My 11th book of the year was supposed to be 蒲団, but I decided to drop it partway through chapter two. I would like to get into 文豪 at some point, but the difficulty was just high enough to make reading it feel like a chore. Since it was getting close to Halloween, I decided to pick up another 恒川光太郎 book, and as luck would have it, Amazon was running a sale on the kindle versions for two that I hadn’t read.

I liked this one a lot. While my opinion of 雷の季節の終わりに has improved in hindsight, I still remember having trouble with the pacing and feeling that the author’s strengths were possibly not on full display with the long-form story format vs the short-story anthology style that introduced me to his work. This one, however, is an interesting mix of the two; each chapter has its own complete story, but they all focus on the same area and feature recurring characters.

The variety is pretty remarkable, honestly — the first chapter simply introduces a couple of key characters and establishes the island group where the whole book takes place, but the next chapter is written in the style of a series of interviews and notes by a visiting journalist; another, in first-person, is the eyewitness testimony of a mysterious death; yet another is the historical account of a former pirate who settled in the islands when he retired. It’s fun to keep an eye out for the common elements as you try to figure out where and when each story is taking place in relation to the others.

Something else that all the stories have in common is the blurring of lines between reality and dream. You can usually guess when something is really happening, but you can never be totally sure, and the sudden jolt that comes when the penny drops is excellent.

As always, I can only recommend this author to people who can read Japanese, which is too bad. I feel like this book in particular would make a great anime in the right hands, but I suspect the chance of that is even lower than the chance of it getting picked up for translation eleven years after its publication. Oh well.