[DeepL Translation - needs review] Volume 1 Introduction: Iori Senzoku, a beautiful young tea ceremony master, is an alien being with the DNA of a yokai. However, because of his lucid mind and mysterious powers, he is relied upon by the police to get involved in a yokai-related case. The tea ceremony family detective makes a strong appearance.
(Translator: DeepL)
Some old-fashioned police work with supernatural suspects
(Note for those drawn in by the "Horror" label on the book cover: this is not a horror book, not even close; this first book at least was just a regular murder mystery with a supernatural twist.)
Almost a decade prior, people with non-human DNA in Japan were discovered. Deemed 妖人 (ようじん), these people look like people, but often have special characteristics, such as being unusually good swimmers, being stronger and faster than the average man, or just getting an unusual amount of enjoyment out of cleaning adzuki beans. Forced to register their status with the government and losing some rights in society, these people are often feared, and an anti-妖人 taskforce, Y対, is set up to investigate and prosecute 妖人 crimes. Our story begins with two detectives from Y対 investigating the death of a young woman found emaciated in the mountains, nothing but diet food in her stomach. They request help in the form of the tea master of 妖奇庵, a crabby 妖人 extremely knowledgeable about 妖人 affairs, as they try to get to the bottom of the mystery.
I thought this book was all right; the author spent more time than they probably necessarily needed to setting up the world and trying to drive home to the reader/airheaded younger detective that 妖人 are not 妖怪, as well as having 妖奇庵's tea master just be unnecessarily argumentative. A group of young women central to the narrative were also fairly one-note, most of them obsessed with losing weight and being catty and petty to their friends. I kind of felt like there might've been a low-key thread of misogyny through all this, but it could have just been me overthinking things; I feel like I would need to read another book or two to see if it's a theme the author really harps on. The mystery itself didn't really feel like anything special, and I'd like to see what the author could really do with the setting in future books.
I did generally enjoy the book's setup and world, though: crime-solving in a world with supernatural beings is always a fun setup, even if the powers we see here aren't necessarily flashy. I think I'm likely to pick up book two somewhere down the line if I just need a casual read, and see how the author develops the world they're building.
I listened to the audiobook while I read for this, and this has to be one of the slowest audiobooks I've listened to yet. The narrator takes a noticeable pause in between every sentence and within every sentence if there's a line of dialogue embedded, and it was the first audiobook I sped up for the entire duration. I personally set the speed to 1.10x, and aside from the occasional spot where the narrator reading at a normal speed was noticeably sped up, the increased speed made the whole listening experience much more bearable.
Difficulty-wise, I did not find this book notably difficult for a low L30 book. Specialized vocab includes some police vocab and tea ceremony vocab, but otherwise felt pretty normal for the day-to-day. There was some non-standard kanji usage (notably 嗤う for 笑う), but nothing incredibly puzzling, and I think any pop-ups of that generally had furigana at least the first time it appeared. Nothing special about grammar that I remember noticing.