The Literature Club is back the way it was, for the most part - the main difference is that Ayame is still around, still nonhuman but much less powerful, and magically tied to Utsume by the events of the previous book. However, now Aki is having supernatural problems of her own. There's an urban legend about a cursed fax, a chain letter that the recipient receives for several days in a row and must send on in the same order if they want to avoid dying. It seems that the fax is real, and Aki has just begun receiving it. Not only is it creepy, arriving out of the blue at 2 AM, it's somehow causing Aki actual physical harm. The paper cut she got from the first fax showed signs of infection only a few hours later.

At the same time, there are rumors going around at school that there's a pack of wild dogs loose in the area. One of the teachers was bitten, and signs of the dogs can be found all over the school grounds, although no one has actually seen one of the dogs. Yomiko, the school witch, freaks out both Ryoko and Aki, warning Aki that she will be torn apart and eaten by dogs that no one can see. Somehow the Literature Club has to figure out what's going on and save Aki before it's too late.

If you haven't read the first book in this series, Missing: Spirited Away, I'd recommend starting there. Although these two books deal with entirely different supernatural beings, Missing: Letter of Misfortune references a lot of characters and events from the first book and doesn't devote a lot of time to explaining things for the benefit of newbies to the series. The entire Literature Club is back, of course, but so are Ayame, Yomiko, Jinno, and the men in black. The first book also mentioned something about Aki that turned out to be extremely important in this book.

As far as its supernatural aspects went, I liked this book a good deal more than the first. The cursed chain letter, demon summoning via fax, the invisible dogs - all of it was much more my jam than the fairy-like "spirited away" stuff in the first book. Aki was also my favorite character in the first book, so I was looking forward to a book that focused on her.

Unfortunately, that's one of the areas where this fell kind of flat. Although there were scenes from Aki's POV, for some reason it was harder to connect to her this time around. It also seemed like Coda had forgotten certain aspects of her character that he'd established in the first book. Yes, she was still cold and sharp on the outside and fragile and lonely on the inside, but all that stuff about her secretly being in love with Utsume seemed to be absent. I mean, I didn't entirely mind that, except that it introduced a few plot holes.

I distinctly remember Aki being jealous of Ayame in the first book. Her hidden feelings for Utsume and jealousy towards Ayame should have become an issue in this book, especially during the climactic battle, and yet none of that ever came up. It was as though those feelings had never existed and Utsume was just another friend of Aki's in the Literature Club. Heck, Ryoko was depicted as being more important to Aki than any of the other members of the club.

I really enjoyed the creepy scenes inside Aki's apartment, and the bit with the sender of the cursed fax reminded me a little of that scene with the tiny dinosaurs in the first Jurassic Park movie. Unfortunately, the story was a bit bogged down by Utsume's frequent lecturing. He gave the Literature Club a multi-page lecture on magic - granted, it contained useful information that both they and the reader needed to know, but it made Utsume seem decades older than his friends. Utsume even interrupted the climactic final battle to announce that he was going to give another lecture. Again, it turned out to be a useful lecture, but it made for a weird and slightly ridiculous moment.

Just like I had trouble following the events at the very end of the first book, I also had a little trouble figuring out what was going on at the end of this one. Some of the things Yomiko said didn't make much sense - I don't know if it's because of the translation, or if it was one of those things that would eventually have been cleared up by a later book in the series. Since none of the later books were ever translated and published, I guess I'll never know.

It's sad because, despite my complaints, I'd definitely continue on with this series if I could. I'd have loved to see what else Coda had planned for these characters. Utsume and Aki were the only characters that the men in black had identified as having some kind of connection to supernatural beings, but I recall Yomiko saying something intriguing about Toshiya that could potentially have been the focus of one of the series' books.

Even though I'll likely never get to read more of this series, I'm still glad I read these first two books. They were interesting and a nice change of pace from vast quantities of "reincarnated as a [random thing] in another world" Japanese light novels currently getting licensed and translated.

Additional Comments:

There were some glaring translation and editing issues. A couple of the worst ones:

"And slowly, the cursed child emerged." (101)

It's possible that this was an accurate translation, but I strongly suspect that this sentence was actually supposed to be "And slowly, the cursed fax emerged." A child did not emerge, Sadako-like, from the fax machine.

"The spell will not work if it is doesn't use the same base knowledge." (203)

I wonder, did Tokyopop's 2008 novels have more typos? I don't recall Missing: Spirited Away having similarly glaring errors.

Extras:

An excerpt from the third book in Coda's Missing series. I didn't bother to read it - what's the use, when the book was never published?

There was also an afterword by Coda, in which he mentioned that a friend of his had accused him of ripping off the Men in Black movie after hearing about the men in black he included in his books.

(Original review posted on A Library Girl's Familiar Diversions.)

Kozaburo Hamamoto, a rich businessman, invites several guests to stay at the Ice Floe Mansion, his eccentric creation, during the Christmas of 1983. The mansion consists of a main building with a confusing layout and very slightly sloping floors, as well as a tower modeled after the Leaning Tower of Pisa. Kozaburo's room is at the very top of the tower, reachable by a drawbridge. A couple of his family members, his staff, and his guests are all in various rooms in the main house.

Things are a little awkward and tense right from the start. Eiko, Kozaburo's daughter, flubs a few of the introductions: she completely forgets Ueda, Mr. Kikuoka's chauffeur, and manages to embarrass both Kumi Aikura (Mr. Kikuoka's "secretary," who everyone knows is also his mistress) and Hatsue Kanai (the wife of Michio Kanai, an executive at Mr. Kikuoka's company). Among the guests are also two rivals for Eiko's hand in marriage, Shun Sasaki and Masaki Togai. After one of the guests is murdered in a locked room, the police begin investigating. As in The Tokyo Zodiac Murders, readers are invited to follow the clues, look at various crime scene and building illustrations, and potentially solve the mystery themselves.

This took me ages to read, because I kept flipping back to earlier parts of the book to reread them. There were so many strange little crime scene details and architectural oddities that I felt like I could somehow manage to solve the mystery if I just thought about it carefully enough. In some ways it seemed more solvable than The Tokyo Zodiac Murders. Even with hints from another reader, I couldn't quite get there, though, and now that I've read the end and know what really happened, I'm not sure I'd ever have figured it out. I spent too much time focusing on the wrong details. Also, as clever as the solution turned out to be, the way Shimada opted to muddy the water irked me.

Although I enjoyed getting to see Kiyoshi Mitarai again, when he finally appeared in the last third of the book, overall this is the kind of story you read more for the puzzle than for the characters. Even with all of the just-under-the-surface drama, most of the characters didn't make much of an impression on me, and for a while I kept having to flip back to the character list to remind myself who everyone was. Of the bunch, Eiko, Kumi, and Mr. Kikuoka probably stood out the most. The cops, meanwhile, completely blended together.

Shimada's Kiyoshi Mitarai books are like the literary equivalent of the puzzle games I like to play, right down to that moment of frustration when I give up and look at the solution, because clearly I'm not going to manage to figure it out on my own. I see on Wikipedia that there are many more books in this series that could potentially be translated into English one day. Even though I didn't quite enjoy Murder in the Crooked House as much as The Tokyo Zodiac Murders (the latter had a better overall atmosphere), I still very much hope that I eventually get the chance to read the next book in this series.

(Original review posted on A Library Girl's Familiar Diversions.)

Because they owe someone money, Noriko's parents agree to consider an arranged marriage between her and Kazuhito Shito. Kazuhito is handsome, kind, and wealthy. The marriage's main drawback is that Noriko would be expected to move away from her small town and live with Kazuhito and multiple generations of his family in their home in Tokyo. It makes Noriko nervous, but Kazuhito is wonderful and everyone in his family seems so nice when she meets them. In the end, she agrees to the marriage.

Everything goes well, for a while. Nobody's personality suddenly changes - everyone is just as friendly as when she and Kazuhito first met. It does turn out that Kazuhito wasn't immediately forthcoming about his mentally handicapped younger brother and bedridden grandfather, which Noriko worries is a sign that she'll be roped into being their caretaker, but thankfully that isn't the case. Everyone in the family supports each other, and disagreements are resolved by the family matriarch, Great Granny Ei.

Two months after her marriage to Kazuhito, Noriko's peaceful life is interrupted by the arrival of a man from the nearby area. It turns out that the Shitos are his landlords and he hopes to get permission to pay his rent a little late this month. He also wants to tell Noriko something important but is interrupted by one of the Shitos before he gets the opportunity. After that, Noriko visits her parents for the first time since her marriage and comes back to discover that the man and his entire family died in a fire. It's arson, a suspected suicide, but Noriko begins to wonder. What had the man wanted to tell her? Did the Shitos murder him to prevent him from talking?

I wanted to read this for several reasons: the cover art was intriguingly cryptic (after finishing the book, I still have no idea what anything on the cover except maybe the little line is supposed to be), the author is a woman (it seems like most Japanese fiction translated into English is by male authors), and I had read several reviews that referred to this as Japanese gothic fiction.

I really enjoyed the bulk of this book. The mystery was intriguing, and the slightly off atmosphere was wonderful. When Noriko was at the Shito family home, it was easy to forget that this was a contemporary-set novel - it made the house ever-so-slightly claustrophobic, which intensified as Noriko's suspicions began to pile up. Were the Shitos really as pleasant as they seemed? What was the real purpose of Great Granny's private meetings with members of the nearby community? Was the relationship between Kazuhito's sister and mentally handicapped brother really as incestuously close as it seemed?

Unfortunately, the mystery was somewhat ruined by Nonami telegraphing important details too soon. I spent much of the book thinking "Okay, Noriko and I both suspect that __ is going on, but since that explanation is pretty obvious, surely the truth must be something else?" Except it wasn't. There were a couple surprises, but I think the ending would have had much more of an impact if the things Noriko spent most of the book suspecting had been more different from what was actually going on.

I did find the process by which the Shitos made Noriko one of them unsettling and disturbing (content warning for on-page gaslighting and abuse, particularly emotional and mental), but that, too, didn't have as much impact on me as it should have had, not even after the fates of a couple other characters were revealed. I found important aspects of the ending to be very difficult to swallow. The more people who know a secret, the harder it should be to keep, and the Shito family secrets had reached a point where the police should have heard something and gotten involved. And yes, the family was rich, but surely they couldn't afford to bribe everyone?

This book had a lot of promise and could have been amazing, but unfortunately it fell a little flat for me in the end. Still, I enjoyed the bulk of it and don't regret reading it. I intend to try another one of the author's works at some point in the future.

(Original review posted on A Library Girl's Familiar Diversions.)

Mei, Satsuki, and their father, Tatsuo, move into a crumbling old house in the country in order to be closer to the sanatorium where their mother, Yasuko, is recovering from tuberculosis. The girls adapt to their new rural life pretty quickly, although four-year-old Mei doesn't respond well to being left with their neighbor while Tatsuo is at work and Satsuki is at school.

Both girls realize there's something a little strange about their house when they first arrive. They briefly spot little beings called soot sprites, and Kanta, the boy who lives near them, tells them that their house is haunted. Then Mei starts talking about having met a being she calls Totoro and who Tatsuo believes is a forest spirit. Satsuki longs to see Totoro too.

I wasn't sure what to expect when I read this. Would it be a stiff and soulless adaptation of the movie, or would it be able to hold its own in the face of the movie's sweetness? I'm happy to say that it fell into the latter category. Although I still prefer the movie, the book was a breeze to read, added things to the overall story that the movie couldn't, and had much of the same charm as the original movie.

(I should briefly explain that I'm most familiar with the English dub of the movie. I'm not sure if I've even watched it in Japanese with English subtitles yet. Some of the information "missing" from the movie could possibly have been translation decisions when creating the dub, editing the script to better match mouth flaps. I won't know until I watch the movie with subtitles, and even then translator decisions are in play.)

The book was more direct about explaining exactly why Tatsuo, Satsuki, and Mei moved out into the country, explicitly naming Yasuko's illness. There were more mentions about what Satsuki and Mei's life used to be like, back in the city, and even one portion of the book where they briefly went back to the city. Yasuko was slightly more in the foreground - the book included letters she wrote to her children while at the sanatorium. I got a stronger picture of her personality here than I did in the movie. She seemed like a dreamer.

In general, I'd say that the bones of this book were about the same as the movie. A few scenes were added, and there were more details about the history of the house the family moved into, and Satsuki's efforts to learn how to cook different foods over an actual fire without burning them. I really enjoyed these additions.

One thing that disappointed me a little, however, was that the fantasy aspects were scaled back. In the movie, viewers' first exposure to Totoro happened when Mei chased after a little Totoro and ended up finding Totoro's napping spot. All of this happened on-screen. These same things happened in this book as well, but for some reason the author chose to focus on Satsuki instead of Mei. Mei told Satsuki and her father what she'd experienced, but there was no evidence that any of it was real, rather than the dreams or imaginings of a child. The first on-page appearance of Totoro didn't happen until the bus scene. The ending was also altered slightly - the scene where Mei and Satsuki watched their mother and father from a tree didn't happen. I was at least glad that all the Catbus scenes were included.

The focus of this book seemed to be slightly more on the relationship between the two sisters and their barely-spoken-of fear that their mother might die and never come home, as well as the girls' growing independence as they adapted to rural life. It was lovely, but, as I said, I did miss some of the Totoro stuff. All in all, this was an excellent novelization that I'd definitely recommend to fans of the movie.

Extras:

Several illustrations (black and white sketches with maybe a watercolor wash?), including a color map of Matsugo, the place where the Kusakabe family moved. The map also gives the exact year this story took place, 1955, so I suppose this could be considered historical fiction.

(Original review posted on A Library Girl's Familiar Diversions.)

Kenji is a "nightlife guide" for English-speaking tourists in Japan. Basically, he takes guys on tours of what the Japanese sex industry has to offer. Although Kenji gets quite a few customers via his little ad in Tokyo Pink Guide (a magazine about the sex industry in Tokyo), the work isn't as good as he expected it to be. He can never seem to save up enough for that trip to America he wants.

Kenji has seen a lot of foreigners, but his latest client, Frank, is different. On the surface, he's a loud and friendly New Yorker who wants to go everywhere and have some sex along the way. There are moments, however, when something dark and ugly peers out of Frank's eyes. Frank hired him for three nights, right up until New Year's Eve, and by the end of their first night together, Kenji becomes convinced that Frank is the serial killer who's been raping girls involved in compensated dating, killing them, and dismembering their bodies (not necessarily in this order).

This book could be divided into three parts. In the first part, Kenji is a guide and translator working with a strange and vaguely disturbing client. This section has a large amount of detail about how the various places Kenji and Frank visit work and takes place mostly during their first night together. I recall them going to a peep show, a lingerie bar (sounded a bit like a hostess club, only with the women dressed in nothing but lingerie), and some kind of club where they ended up going on a paid date that Frank had hoped would end with sex. They also spent some time at a batting cage, of all things. Considering what just the time with Kenji cost, it was a little surprising that Frank wanted to spend it just watching Kenji try to hit some baseballs. But Frank was weird, even at the very beginning.

The first part is surprisingly tame. No sex, on-page or otherwise. The closest Frank gets to having sex is a handjob at the peep show, which isn't on-page. Kenji asks the woman who did it for a few details, hoping for something that might tell him, one way or the other, whether Frank was the murderer. Some aspects of this part of the book could almost be viewed as darkly comedic. Even as Kenji worries that Frank might be a murderer, there are moments when Frank seems clownish and ridiculous.

In the second part, which occurs a little over halfway through, the violence and gore is cranked WAY up. It's basically just one scene, but it is not for the faint of heart. I didn't expect this level of nastiness and ended up skimming it for my own peace of mind. Even then, way more of this scene is burned into my brain than I'd like. There is

The third part returns to the pacing and overall content of the first part. Kenji continues to act as Frank's guide, although Frank is no longer interested in finding someone to have sex with. However, whereas the first part was filled with Kenji's suspicions, more a fear of what his gut told him Frank might be capable of that anything, in the second part Kenji is

The last part also had a sharp increase in Frank's level of self-reflection, philosophizing, and societal analysis. Kenji, too, found himself thinking about what it is to be Japanese. And, to be honest, I really didn't care what sorts of insights Frank had or inspired in Kenji.

I didn't like this book. I suppose it was intense and focused look at the emotional impact of three nights with a guy like Frank, but I don't know that that time was worthwhile.

(Original review posted on A Library Girl's Familiar Diversions.)