star level; plus I'm disappointed that the author wasted the opportunity of the premise, so overall I rated it at two stars.