[This is an old review, and I had to guess at a rating. It was a toss up between 3.5 stars and 4. My memory of this book is still pretty positive, even after 3 years, so I decided to round up.]

 

I got this at a used bookstore, buying it as part of decision to buy all the Tokyopop light novels the store had (at the time, 3 or 4 total). Other than that, I knew nothing about the book, although I had a feeling I might have seen ads for it before in the backs of other Tokyopop volumes.

On the one hand, I've read some real stinkers while trying out light novels, and this was better than I expected. On the other hand, the book was really uneven. It took a while for me to get a feel for where it was going (in my notes, I wrote, "What genre is this?" - for the longest time, I wasn't even sure if it was realistic fiction or psychological fiction). It was also difficult to tell whether anything really was going on, or if the entire story was just a giant tease.

I tried to write my synopsis without spoiling too much, and I'll try to do the same with this commentary, but it will be hard, because the way things appear in the book aren't always true. So, for the most part, I'll be writing as though the the way things appear is actually the truth.

The main story is written from the perspective of three girls, Sawako, Mai, and Mayumi. The story they are writing involves four people, however - Yukari is the only girl who never has any passages in the book written from her real-life perspective. I spent a good portion of the beginning of the book wondering who Yukari was. My most promising guess seemed to be Yuki, the tough-looking girl with the cell phone decorated with Donald Duck stickers. Eventually, I also started wondering about the identity of the girl whose story is the book's prologue - the girl's father would beat her mother whenever the girl didn't get good grades, until her mother finally ran away. My guess was that Yukari and this girl were one and the same, and the story Yukari started was a way for a lonely girl with an abusive father to play with other girls her age without actually having to interact with them in person.

The creepy nature of the story the girls were writing together and the mystery of Yukari's identity were the first clues, for me, that this would probably end up being a creepy story overall. Halfway through the book, when real life started invading the girls' writings and Sawako disappeared after being stalked, I felt a thrill - finally, the hints of upcoming creepiness were going somewhere!

At first, when Sawako went back to writing and the truth about what happened to Sawako was revealed, I was disappointed. It seemed like an awful lot of drama for no reason. It wasn't until Mai started investigating things that the very details of what I, the reader, thought I knew about some of the characters started to unravel. Perspective is a very important thing in this book, and not all of the characters can be trusted. Just like Yukari's stalker character views the world from his own twisted point of view, the truth as viewed by the characters in the main story is only the truth as they see it and not necessarily what has actually happened. There are plenty of hints throughout the book that this needs to be kept in mind, and one particularly big hint at the beginning of the book passed me by until the book was nearing its conclusion.

I could accept, because of the emotionally disturbed state of one of the characters, that the "truth" as it was presented in the book was not always the truth. However, I had problems with some of the other revelations at the end of the book. Much of the suspense in the last half of the book turns out to be very contrived.

(Sorry about the tortured writing coming up - I'm trying really, really hard not to reveal too much, but this is still something I feel like I need to write about. Unfortunately, including any details would give away parts of the book's ending.)

The actions of one of the girls, with respect to the story they are all writing, plays an important part in the ending of the book. Some of the suspense in the latter half of the book is achieved by not revealing everything that this girl is doing. The problem is that this girl is very much in her right mind - there is no logical reason for her not to think about what she's doing. In fact, I think that, in an effort to avoid letting the girl reveal too much about what's actually going on, Ishizaki even (inadvertently?) has her lie to the reader. Again, it makes no sense for her to do this and just makes the suspense, upon reflection, seem contrived.

Overall, despite feeling like the author cheated in order to ramp up the suspense and make everything work out neatly in the end, I did like this book. The girls are all really interesting characters - I couldn't help but want to find out more about them and see them grow. They are all so very lonely, with the story they're writing together their only real outlet. Sawako doesn't seem to get out much and has no friends. Mai goes out often but feels too different from the people she meets to really connect with them, so essentially she has no friends either. Mayumi lives and breathes for her friend Sayuri. Mayumi made it into her school only because Sayuri, a star badminton player, asked the school to make an exception and let her in. Mayumi is technically on the school's badminton team, but she never plays - she's not actually good enough to be on the team and is only on it to support Sayuri. Mayumi's one love, mystery stories, isn't of interest to Sayuri, and Mayumi has no friends outside of Sayuri that she can talk to.

It isn't until they all get involved in writing the story, Chain Mail, that the girls, some of them at least, really begin to open up. Mayumi, in particular, really comes into her own. I was so happy about that, because she was the girl I was most hoping would realize she could be something more. A person shouldn't have to be a supporting character in their own life.

There are indications that, in Japan, this book might be one book in a series (Amazon calls this "v. 1"), but, if that's the case, no other volumes have been translated into English as far as I can tell. If it really is one book in a series, I can only hope that future books show other characters from this book flowering as much as Mayumi. Mai, at least, got to shine through the work she did while trying to figure out more about the other girls. For once, she actually interacted with real people in a positive fashion and learned that her previous behavior with others had alienated them. I'd also love to learn more about Yuki, who seemed like a contradiction, with her tough girl looks and flashes of niceness. Sawako, too, was more than just a one-note character. These were some really complex and, at times, heart-breaking young teens.

One of the reasons this book initially grabbed me, enough to keep me going despite the truly creepy stuff not starting until halfway through, was that I have actually participated in a group story before. When I was a teen, I wrote one character's part in an online story posted on an AOL discussion board. My experience with that made the girls' participation in Chain Mail particularly appealing to me, but it also made me aware of all the areas where the book really simplified things. Group stories are not nearly as easy as this book makes them appear. The girls start to encounter some difficulties with Chain Mail as the book progresses, things like members with important characters slacking off on their part of the story, or some members writing others into a corner, but, overall, the whole thing goes pretty smoothly. My own group ended up going under because 1) the story simply couldn't progress and 2) no one could even decide where the story should go.

I've read a lot of light novels that were just plain terrible and some that felt like they could have been better but maybe encountered some problems in translation. Neither of those things were the case with this book. Aside from the contrived aspects I mentioned, this was an excellent read.

 

(Original review, with read-alikes and watch-alikes, posted on A Library Girl's Familiar Diversions.)

Review: Sawako, Yukari, Mai and Mayumi are four teenagers fed up with life. And one day they get an email to their phones inviting them to write a story. Each takes on one charcter and writes a little from their character’s point of view, and then the next person carries on the narrative. Each takes one of the four characters to narrate in this way, a schoolgirl, her boyfriend/tutor, her stalker and a detective. Together they write the story, but there is also a little more than that. They start writing having never met eachother, but then start wanting to meet up. They go on an unforgettable journey, of a kind, set in Tokyo and blurring the lines between reality and their fantasy world.I only picked this up because it was one of the few young adult novels that came up when I asked my library database for something “translated from original Japanese”. So I reserved this, and I wasn’t sure what to expect, but it looked good from the blurb.It was much more interesting than I thought it would be. It started really quickly with Sawako receiving and passing on the chain mail within the first twenty pages. We got really close to Sawako, Mayumi and Mai, both in the fantasy and real lives.I loved watching Sawako, Mayumi and Mai develop. Their characters, their maturity, their intelligence. They are all amazingly put together characters. The characters and the story they made up were just as realistic and well imagined as their real lives.Hiroshi Ishizaki has a brilliant writing style. Five of them to be exact. One to narrate real life, and four more for each part of the story that was put together by the girls, as it was a voice varying with each girl.It’s perfectly paced, with a nice balance between the girls and the story. Throughout I just wanted to read on and on and on. It finished on a perfect note, with closure, and a little room for letting your imagination wander. Overall: Strength 5 tea to a really richly woven story.

This book started out as a bit of a train wreck with annoying characters, a simple story, and a lot of Japanese pop culture name-dropping to the point it was annoying (Pocari, Gackt, southeast exit of Shinjuku train station, and I can go on forever). Especially the characters really annoyed me throughout the whole book. The book really didn't get better until about 100 pages in (it's a thin book, so that's about halfway), when there was actually something happening. In all fairness, I did end up staying up late to finish reading because I was curious about the ending. The ending of the book had a plot twist, but at the same time it was a huge anti-climax to me.

If you read it as if it were manga, what Tokyopop usually releases, instead of a novel, your expectations of the book will become more realistic. Considering that, the book wasn't too bad. This is a teenage novel, and I'm not a teenager anymore, but at the same time I've read a lot of other teenage novels that were a lot better than this. I even would have liked the Japanese pop culture aspect of this book if it hadn't felt like it was added to the book desperately.

Good thing I got the book for free.

A book about role playing on cell phones is a great idea.

Soon it'll be great historical fiction.

I’m sad that this book is out of print now, because it’s a really good read that I just happened on when I need something new. It was hard to find to begin with, and with Tokyopop going under, chances of getting a copy are a bit slimmer. I really clicked on this, mostly because of the premise. Hey, it’s about writing, I tend to jump on those books. And the whole ‘writing a story’ really comes to life here. I like that all of the main girls have ideas of where to take the characters they’re writing, even if they’re lifting from their own lives and experiences. I also like how, in the samples of the in-world ‘Chain Mail’, each of the writers has their own style of writing. It’s a subtle detail, but a good one. It gives the characters a little more of an identity in their own respective sections.The plots of both the in-world story and the actual book tie in very neatly with too little obvious parallels. Like I said, I like the detail that these girls are drawing from their own lives to write this story, and it adds to the ambiguity of what’s really going on. This is a book that kept me guessing until the end, and it’s great to go back and try to pick up on all of the clues. The only downside is the somewhat confusing first person prologue, and while it’s explained early on, it still feels jarring as compared to the rest of the book. It’s the only part I could argue that would have been handled in the text of the main story.While I don’t absolutely love the characters, I still really enjoy them and they’re very sympathetic. If I had to pick a favorite character, it would be Mayumi. Partially because she’s more of the writer in the group (she’s the only one specifically mentioned with an interest in fiction, and Western crime novels to boot), but I related more to her wanting to find something bigger for herself. She’s very supportive of her friend Sayuri, but I really felt her frustration about being regulated to the sidelines and treated like dirt by others. (And I really love her relationship with Sayuri; they’re friends first, interests second.) Mai is a character that could have very easily been written off as just a cool girl, with her love of music and just happening into the game. But she’s the one who figures out the details first and is the first one to pick up on the fact that something’s wrong with everything. She feels more like a typical teen girl, as a lot of her conflict is between her and her mother, but it feels genuine with Mai. I also really like that she feels the loneliest, having a lot of people in her contact list, but very few that she actually talks to regularly. And I like that part of the reason for that is that she wants more from these friendships than just gossiping about other friends and celebrities. (It does tug my heartstrings a little when both Mai and Mayumi admit to wanting to email each other once Chain Mail’s finished.) Sawako is definitely the weakest of the three main girls, as there’s not much to her outside of studying and Chain Mail. She’s extremely nihilistic, which definitely plays into the plot. This is also one of the better translated novels that I’ve read. The dialogue and prose flow naturally, with only one or two parts that don’t work as well. The girls actually sound like teenage girls—Sawako’s a bit smarter, but still feels like a teenager at times—and while the in-universe writing is good, it’s still a bit unpolished and rough. Some of the plot twists, especially the reveal, could come off as silly, but it manages to work well, and as I mentioned, had me flipping back to the beginning to try to figure it all out. It’s not a perfect book, but I’ve enjoyed reading this multiple times, and it still has me looking for clues. This is definitely a book to keep in mind, and if you’re lucky to find it, do pick it up.