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Content warnings: Torture-ish scenes. Suicide and murder touched on lightly. Also if bugs freak you out probably stay away from this book.
Set in a police academy, we watch several short, lightly interconnected stories unfold as individual students face challenges and reveal their pasts. Events kick off with the replacement of a teacher by a man who conveniently seems just stellar at reading into peoples’ behavior and setting up the themes we’re intended to examine. Heavy handed use of symbolism, heavy handed moral story telling. It’d make for a decent drama to watch over dinner, but it just didn’t really draw me in as a book. I got through it by reading along with the audiobook at ever increasing speeds.
Vocab spread is wider than average, but not crazy. Decent amount of furigana and some of the more unusual words are directly explained in the text (like 牢問). Most of the difficulty in my grading this is for the vocab since the stories bounce around in theme which introduces new types of vocabulary, and also due to it being set in a police academy there are some less common legal words thrown in.
Grammar wise there are some more literary turns of phrase, but mostly it’s straight forward.