가면산장 살인사건

I thought this was a really fun read! While it’s definitely more focused on the characters discussing the mystery and figuring out the truth of the matter, I was very invested in getting to the ending and liked the ‘tense’ atmosphere.

I read this in like 3 days haha. It was a good level for me, the sentences were shorter and used simple grammar imo. Not very much descriptive language, it was more dialogue and telling what is happening action wise. The vocab that came up seemed a little more high level? I did use the built in dictionary to click and translate easily while reading, and learned a lot of higher level synonyms for words I knew. Maybe it’s because it’s translated from Japanese…? But it was a good reading experience.

I was really confused on the characters until about halfway through the book. It might be because I’m not used to Japanese names, but they also referred to characters by only their first, or only their surname. So I made a cheat sheet. I’ll write it here in case it helps someone, all these characters are introduced really early (I left out some characters that appear later on bc those don’t get mixed up easily). If not, feel free to ignore this haha. There may be spelling mistakes…

• 모리사키 도모미
• 모리사키 도시아키 (도모미의 오빠)
• 모리사키 노부히코 (도모미의 아버지)
• 모리사키 아쓰코 (도모미의 어머니)
• 가시마 다카유키 (도모미의 약혼자) Main character
• 시노 유키에 (도모미의 사촌)
• 기도 노부오 (주치의 family doctor)
• 시모조 레이코 (노부히코의 비서)
• 아가와 게이코 (도모미의 친구)