帝都モノノ怪ガタリ

A parade of clichés

“Teito Mononoke Gatari” is very naive—I’d even say primitive. Nothing truly bad ever happens, all the stories end in a happy ending, and the so-called plot twists are hardly twists at all—they’re far too predictable.

I wouldn’t recommend this book. To me, it felt flat and underdeveloped. It’s hard to believe in the story or feel connected to the characters.

I can imagine this plot as a script for a mediocre anime at best—but even as a script, it’s too raw. The book lacks description—of the setting, of the characters’ thoughts, of basically everything. The writing is on the level of: “the night was dark,” “his eyes flashed coldly”—and that’s simply not enough to get immersed in the story. The Taisho era setting feels like a decorative label—it plays almost no meaningful role in the narrative.

The relationships between the characters develop quickly, but we don’t really get to know them. Their personalities are quite cliché: the naive, kind, gentle Koshiro and the cold, unapproachable, even slightly “cruel” (but secretly gentle deep inside) soldier named Shinobu. These character types aren’t inherently bad—they could’ve been the basis for a deep, compelling story. But here, everything just falls flat.

The only things that helped me get through the book were the simple language and the fact that I had to use my imagination to fill in the gaps, just to make the story feel more interesting. I pictured it as an anime in my head. But as a novel? It’s a failure.