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A mystery with a touch of horror and a twist
Content Warning: This book portray some disturbing themes like suicide, animal cruelty and pedophilia and I wouldn't consider it a light reading due to its content.
Entertainment - Michio, an elementary school student, on a welfare check on S, one of his classmate, discovers S's body hanging in his house. In distress he runs back to inform the school about the occurrence. The police is called and upon its arrival no body is found. The mystery has now increased. Why S hanged himself? How and why the body disappeared? Who is also involved in this mystery? Michio joined by his sister decides to find the truth himself and help S's mother to recover his son's body. That is the main plot involved in this book (no spoiler was mentioned here), a thriller with a hint of horror.
Language Learning - When I started to read this novel, I was level 40 in Wanikani with around 4.100 words learnt, had contact with all Bunpro N3 grammar and about 21% of N2 grammar. That was my second N2 book and already the 12th novel/light novel I dove into (10 of them were aimed to children and ranged from Lvl 23 -> lvl 26 here). It took me around 50 pages to get used to a more descriptive writing style that includes longer sentences and more complex grammar. For those who have some grasp of N2 vocabulary/Kanji and Grammar this book won't represent much of a challenge. Furigana is presented in only the first occurrence of some unusual words including names. The vocabulary is slice of life with a little bit of criminal description, but nothing too elaborated and tends to repeat throughout the story.
Overall - For a language learner the book holds its value in exposure to more mature novels ind a rather simple way with a bit more description than those presented in children's books. The sentences are longer and the narrative contains some moments that occurred in the past leading to trails of thoughts. If you fit the description mentioned in the Language Learning section and would like some mystery story to sink your teeth on this could be for you. Just bear in mind that this book is around 470 pages, so its quiet a commitment compared to most light novels, but by the end of it, you'll be a lot more "fluent" in reading and the only set back might be the content of the story itself, that has some twist and turns and at some parts reaches some themes that might be disturbing for some audiences.