Month / September 2021

by Inhae

Book review: 『ひと』 by Fuminori Onodera

Introduction


Title: 『ひと』
Author: Fuminori Onodera (小野寺史宜)
Published by 祥伝社
330 pages

『ひと』has won the second place of the Japan Booksellers’ Award in 2019.

Review


『ひと』was not a book for me unfortunately. It tells the story of 20 year-old Seisuke whose mother dies unexpectedly, leaving him without family ties (his father died several years ago) and without finacial support. Seisuke has no choice but to quit university and try to make a living of his own.

With this setting, I thought that this book would be about loneliness, struggle and fight to both support oneself financially and find a new place in the society outside of preconceived tracks. I was looking for a memorable character who will find a way to stand strong despite everything.

The novel is the reverse of what I was expecting. We don’t really see Seisuke fighting in a hostile world, rather, good things happen to him and keep happening to him. Instead of a character who has to be stronger because he has less, we have a character who receives more because he has less. The obi actually summarises the book very well when it states: 独りだから、そばにひとがいる、ありがたさを知る. The only true challenge for Seisuke will be to learn to rely on people and accept their help.

The word 独り is also a little misleading. Even though Seisuke finds himself without family support, he is far from being alone. His new employer and collegues act like a new family, he has friends, and is dating a former classmate. There is not a single page in the novel that made me feel even a tiny sense of solitude, mourning, despair or fear, which are things you certainly should expect to feel in this context.

I also found Seisuke hard to identify with. He is a bit too passive to make an interesting protagonist to me. Things (mostly good things) happen to him, but he does not really provoke them. He looks like a lucky character rather than an inspiring figure.

This book is more a heart-warming story which shows you that there are always good people out there who are eager to help. We learn that one can be generous even in poverty, and that there is no shame in accepting a helping hand when one is in need. There are several things I liked in the novel, and sure, reading this book felt good in the end, but I don’t think that reading it brought me much.

Overall, I was expecting more from a book that won the second place in the Japan Booksellers’ Award (本屋大賞), but I would still recommend it if you are looking for a feel-good story or a relatively easy book to read in Japanese.

by Inhae

Book review: 『プレゼント』by Nanami Wakatake

Introduction

Title: 『プレゼント』
Author: Nanami Wakatake 若竹七海
Published by 中公文庫
314 pages

This book is a collection of 8 short stories featuring Akira Hamura and detective Shuntaro Kobayashi. Each short story features alternatively one of the two characters except for the last one when they meet.

Nanami Wakatake has written several series of mystery novels, including the Akira Hamura (葉村晶シリーズ) series and the Mikoshiba series (御子柴くんシリーズ).

『プレゼント』 is classified as the first book of the Akira Hamura series, but in reality, it is also the first book of the Mikoshiba series given that Mikoshiba makes his first appearance in this book, as the assistant of detective Shuntaro Kobayashi.

Review

I really wanted to love this book, but I only started to appreciate it towards the end, and never felt really interested in the characters or the cases presented.

I chose to read this book because I plan on reading the whole Akira Hamura series. As a result, I was particularly interested in the short stories featuring Akira Hamura, but in the end, I ended up liking the Shuntaro Kobayashi ones most.

The stories with Akira are told from Akira’s perspective using the first-person pronoun, whereas the Shuntaro ones use the third person pronoun and are told from the perspective of someone related to the case. Shuntaro usually only makes a brief appearance towards the end.

Despite following Akira directly, I never felt close to her nor could I really understand her personality or feel any sympathy for her. I just cannot understand why she acts like she does, this character completely puzzles me. For now, she is not the kind of character I would happily spend 7 books with… this is just the first book though, so things might change.

I also did not particularly like the author’s style. For example, I found that it takes a while at the beginning of each story before the reader can understand what is going on. It is hard to describe what exactly bothered me, but I had the feeling that the narration would always describe first and explain after. For example, you will first go through an entire dialogue without really knowing what is going on or who the persons talking are. Only after the dialogue would and explanation be given. I found it very strenuous to read, especially because these were short stories. I found that I always struggled a bit to get a good vision of the setting at the beginning of each story, and it took me a while to start feeling involved in the case and the characters involved in it. When i finally did, the 30 pages long story was generally over 😅

Overall, I wanted to read this book first because it is the first of the Akira Hamura series, but now I think that I would have enjoyed it more if I had already read books of the series and were familiar with Akira. The problem is that this book introduces two different detectives who only have 4 short stories each, and I feel that it was not enough to really get to know them. My favourite story is the last one where they are both featured. It’s only at the end of the book that I started to get used to the author’s style and to appreciate the characters.

I have the next book of the series because I bought it together with プレゼント, so I am not giving up yet!

by Inhae

『吸血鬼』by Edogawa Rampo

Introduction

Title: 『吸血鬼』
Author: Edogawa Rampo (江戸川乱歩)
Published by 集英社文庫
437 pages

This is the seventh book in the Kogoro Akechi collection published by Shueisha. Kogoro Akechi is a fictional detective created by Edogawa Rampo. My reading challenge for 2021 is to finish the whole collection of 12 books by reading one book per month.

Review

This is my favourite book of the series! First of all, we meet Fumiyo again, the only interesting female character of the whole series. She appeared first in 『魔術師』where she played a major role in the plot. Now, she works with Kogoro Akechi as his assistant and is described as a female detective. We also meet the young Kobayashi who helps Akechi and works in his office (and who will become the main protagonist in the 少年探偵団 series).

Contrary to the previous stories where Akechi worked alone, we now see a team building itself. In previous novels, Akechi’s life and whereabouts were kept mysterious, we knew for example that he just came back from abroad, but we didn’t know what he was doing there. There were no mention of where he lived, he just appeared out of nowhere to solve the crime. With 『吸血鬼』, Kogoro Akechi feels more tangible and human.

The plot is also excellent, one of the most complex of the series with several good twists. Generally, the mystery in the novels of the series is easy to crack, and I think that most readers know what will happen next, or have a good idea about who is who or what tricks the author is using. This novel, however, managed to surprise me several times and reading it was really exciting.

Similarly to 『魔術師』, there were a good amount of memorable scenes in this book. To cite only one, I really loved the scene of the coffin. It is quite long, but very well described and extremely immersive. Overall, this novel is just a succession of great moments, there is both deduction, action and horror in a perfect mix.

I also liked how everything is explained in this novel. Most of the time, in the other novels, the story lacks realism, with criminals who make impossible escapes and other tricks like disguise or the use of mannequins that are not credible. I felt that at the end of the novels, a lot of mysteries were left untouched, but in this one, everything is explained in a long but exciting passage where Akechi reveals the truth and how he found it.

However, what I loved the most in this novel lies elsewhere: for the first time since the first short stories of the series, the criminal has a motive. In all the other novels, the criminal kills people because he is “the worst and most dangerous criminal of all times”, and that’s it. There is no explanation, no reason for their actions. In 『吸血鬼』, people have their reasons for acting like they do, and instead of having just a big villain, we have secret motives and a somber past.

Finally, the end of the novel was excellent with a fun hint to one of Edogawa Rampo’s most famous work.

With 『魔術師』and the short stories of the first book, this is my favourite novel of the series. Hopefully, the next one will be as good!

by Inhae

Book review: 『空飛ぶタイヤ』 by Jun Ikeido

Introduction

Title: 『空飛ぶタイヤ』 (そらとぶたいや)
Author: Jun Ikeido (池井戸潤)
Published by 講談社文庫
907 pages

This novel was published in 2006 and is inspired by a real accident that involved Mitsubishi. In 2002, a 29-year-old mother was killed when the wheel of a Mitsubishi trunk broke off and hit her. Her two children were injured. This happened just two years after Mitsubishi publicly recognized that it had covered up vehicle defects to avoid recalling them.

Review

You really don’t need to know about the Mitsubishi scandal to enjoy 『空飛ぶタイヤ』, and even if you are not an avid reader of economic news, I heartily recommend you to give this novel a try.

Our main protagonist is Tokuro Akamatsu who owns a small transportation business. One of his trucks loses its wheel which leads to an accident similar to what happened in 2002. The novel takes us in a epic battle with Akamatsu’s small company on one side and Hope Motors Corporation, the giant automotive manufacturer, on the other side.

The topic of a small business and employees fighting for justice is appealing in itself, but in Jun Ikeido’s novel, it becomes a most exciting quest filled with emotional moments. I cannot remember the last time I felt so emotionally involved in a novel. I was both trembling with rage and shedding tears of joy with Akamatsu.

Another thing that I loved in this novel is how much we learn about how a big corporation works. Seeing how different services compete inside of Hope Cars was both an interesting insight and a nice addition to the plot. Similarly, the delicate position of Hope Bank, which belongs to the same group, spiced up the story while opening my eyes on things I never really thought of before.

I also found that the characters were more interesting and complex than in the other book I read by Ikeido, which was 『アキラとあきら』. In Akira, the characters were either good, nice and brilliant or ill-intentioned and stupid. While the novel was excellent, the characters’ actions were dictated by their nature (good or bad) rather than circumstances or inner struggles. In 『空飛ぶタイヤ』, the characters are more complex, and while there is still a good vs bad frame, there are more interesting characters who are torn between their own interests and what they know to be just.

Overall, 『空飛ぶタイヤ』 is one of the most engrossing novels I have read in Japanese so far, the characters and the whole story feel very real, the novel takes you on an emotional roller coaster filled with tension and suspense. The book reads like a thriller, but what makes it so gripping is that it deeply cares about people.

by Inhae

Summer wrap up

I have been in a long reading and blogging slump this Summer, so I haven’t read much and haven’t updated my blog either. On top of it, my computer broke, which made go back to blogging even more difficult.

Now I am finally back with a new set up, and I will start with a quick wrap up of the Summer before catching up with my book reviews.

DNF: 『占星術殺人事件』by Soji Shimada (島田総司)

Let’s start with a DNF… I have tried to read 『占星術殺人事件』by Soji Shimada. I really wanted to love this book, because it is the first novel of a long series and I was planning on reading the whole series, but I could only read around 150 pages before giving up.

The reason why I could not get into the story is the way it is told: two protagonists discuss a series of crimes that happened in 1936. They use different documents and go through the different cases, discussing what could have occurred, examining the crime scene as described in the documents, checking the suspects alibis and so on. This is exactly what I love in detective stories, but it was incredibly dry as well. We know very little about the characters involved because they are just names in a file, we don’t really know them.

The first 150 pages were so dry that I lost interest in the story. The intellectual challenge of cracking the mystery is not enough to get me involved. I also need to care for the characters and feel that there is a real story unfolding instead of just going through an enumeration of facts.

Maybe I’ll give it another try later, but for now this stays on my DNF pile.

Kogoro Akechi: July and August: 『吸血鬼』and 『人間豹』by Edogawa Rampo (江戸川乱歩)

I have read the 7th and 8th book of the Kogoro Akechi collection, and it is hard to believe that there are only 4 books remaining now. My goal for 2021 is to read one book a month and while I fell behind schedule this past couple of months, I will try to keep the pace for the remaining four books.

Both books were good, I loved 『吸血鬼』which has become one of my favourite books of the series. The other one, 『人間豹』was also good, though not as engrossing.

In both books, we find recurring characters like Fumiyo, Akechi’s partner in life and work (she is often described as a female detective), and the young Kobayashi who works as Akechi’s assistant. I really love seeing these two characters forming a solid team around Akechi. I find that seeing recurring characters is part of the joy of reading a series. Hopefully, they will be there in the next 4 books as well.

『ひと』by Fuminori Onodera (小野寺史宜)

I managed to finish 『ひと』by Fuminori Onodera. I loved it at first, but soon the book turned out to be very different from what I was expecting, and I had a hard time finishing it. As as result, it took me one month to complete it, although it is a short and easy read.

I thought it would be a book on the difficulties to find one’s place in society when one does not fit in a predetermined pattern anymore, but it is more a heart-warming (I am almost tempted to say naive) story showing that there are always good people to help you when you are struggling.

It is a nice story, but it really was not for me.

Currently reading: 『ベスト８ミステリーズ2017』compiled by the Mystery Writers of Japan (日本推理作家協会).

This is a collection of short stories compiled by the Mystery Writers of Japan (日本推理作家協会). I didn’t know it before, but they apparently publish an anthology every year. I have the 2017 edition and the short stories I have read so far are excellent. I will definitely buy the other editions as well.

It is a good way to discover new authors!

Currently reading: 『完全犯罪に猫は何匹必要か？』by Tokugawa Higashigawa (東川篤哉)

I also started the 3rd book in the Ikagawa series: 『完全犯罪に猫は何匹必要か』. The title is very intriguing, but I must say that I am not particularly thrilled by the book so far. The criminal case looks appealing as always, but I find it hard to go through the lighter, comical parts of the novel. I am only at the beginning though so we’ll see!

Goals for the upcoming months: read the books I bought this year!

I have a big pile of books I bought this year but still haven’t read… My goal now is to (try to) read them all before the end of 2021. I still have 4 months left, so it should be feasible. I went through my shelves, and this is what will keep me busy this autumn: