世にも奇妙な商品カタログ 1 インスタント死神・友だちクジ他

I love the concept of this book. A collection of short stories about (mostly) ordinary people discovering weird, magical items, with a dark twist? Sign me up!

Unfortunately, this book was a mixed bag for me due to three reasons:

• Two of the twists were rather lackluster, with one of them feeling more like a joke than an actual twist.
• In some of the stories, there are passages which were rather boring with barely anything interesting happening. If you're faster at reading than me, this might be less of an issue.
• My favourite part in books is usually characters interacting and talking to each other. This book has almost none of that. The stories mostly consist of the protagonist thinking and talking to themselves, and interacting with the world and the Catalog item in question.

It wasn't all bad though. The other twists were great, I liked most of the Catalog items, and in the end, I enjoyed most of the stories.

Here are my individual ratings:

• Instant shinigami 「インスタント死神」3/5
• Tomodachi Kuji 「友達クジ」1/5
• Shokei set「処刑セット」3/5
• Fuyu shika kaenai Ice-cream「冬しか買えないアイスクリーム」 4/5
• ??? kingyo (Red)「？？金魚（赤）」 4/5
• Kioku Shoukyou Button 「記憶消去ボタン 」3.5/5
• Epilogue 「エピローグ 」5/5

Most of the grammar was N4/N3, with a few N2 and one or two N1 grammar points. My vocab isn't great, so that's what I had most trouble with. There were barely any sentences I couldn't figure out with the usual tools (Yomichan, ichi.moe, and sometimes DeepL to get a hint on how to parse a particularly challenging one).

If you like the premise of the book, and are okay spending most of your time with just one character in each story, this is a book you might want to read!

As for me - for now, I won't continue the series, but I'm thinking of doing that once reading books at this level is easier for me. The later half of the book was pretty nice, and I think I wouldn't have minded the less eventful parts so much if I wouldn't have to invest so much time and effort into them.