Book Girl and the Suicidal Mime
Ok so first things first—this has nothing to do with the content of the novel itself but I just need to get it off my chest real quick: that cover has got to be one of the worst pieces of graphic design I've ever seen in my life. “Graphic design is my passion” does not begin to cover it. That ugly brown. Those fonts. That attempt at a crop that just looks like a kindergartner’s first attempt at using scissors. I can see what they were going for, but what they were going for was stupid. What a waste of the delicate watercolor artwork. Like, I know I'm always committing heinous crimes against basic design principles whenever I boot up VSCode but this isn't my job. Who greenlit this shit!?
All right, insane rant over. Don't judge a book by its cover and all that. Where were we?
I feel like I hadn't read a “proper” light novel in a while. What makes a “proper” light novel, you ask? I've been trying to come up with a definition, but all I got is:
1. It needs to have some sort of supernatural element;
2. It needs to have some sort of extraordinary girl;
3. It needs to have those color inserts with the quotes at the beginning.
To exemplify, I mean something like Haruhi or Boogiepop—or this book.
Anyways! The protagonist, Konoha Inoue, is a boy in his second year of high school who's trying to lie low after accidentally becoming a best-selling novelist at 14 years old—an experience which left him traumatized. About a year prior, he found himself strong-armed into becoming the second member of the school’s literature club by a “goblin”(I had to look up the Japanese version to confirm that this is how the translator chose to localize “youkai”) girl that feeds on stories—by which I mean that she literally eats the paper they're written on—Tohko Amano.
According to her, some stories taste sweet, some bitter, some are well-cooked and some are raw—I’m always saying that this and that story tastes like this and that food(and that I wish I had physical volumes of my favorite manga so I could eat them), so I can relate.
Konoha’s club activities mostly consist of writing “snacks” for Tohko—short stories based on prompts she gives him, and which he may or may not half-ass, depending on his mood—until he’s tasked by a bubbly girl to write a love letter for her crush, a boy in the archery club. The plot takes a turn into mystery when it starts to look like the person he's addressing the love letters to might not exist at all.
I confess I went in without expecting much, but the story turned out to be surprisingly poignant. I wasn't expecting that level of drama, nor that I would feel so understood—I ended up crying a lot. Besides, with such a bright and lovely heroine giving passionate speeches about the works of one of my favorite writers ever, Osamu Dazai, there's no way I wouldn't love it.
This novel was a very pleasant surprise—I can't wait to read the others