怪盗探偵山猫

Yamaneko is a thief who robs people of ill-gotten gains while exposing their misdeeds. He always leaves a notice identifying himself, and robs by stealth, rather than violence. However, one day the chief of a failing publishing company is found strangled dead in what appears to be a robbery gone wrong, with Yamaneko’s signature notice left at the scene. Now Yamaneko is wanted on suspicion of murder. Katsumura, a young reporter who was a protégé of the victim, is on a personal and professional mission to find out the story. Kirishima Sakura, a young female detective, has been assigned to work with the hardboiled inspector Sekimoto who has been pursuing Yamaneko for years. And what about Yamaneko himself?

This is a page-turner. It’s the kind of book you pick up in an airport bookstore and plow through, even if you’re not normally a big reader. Of course, it’s not quite that simple if you’re reading it as a language student, but this has a Tsubasa Bunko version to help. There are few opportunities to read a full-furigana book written for a general audience, with adult characters in the modern adult world, and the vocabulary and kanji for a story about adults.

Kaminaga has a simple style but likes to write with a range of vocabulary and grammar phrases. I read this after 君の名は, and looked up over twice as many words here. It’s a mystery so new vocabulary gets introduced throughout the book as the plot moves. There are lots of “once per book” words to add nuance, but quite a few were ones which I had encountered once before in some other book this year. It also has plenty of non-Jouyou kanji, which appear in the Tsubasa Bunko version as well with full furigana. I read the Tsubasa Bunko version so it was easier to look words up, and it was a pain-free chance to get used to the kanji for many words which I’d mainly seen in hiragana before. I also found this a good chance to become more familiar with some of those stiff-sounding official/business words that you need for the JLPT, that I’d studied but wasn’t used to yet.

Grammar I’d studied from N2 and N1 prep books but hadn’t really encountered “in the wild” made plenty of appearances here. What’s really nice is that the writing is straightforward and the sentences tend to be short, so when some prep book grammar shows up, it’s easy to read even if you’ve half-forgotten the pattern. I appreciated getting a grammar refresh packaged in a fun story.

This is a Tokyo story and while there’s some mild slang, there’s no dialect. And it was written in 2006 so the language and settings are still basically current.