A review by liz_rath
Nipponia Nippon by Kazushige Abe

dark informative reflective tense fast-paced
  • Plot- or character-driven? Character
  • Strong character development? No
  • Loveable characters? No
  • Diverse cast of characters? No
  • Flaws of characters a main focus? Yes

3.75

This stuck with me a lot more than I expected. It reads lagely like a standard Shōsatsu and suffers from many of the classic issues of the genere. It's pretty unfocused at times and jumps around in time a little too much. I lost focus part way through a few times. But the translation reads very smoothly (not necessarily a given for japanese books) and the prose is at times very impactful. I really liked some of the themes in touches on and I surprisingly have come back to ponder on them. However the "twists" at the end and just the entire climax plainly did not work and they were honestly kind of stupid. It felt like the author was still missing about ten pages in the draft and just decided to send his main character on a random side quest that thematically had little to do with the rest of the book which is what substantially knocked down my rating
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