Goth was added to my TBR at a time when I dreamed I'd live in Japan for a year, reading only Japanese literature. Years later, that aspiration has faded, but Goth remained.
Side question: Do books ever fall off your TBR until they are read? There is a t-shirt I saw online that briefly tempted me, a skull and a headstone reading "Bury me under my TBR." But enough talk about mortality!
Through a series of short stories, Goth introduces us to two high schoolers obsessed with true crime. Initially, the stories were released online, and they retain that creepypasta vibe and style of writing, with all the limitations that entails. The writing does improve as the collection goes on and the author matures.
The narration, like the teens, are detached, even as they encounter increasingly gruesome situations. The book is not for the faint of stomach. In the first story, the kids visit a remote mountain in search of a crime scene -- and find it. Even as they find clues to uncover the murderer, they don't turn them over to the police. They are interested in why and how a criminal commits atrocities, not in justice or preventing future crimes. And as in places where Jessica Fletcher goes, there is plenty of violence for the kids to explore.
The collection cast a kind of spell over me. The first story involves a disturbing series of murders, but mostly serves to introduce us to our mysterious, unnamed narrator and his classmate Morino. The narrator is outwardly normal, he plays sports and jokes with his classmates, but inside he covets a dark fascination with the macabre. Morino, on the other hand, is outwardly "strange," dressed all in black, she is abrupt with classmates and teachers and completely uninterested in social niceties. In other words, my type. The second story explores the inner mind of a criminal while we learn more about our two central characters. Even though, or perhaps because, it is about a person who cuts off as many hands and paws as he can get away with, this is the silliest story, and I'm not sure if it is always intentional. As here, when the narrator is exploring the criminal's house:
"Each time I left a room, I checked to make sure I hadn't forgotten anything, like my student ID, a uniform button, a textbook, or a sock."
Student ID I can understand, a uniform button, sure, but already that's weird, but why would he leave behind a textbook? And then: Sock. How would you not notice leaving behind a sock?
And then later, when the criminal has to go to work knowing that his prized collection of hands has been stolen, he obsesses for half a page over hands and here, the repetition lends humor to the macabre:
"Hands. Hands. Hands were more important than the other teachers. First, there were hands, and then the human followed. There was no point in talking with the human."
On the last page, the narrator asks Morino what she would be doing if she had been one of the victims. She considers and replies: "It would be very hard to put on a watch."
However, it is the third story ("Dog") where the collection really kicks into high gear. I would argue this is Otsuichi's best writing in the collection, and from this story on I was captivated. What surprised me was I found it rather moving by the end. I wasn't expecting that at all, given how distant we were from the main characters at the start.
The collection comes together as a whole towards the end, and what is fascinating is to see that through it all has been planted a surprise that makes sense only at the end. There's a lot more a person educated in Japanese mystery stories could say about this (see: honkaku), but that person isn't me. I will note that I didn't read the afterwards or the bonus story.
-Michael G.
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