Specs
Reviews
(3/5)This book may be short but it's not easy. It's written in the stream-of-consciousness style, with long sentences, unconventional metaphors, sometimes unique onomatopoeia, extensive vocabulary, and (thankfully only a couple) lines in a combination of dialect and old-man-slur that were nearly incomprehensible to me.
It was, however, a delight. A blend of slice of life, slapstick humour, mystery and even horror (in the atmosphere of increasing unease and doubt it creates), it effortlessly straddles the line between reality and delusion, and even sometimes blurs the boundaries of time itself. The world we see through the protagonist's eyes may be a strange one, but her observations and thought processes are often surprisingly familiar.
Don't expect clearcut answers or anything, this is a book that creates more questions than it answers. But if felt intriguing up to the last minute, and left me thinking about it long after I finished reading.
The worst thing I've read in Japanese yet!
Extremely repetitive, if you want to read someone panicking every time they go outside because they see a person that unsettles them, and then they ping pong in their head for two pages between thinking something and thinking the polar opposite, this book will certainly fulfill that. It pretty much coasts on its 50+ character sentence length to substitute these same-y rants in place of having ideas. It's neat enough for the first few chapters until it's clear that's the only trick it's got. Wow I wonder if the person she saw this time wasn't there. Manages to somehow be intolerably indulgent and several times as long as it should at only 128 pages.
Works as a test of your comprehension of very long sentences and some obscure kanji for sure, if that's what you want. It all feels very "extra," obfuscating and self-satisfied in a way that I can only describe as the manifestation of what anti-art people would caricature surreal literature as. Sure I can read themes into it all day but when you make it this vague and wandering it feels like analysis bait. I'm the one doing all the work here, but the time spent was too unpleasant and dull to be worth that work.