Tag: Mystery

Our search for the Nasu copycats means it is time to expand the conversation beyond just him. We came looking for a genre, but what does that even mean?

Fate/stay night and Kinoko Nasu feel like a whole genre on their own. But why aren’t there more Nasu copycats?

Nine book reviews to catch up on what I’ve been reading and enjoying while taking a bit of a break from blogging.

Tsukumojuuku by Outarou Maijou succeeds in crafting something that seems authentically confessional out of deconstruction and metatext.

To be direct about it, Our Broken World (Sekai vol. 1) is my favourite novel ever written. Here is a review.

To cut right to the chase, Glass Onion is less original than Knives Out. However, it finds some stable qualities that allow it to stand up to its predecessor.

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”.

Metafiction attempts to erase the existence of its author, the authority of its fictional world, who is even analogous to God. What about Umineko?

Using shinhonkaku mysteries as a case study to expand on why genres matter for contemporary literature.

A portrait of popular Japanese literature trends leading into the early 2000s and the ascent of otakudom.