A Tokyo student named Shuhei Sasaki, interested in all things paranormal and otherwise spooky, disovers a mysterious blog, last updated a decade ago. In it, a man who calls himself Raku, describes the pregnancy his wife, Yuki. A second story is about a young boy who goes missing; a third one about an arts teacher who is slain whilst camping out on a mountain. How are they linked? The reader is invited to scrutinise the pictures that the victims drew and to see if they can fit the pieces of the puzzle together.
Okay, so this book definitely wasn’t for me. I exchanged it with a colleague for The Line of Beauty and honestly, I think I got the short end of the stick here.
I don’t want to puzzle, I want to read, and if it’s rock-solid writing you’re after then this is not the book for you. The prose is barebones and more than a little wooden (though that might be a translation thing) and character development is non-existent. It really is meant as a puzzle, and I don’t like puzzles. I like beautifully flowing languages and compelling characters.
But even so, at multiple points the plot makes leaps of logic that seem improbable or downright impossible. To stay that this requires a major suspense of disbelief is an understatement. As anyone who regularly reads mystery novels can tell you, a complex plot is hard to pull off. It’s not that hard to construct a chain of events, but putting up an entire chain-link fence, so to speak, is a lot harder. Here, details are conveniently overlooked in favour of less likely possibilities or events that fit the narrative, and that’s where it loses its power. A puzzle only works if every piece fits, and there are many gaps here. The rest of the story hinges on clichés: the angry mother in law, the prescient mother, the studious child. It’s all very dull and uninspired.
I feel like this book isn’t really aimed at people who read a lot of books, so to speak. It’s written by a YouTuber who goes by the moniker Uketsu. Its fast pace and easy prose probably appeals to people a lot younger than me; I’m hardly the target audience. I might actually order it for our school library; I think the kids would appreciate it. But for me, it was a big miss.