I’m still enjoying the book, but considering we’re about 1/3 into the book I feel we haven’t made a lot of progress into the mystery.
I just finished 変な家 through the book club on Wanikani, and the pacing for that was really quick, no fluff. So I’m needing to adjust to the pace of this book.
Oh, and I looked it up to check but 国鉄 is basically the old JR!
Haha yeah, just recently one of my language partners told me about this. When they privatized (and thus renamed) it in the 80s or somesuch, many people would still refer to it by the name of 国鉄 for a long time (even nowadays still, maybe? )
That makes sense! I haven’t personally heard it but perhaps some elderly people might.
Some of my coworkers worked at JR as 新卒 so as part of her training period she had to learn the history. She told me about it once but tbh I don’t remember too much now lol
I’m finding the writing of this book rather dry. Maybe my expectations were set a bit high given that this author is very famous for his mysteries, but right now all the characters feel a bit flat and the scenery is basically just a list of train station names and that they’re not very joyous places I suppose also I’m having trouble fulling believing that it’s just on his カン that he’s spending all this time interviewing random people and timing his walking pace on a case which I suspect most police would just go ‘yep, lover’s suicide. How sad. Next!’
I don’t necessarily dislike the book, I think I’m just finding it a bit contrary to my expectations is all.
Mmm, I’ve read seven or eight of his mysteries, and this one is a little bit of an outlier I think. It’s the really famous one, but I like some of the others a bit more. If I’m reading the Wikipedia page correctly, this was his first full length novel, though he’d written a number of short stories before this.
More just how the sentences are crafted. It’s hard to explain it beyond “this writing does nothing for me”. Like I love sparse writing that leaves things to the imagination, but this isn’t that either.
It reminds me a lot of 東野圭吾’s writing which is an author I know a lot of people love, but for me some of his books I’ve tried to start reading and just stopped because the writing just had no pull for me. “dry” is the feeling I have but it may be a poor descriptor for the quality I’m not enjoying.
Quite the contrary to „sparse“, I‘d say
Reminds me very much of how I was told to write a thesis: „First you say what you want to say, then you say it, then you say what you have said.“
I like the writing style with its slightly old-fashioned bits and pieces, but this I found outright boring.
There is definitely a good deal of repetition in this book that I think is part of what has been rubbing me wrong, but I think more than anything it’s the faceless feeling of the characters. I don’t mind a puzzle style whodunit (which this is supposed to be famous for breaking from the mold of?), but in any book I want the characters to have some depth and shape to them which I haven’t gotten here. The most I’ve felt it is with 三原, but the rest of the cast just feels very muted, almost like they exist to push the story along and I’m supposed to ignore them the rest of the time
It’s definitely not like ７回死んだ男 where I hated the writing so much I wanted to chuck the book against the wall, but more a ‘huh?’ feeling where it doesn’t feel that much different in writing/plot than some much less famous books of the same era that I’ve read.
3 Likes
As an Amazon Associate, Natively earns from qualifying purchases through any Amazon links on the site.
)
I suppose also I’m having trouble fulling believing that it’s just on his カン that he’s spending all this time interviewing random people and timing his walking pace on a case which I suspect most police would just go ‘yep, lover’s suicide. How sad. Next!’
“dry” is the feeling I have but it may be a poor descriptor for the quality I’m not enjoying.
