Volume 1 Introduction: “Hey, can you tell me about your dream?” It has been 10 years since the emergence of “insects” that feed on people's dreams and give their hosts supernatural powers. Daisuke Yakuya meets a girl named Shika on the train on his way to school, and they are strongly attracted to each other. However, Shika is a fugitive from a top-secret government facility that houses “insect possessors“. The Special Environment Protection Secretariat orders the best agent and the most powerfu...
I started off with a really good feeling about this, but that evaporated pretty quickly. It had a lot of interesting elements to it, a lot of ambition, and a lot of potential, but the author was just not skilled enough to pull it off. In particular, I feel there's a really weird disconnect thematically - one of the protagonists doing awful things, while not being portrayed as an awful person, and that not really being examined in any way.
Spoilers because I want to have a bit of a rant:
In the first chapter he's introduced, かっこう effectively murders a child. Killing her insect completely destroys her personality and free will, and as far as he knows this is permanent. At no point in the book does this weigh on him at all. Now, if he were just meant to be an uncomplicatedly evil character maybe that would be fine, it it seems like I'm supposed to care about the other stuff that he has going on? His motivations are never really explained - or they somewhat are, but in no way do they feel sufficient to justify his actions And also, what the hell at the end? He/his organisation push 梨奈 into a situation where she's almost certain to lose control and die. His thought on this is that if only he'd killed her insect she wouldn't have died - just ignoring that a) he didn't have to fight her at all, and b) killing the insect effectively kills her anyway, as above. He basically straight-up murders his classmate, and it's treated like some inevitable tragedy. There are no repercussions or consequences, and no self-reflection. My overall takeaway is that this guy is an absolute piece of shit, but I don't think the author agrees and portrays him sympathetically, despite him having done absolutely nothing to deserve that.
Anyway, there are good elements, but as a whole I don't think it is a good story.
Difficulty-wise, I found it very easy. It's simply written, and there's nothing in the way of dense descriptions or explanations, and very little special vocabulary.