コールドスリープから目覚めたら (キャラ文庫 う 2-10)

The protagonist Masato, a high school history teacher, contracts a new variant of an illness, and decides to go into cold sleep for 2 years to wait for the treatment to be developed. At the last minute, the cold sleep company asks him to do it for 20 years instead, saying the experiment will benefit humanity, and they’ll guarantee financial support for his future life. He doesn’t have any family or close friends. The only one who cares about him is his student Watarase, who has a teenage crush on Masato that he dismisses. So Masato figures, “what the hell, why not? I’m not doing anything important and nobody will miss me except Watarase, who’ll forget about me anyway soon enough.” 20 years later he wakes up, not knowing anything about this future world, no longer existing legally. And Watarase is there, as the company representative designated to support his adjustment.

I was hoping this book would be more sci-fi than it was. The main point of the book seemed to be working through what was going on in Masato’s head and upbringing that made him think joining a 20 year cold sleep experiment was reasonable. Lots of conversations between him and Watarase, in which Watarase (now a respectable 38 year old man with more life experience than his former teacher) tries to get Masato to open up, and make him see he had more impact than he knew. Besides the two lead characters, there are hardly any other named characters. This is a BL, and there's an adult scene near the end.

“Depressed person slowly unpacking their issues” isn’t one of the genres I enjoy. For me it got boring quickly, and it felt repetitive. There were many times I thought, “didn’t I just read this same glum sentence in the last chapter? And the one before that too?” I think I will avoid this author in the future.

On the language side, my feeling is that the grammar is more challenging than the vocabulary. The sentence structure isn’t too convoluted but the author uses a range of N2 and N1 grammar patterns, as well as some idiomatic expressions. The vocabulary is mostly ordinary, so as long as you’re familiar with the grammar patterns this is pretty easy reading.