It’s always sad to see a place such as Bookoff to close
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How do you all like your Natively reviews? I just wrote my reviews for 君を愛したひとりの僕へ and 僕が愛したすべての君へ, but I really just talked about their tone and the order I recommend reading them in. I didn’t talk about the premise or story, or even about their difficulty. Normally I’d at least mention the difficulty in passing, but since in this case I was basically comparing the tones of both books there wasn’t a good place to put that. (Maybe I’ll go back and add something later.) I never explain the premise in a review since I feel like you’re better off reading the summary from Amazon at that point.
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I almost always do (excluding short stories) because I personally like it when other people do it. If I discover the book on a site which has a summary I can read it there, but on Natively I have to opt to click out to an external site to even see if it’s something interesting. Maybe once there’s tags that will matter less to me, but there’s only so much I can guess from a cover and only some books can grab me by cover alone.
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That makes sense. I’m just really bad at explaining the story in a satisfactory, yet non-spoilery way. 
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I finished today
And while I don’t think is as bad as some reviews I’ve seen, it’s true that:
- The fan service is greatly reduced (depending on the person this might be a good or bad thing)
- They keep introducing new characters, making it very hard to keep track of things.
- About half of the stories feel like fillers and that you can skip without loosing anything.
Overall I enjoyed it but I’d love at this point to see some actual progression like back when the Misaki arc.
Now we wait another 4-5 months until the next volume I guess.
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I finished 人間失格 | L39 this week. I absolutely loved the ending, and it really reframed everything earlier in the book. Still a very heavy read as I mentioned before, but also… hopeful? In an interesting way. I’ve been listening to bits of the audiobook on Youtube since finishing it.
I’ve also made good progress on 神様の御用人 | L36 which has been fun. I’m hoping to finish this by the end of the month before starting 体育館の殺人 | L30 with the book club. Lastly, I also started 夜は短し歩けよ乙女 | L43, which I’m not totally committed to yet (and is very dense so far) but has been in my 積読 for a long time. I ordered a bunch more books under the excuse of needing to get 体育館の殺人 for the book club, so I’m trying to work on as much backlog as possible before those arrive, lol.
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I meant to ask before, but can you comment on what made 風立ちぬ difficult? I’d like to read it at some point, but the level 42 on Natively scares me a bit…
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Hmm… probably the biggest thing is long, interconnected sentences. This is more of an issue in the “prequel,” 美しい村 (though it certainly happens in 風立ちぬ at times), but the author really likes to say a whole paragraph without any periods. For example, this sentence from 美しい村 really tripped me up for awhile:
Hint if you’re trying to decode it yourself: It’s referring to a Camera Obscura effect in the dark room he’s staying in.
This sentence was one of the hardest for me, so it’s not representative of the average sentence in the book, but there are quite a few complex ones like this and certainly a few even longer ones. You can also tell there’s some older/unusual kanji usage like 或る for ある, or 認める to basically just mean 見る, but I found that I could get used to those relatively quickly. The author also loves to describe vegetation in great detail so get ready to look up pictures of 10+ different kinds of flowers.
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Well, that was impossible to figure out without context. 
That I actually knew! And older kanji is probably not as concerning to me as some of the other things you mentioned.
Also, that’s a lot of ながら’s…
That reminds me of my least favorite aspect of 銀河鉄道の夜… So many descriptions of things that I don’t even know in English!
Anyway, thanks for the response. I would still like to read it at some point, but who knows when I’ll get to it. It’s short enough that I think I can manage though.
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I didn’t read, but I listened to 火車 | L35 . I really enjoyed the audiobook. The narration us very good and the setting felt really real.
There were much more homeless in Japan 20 years ago. It seems to me that minimum welfare, regulation prohibiting excessive interest rates, and prohibition of regular businesses to have interaction switch the Yakuza are the reasons for this. This book narrates Japan before those changes. There is lots of information off the social status of women at work setting 30 years ago, that probably came from actual experiences by the author who used to be an office lady before her debut as a writer.
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I liked it a lot, and felt the characters were well thought out, but I felt the ending rang a bit too ‘perfect’. Too tidy and clean compared to how things had been going up til that point, I suppose. It did make for nice dramatic effect however.
I’m glad a lot of those things have been reformed! It does seem to me like homelessness in particular is brought up a lot more in media from the ~90s and thereabouts.
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I started reading 魔道祖師 a few days ago, after having binge-read it in English recently. Although I just read it, I did it quickly and rather badly and missed a lot. I wasn’t able to keep track of the romanized Chinese names, especially since characters have multiple names/titles, and I didn’t start to have an idea of who was who until somewhere in book 2 or 3. So I ended up feeling like I wanted to read it again anyway, and thought I might as well do it in Japanese.
It definitely reads different when I can tell the characters apart. And there’s a lot of foreshadowing which I completely missed before. The Japanese version has a nice character list at the beginning of the book, and it’s sorted by clan so it’s easy to read.
The jargon level is pretty crazy. It looks like some words were made up for the story, but others seem to be Chinese words used as-is without translation. I’m keeping a list in a paper notebook (no point adding words to Anki if they’e not normal Japanese) and after only 43 pages it’s already nearly as long as my jargon list for the whole 2-volume first book of 十二国記. The kanji hasn’t been that bad though, surprisingly. (at least not compared to other fantasy books)
There’s a lot of other vocabulary too. I’m glad I’ve already read a few fantasy books with Chinese-inspired settings because it’s definitely saving me some time with the dictionary, but I still feel like I’m looking words up all the time.
Also, I think this might be the first time I’ve read the exact same book in Japanese and English. I’ve read things before where I already knew the story, but they weren’t exactly the same work. It’s an interesting experience and now I think it would have been useful to do it before because this makes it so much easier to unwind tricky sentences. I hadn’t expected to learn anything except fantasy jargon and maybe some 四字熟語 so it’s a happy surprise to feel like it’s going to help my overall grammar too.
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I wonder if the experience is the same reading 天官賜福 1 | L30??; same publisher, I know, but I’m not sure if it has the same translator? I assume it’d be a pretty similar experience, though.
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The translator is the same so I’d also assume the experience would be similar. They look similar in the reading previews, at least.
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Good day Ylevitan, I hope you are having another delightful day mixing up 待つ and 持つ.
Recently, I finished Vヴィレッジの殺人 | L34 and I liked it. 
Unlike a certain circus book that claimed to be a mystery but wasn’t actually a mystery, this book was actually a mystery!
Here’s the quick rundown on the plot: A 吸血鬼私立探偵女性 named メグ is suddenly tasked with finding a young man who went missing, presumably to commit suicide in the vampire village (Vビレッジ.) Apparently, a couple of hundred years ago, 吸血鬼 from Eastern Europe had created this secret 吸血鬼 village in Japan to escape persecution. Eventually, people started to take the notice of this, so the government (yes, the government is in on this) created a special region called “日本国自治地区認可第三号山梨県自治郡Ｖ村” and cut it off of from the outside world to prevent the existence of 吸血鬼 from leaking. The author really likes long strings of kanji sometimes (which is why my ratings nearly pushed it in to the green zone.) Anyway, despite it being closed off, rumors about 吸血鬼 in Ｖ村 start spreading around and intruders occasionally find their way in. So, メグ, who was actually originally from the village, returns for the first time in 10 years to find the son of her client.
I liked that (unlike some of the books I previously read…) the fact that the villagers were 吸血鬼 was actually highly relevant to the plot. Eventually, メグ finds that there has been a 吸血鬼 murder in the village! 灰 and a 杭 in the shape of a クロス was discovered in a 吸血鬼廟 (apparently, they sometimes go into this hibernation state where they sleep for hundreds of years.) So, the question becomes this: are these the remains of the person she is looking for (post-吸血鬼化), or is this some other 吸血鬼? Essentially, was he the one who was murdered or was he the murderer? After all, none of the 吸血鬼 in the village can go near a cross, so it couldn’t have been the murder weapon of a 吸血鬼. So, logically, the intruder must have been the murderer. However, the 廟 are surrounded by 吸血蝙蝠 that attack anyone who isn’t a 吸血鬼. So, how could a human carry out a murder in the 廟?
I’d also like to point out how incredibly common this “吸血鬼村” trope seems to be. 血吸村へようこそ | L30?? and お前のご奉仕はその程度か? | L30?? are two prime examples. I wonder if this originates from 屍鬼 一 | L30?? 
I guess I also have to talk about the hot science man book (おちこぼれ吸血鬼、理系イケメンに餌付けされるっ!~ついでにその血も飲ませてください~ 1 | L26). I’m sorry to disappoint my hot scientist appreciators, but I don’t think it’s very good… The book is really short, and I was already 60% through, but I couldn’t bring myself to finish it. It’s a romcom LN, but it really didn’t feel romantic or comedic at all. It was just frustratingly boring. I was that far into the book and there was pretty much zero romantic development between the 吸血鬼 girl and the science man! There was nothing to really laugh at either! Not to mention that there was zero (ゼーロ) 吸血 up to that point!!! I probably shouldn’t have expected too much from a Kindle unlimited book with zero written reviews. Maybe I just really don’t like romcom LNs…
I started reading 死なないセレンの昼と夜 ―世界の終わり、旅する吸血鬼― | L31 because it actually had some reviews. I think I’ll like this one. It’s about a 吸血鬼少女 (actually 500 years old) who drives a motorcycle and sells coffee in a post-apocalyptic world. I guess it’s like Mad Max with vampires? It’s comfy. It will probably end up being my last book for the October season. Is anyone planning on reading something special to commemorate the fact that we are approaching the best holiday of the year?
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I’m about to finish up 受取人、不在につき―― (赤川次郎 ホラーの迷宮) | L27 which, despite the title, is barely 25% horror, so I’m going to start either また、いる...... (怪談 5分間の恐怖) | L30?? or 呪いの人形 ひとがた 怪談5分間の恐怖 | L30?? and make Halloween last all the way through November.
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Nothing special but I just started reading 死仮面 for a WK book club and have two more murder mysteries starting soon. Murder is halloween-y, right?
Oh, and I picked up this book recently: 魔女たちの長い眠り - as it’s an 赤川次郎 book though it is relegated to bed time or lazy day reading, though, and I’ve lately been listening to English (
) audiobooks before bed so haven’t had as much time for working through my collection of his works.
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This sounds amazing, please keep us updated
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Thank you for the lovely review! 
Do you think this would be a good nomination for the 推理小説 club?
I’ve got a mini tradition of re-reading the zombie arc in D. Gray-Man every Halloween. It’s just a couple of chapters long and it’s good fun, so I’ll definitely be doing so again this year. Notably, this’ll be the first year I’ll be reading it in Japanese, so I’m pretty excited!
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Maybe… It’s pretty short and I’m not sure how large the overlap between 吸血鬼 enjoyers and mystery enjoyers is. If people actually are interested in this stuff, there’s also https://learnnatively.com/book/8dcec66585/ which is another 吸血鬼 mystery, but it’s a bit longer and by the same author, so maybe that’s a better choice. Either way, we already have https://learnnatively.com/series/a428da6cb4/ nominated, so there’s already some 吸血鬼 representation there. (I’ll continue voting for that one)
I’m about a quarter of the way through and I’m absolutely loving it so far.
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