Horror needs to be a lot more character-driven to be interesting.

Way too much action, way too little slice-of-life scenes/romance/character work.

Omg I LOVED this! Somehow I seem to find Japanese thrillers very wholesome 🤭

I’m so excited to go into Bullet Train now cause this was fantastic and had my interest the whole time.

Super well-written, with hyper original and tri-dimensional characters, it’s as good as a thriller can ever be to me.

Lots of thoughts!

1. Hiromi is at her greatest when she writes ROMANCE. Even if we look at Under the eye of the big bird, the most interesting and successful parts of the books were the romance vignettes. She excels at it, and she should write “just” romances more often, without dabbing too much into other genres imo.

2. The English translation was not good. This is my first time reading this translator and it impacted the experience negatively. I’m sad I didn’t read it in German, big mistake.

3. To the book itself: Hiromi is an amazing writer and I’m determined to read her entire backlist.

This one is my least favorite so far as it distanced itself from the hyper creativity and crazy charisma of her other works I’ve read so far. Not that it’s not creative — she always is.

But it’s more reminiscent of one of those hyper nostalgic/yearning-filled Murakami novels I dislike (see Sputnik sweetheart), with a touch of the worst Japanese writer in existence, the other Kawakami (as in there is TOO MUCH philosophizing about the same topics, circling around the same ideas, with rare moments of impact and emotion, but overall just too much navel gazing).

4. The pacing is too slow even for my taste, and I find everything extremely fast-paced.

5. I don’t like books that have just one tone. That’s why I dislike dystopian lit: it has just one tone. That’s why I dislike Ryu Murakami: just one tone.

Her best work will forever be Strange weather in Tokyo, as that is the best example of combining multiple tones and making a story hyper dynamic: that book is wild, energetic, hilarious, absurd, charismatic, AND also slow and depressing. The best books combine multiple tones.

6. Yearning and dwelling on the past will forever be my biggest pet peeve in literature. I’m too much of a Gemini for that.

Uff, I was expecting something with more depth, and not the usual “omg I’m new to Berlin omg it’s soooo cooool, everyone is soooo cool” type of Berlin story.

My fault for reading a Berlin story.

Damn. This hit too hard

So so great and addictive!