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.)

This is set in Tokyo, at the K Apartments for Ladies. I didn't write down enough of the mentions of exact years to be 100% sure, but the book's "present" is probably the late 1950s.

The K Apartments for Ladies were originally meant to help "Japanese women emancipate themselves" (17). All of the women who live there are unmarried. Men are only allowed into the building if they check in first, after which they're escorted to whichever apartment they plan to visit. All the rents are frozen at wartime levels, so it's a cheap place to live. In the book's present, the entire building is about to be moved four meters in order to make room for a road-widening project. This can supposedly be done without disturbing any of the building's residents, who have all opted to stay inside until the project is finished.

Togawa gives readers glimpses into the particular stories and secrets of several of the building residents. In every instance, the weight of their secrets either begins to overwhelm them as the date of the move nears, or there's a strong possibility that the move will force their secrets into the light. Some of the residents mentioned include: Chikako Ueda, who once worked with a male accomplice to bury a dead child in an unused communal bathroom in the building's basement; Toyoko Munekata, who is supposedly hard at work correcting her late husband's manuscripts; Noriko Ishiyama, who has taken to living like a mouse, existing off of others' scraps; Suwa Yatabe, a violin instructor; and Yoneko Kimura, a retired teacher who spends her days writing letters to every single one of her former students.

I heard about this via a list on Goodreads. Although it's been tagged as a mystery, it's not really a traditional mystery, and readers who approach it as one are likely to be disappointed. There are certainly plenty of crimes mentioned - kidnapping, murder, arson, theft - but it's only in the last half of the book or so that anything like sleuthing happens, as Yoneko investigates one of her fellow residents on behalf of a former student.

Even then (I'm trying to avoid spoilers), there is the issue of appearances and reality. Some readers may love the twists at the end, while others may feel like the author cheated. I fall somewhere in between. I admired the way Togawa set things up so that readers would expect that they were dealing with one set of rules when they were actually dealing with a completely different set. She managed this without, as far as I could tell, ever really lying to readers, although I suppose that could depend upon your definition of "lie."

That said, the revelation concerning one particular character really bugged me. It required the character to be completely and utterly bound up in the building, the residents, and all their stories, to the point that that was their personal story. My suspension of disbelief was severely strained. I also had trouble believing that this person could do everything they would have had to have done without anyone ever being the wiser.

I thought that Togawa was going to end the book with a few "realistically" loose threads, and I was fully prepared to be mad at her for that. Instead, she included a short epilogue that answered that last question and left me feeling absolutely furious at one of the characters, the only one who'd escaped the story completely unscathed. I'm actually angrier at that character than I am at the one who literally murdered another character.

I'm not really sure how I feel about this book. The structure was a bit strange, the timeline and characters weren't always easy to keep track of, I disliked a lot of the revelations in the chapter just before the epilogue, and there were parts that were ridiculous enough to make me wonder whether this could be considered a black comedy. Still, it was fascinating seeing characters' stories get tangled up together. I'd probably be willing to try another one of the author's works.

Additional Comments:

This translation seemed decent enough, although potentially a bit over-localized. I wonder, was the spirit medium really named "Thumbelina" in the original, or was that just the closest approximation the translator could come up with? Thumbelina was repeatedly described as being dressed in "a white robe with loose red trousers" (15) or something similar. I figured that she probably looked very much like a miko, not that there were translator's notes mentioning this (and the word miko was never used - the translator's choice, I'm guessing, because I doubt the original Japanese text would have gone out of its way to avoid using the word).

Names were almost always in Western order, given name first and then family name. I noticed one or two instances of the translator messing up and using the Japanese order, which unfortunately contributed a bit to my difficulty with keeping track of all the characters' names.

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

"The Yellow Wallpaper" is one of the few things I read during my vacation that wasn't a graphic novel or manga. I downloaded it via Project Gutenberg. I think I saw a review of it on Booklikes, but I couldn't remember a thing about it. I wasn't even sure what genre it was and, since I didn't bother to look it up before getting started, I thought it might be a mystery. It's actually more psychological fiction (psychological horror?).

An unnamed woman stays at a fancy house with her physician husband and their baby. She's supposedly there for her health. Her husband says there's nothing physically wrong with her - she's suffering from hysteria/a nervous condition and must receive as little mental stimulation as possible. The woman feels she'd be better off elsewhere, but her husband insists that she stay in the horrid former nursery with torn yellow wallpaper and barred windows. The story takes the form of secret journal entries written by this woman,

I wasn't expecting this to be so unsettling. When I first started reading, I wondered whether the woman's husband had malicious intentions. The room was objectively awful, and the woman's request to spend a bit of time elsewhere didn't seem like a big deal. I think the husband probably did have good intentions, though. He just had terrible ideas about what might help his wife. I wonder if it finally dawned on him, too late, that he'd gone about everything all wrong?

I wondered whether the room was really an old nursery, or if it had once held someone else very much like the narrator. It was such a sinister place.

All in all, this was an excellent and quick read, and this is coming from someone who generally prefers novels over short stories.

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

Behind Closed Doors - B. A. Paris 

So, I just knew I had this all figured out.  We all know that Jack's a bad guy right.  It's pretty obvious that  that is going to be the big twist.  But, You just have no idea how bad of a guy this guy is.  Seriously. A special place in hell for that one.

My thoughts are just so jumbled, I'm not sure I can really do a review justice for this one.

Jack was a creepy bastard.

Millie was my hero! Such a smart girl and so incredibly strong

I started to get a little upset with the back and forth but I get why it was done (to keep the reader confused for the course of the book, LOL).

But ultimately, I was a bit disappointed by how tidily everything was wrapped up in the end even though I loved how Esther proved herself. 

I will definitely read more of this author's work. This is her debut effort and if this book is anything to go by, she's got a great career ahead of her.

The audio was decent as well, so overall I think it was a great read.  One I will definitely talk about long after reading.

[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.)