Specs
Reviews
(4.27/5)A great thriller/mystery that keeps you on edge
I really enjoyed the story. It had me literally looking on Google Maps to try and find possible locations that they were talking about in 近畿。 The writing style was different and featured interviews and tape recording interviews with people of various experiences with the spirits that appear in the story. Although the story started out fairly scary and eerie, it slowly turned into more of a mystery and thriller. It was so fun trying to piece together the mystery. The language learning aspect of it was also good. My print copy of the book featured fuigana on many of the lesser-known more difficult words, so look ups were easier.
I would say this is N1 level book. I would rate 9/10.
Okay this is another horror book that's trending on social media like 変な家 which was enjoyable so I picked this up without knowing much about it.
It's basically a collection of short stories in different formats (interviews, letters, 2chan threads, etc) from different people, chronicling various strange events that a reporter has filed together as being connected to a certain place in the Kinki region.
On their own, the stories aren't terribly scary, but the amount and variety of them gradually connecting is fascinating. The atmosphere was very eerie and I was curious how everything would come together. I actually got unnerved reading this at night but at the same time couldn't stop.
For language learning this was a mixed bag. There is a large variety of formats to the stories and some of them have very different styles. For most stories though, I could follow along without much problem and it was good first-person narrative reading practice. Some other stories were downright incomprehensible to me as a learner (due to quirks of speech and stuff like that).
Overall I would recommend this if you're okay with more slow-burn, creepy kind of novels, and you don't mind that the style of writing is going to be changing constantly. As a bonus, the story is technically free to read on kakuyomu, and there's people reading it out loud on Youtube that you can use as a pseudo audiobook.
Very cool semi scary, fairly creepy, mosaic-style novel made of a collection of interviews, stories, reports, audio transcriptions, chat sessions and the like, following a string of mysterious encounters in the 近畿 region. Not a horror fan myself, but this was a really interesting look into the world of 妖怪, 幽霊 and UWA, and the spread of their associated tales and urban legends across time and through the collective mind.
For me this was more profound and interesting than the 変な家 series (which I also enjoyed) at the cost of some more complexity in the storytelling and writing.
The writing style varies significantly depending on the type of documents, from the somewhat formal to the 2chan style slang or 関西弁, but most of it is fairly standard. Vocab and grammar are diverse enough to make it a bit challenging to less experienced readers. This also makes it an interesting choice to gently work on one’s weaknesses.