Category: Book reviews
Catch-up: Nine book reviews
Nine book reviews to catch up on what I’ve been reading and enjoying while taking a bit of a break from blogging.
Tsukumojuuku and Symbolic Realities
Tsukumojuuku by Outarou Maijou succeeds in crafting something that seems authentically confessional out of deconstruction and metatext.
An Anthologised Review of Locked Outside of Mystery
A guest post? A review of an entire short story anthology? Now, this is something entirely different from usual…
Fiction and the world: Our Sekai Breakdown
To be direct about it, Our Broken World (Sekai vol. 1) is my favourite novel ever written. Here is a review.
Despair: Russian anti-mystery
Nabokov’s Despair takes the form of a mystery novel, inverts it, and stuffs its insides with the aesthetics and logic of artistic, modernist fiction. In this sense, it might well be the first true “anti-mystery”.
The World-wide Exploits of Kuroneko Byouinzaka
The World We Broke (Sekai 3) takes on a distinctly celebratory tone compared to the high stakes murder mysteries that preceded it. In contrast to an ordinary whodunit, it was an experience that was distinctly reminiscent of the slice of life genre.
Imperfect Girl: Alone with the past, together within a locked-room
Imperfect Girl is not a story about heroes or heroines. It has nothing but contempt for the scolding attitude of what it might call “normal” stories, of the kind where good people learn to be better people by virtue of their goodness.
Meiro Byouinzaka’s Enclosed-World of the Constant Suicides
An Eerie and Artless Enclosed World (Sekai 2) is written by Nisio, Isin, and it is the sequel to my favourite mystery novel ever.
Loups-Garous and the mythology of domestication
Natsuhiko Kyougoku’s Loups-Garous is a thrilling blend of traditional Japanese storytelling forms with modern genre sensibilities. It is my pick for book of the year for 2020.
Zaregoto, the Debut Novel and the Nihilism of Failure
‘Decapitation: Kubikiri Cycle (The Blue Savant and the Nonsense User)’ was the debut novel of the Japanese mystery and young-adult fiction author Ishin Nishio. It is a novel that has something to say, and is successful in saying it, while still being a viscerally satisfying work of fiction.
