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A review by dee2799d
Zoo by Otsuichi
5.0
After Goth and Summer, the Fireworks and My Corpse I thought I might as well read this one because there's not a lot of his work translated and I hear it was nominated for the Shirley Jackson award. Boy am I glad I actually bought this one.
There's a lot here that's absurd. In 'In a Falling Plane' we have an entrance exam re-taker (a ronin, if you will) hijaking a plane. This guy looks so unprepossessing that it would have been easy enough to overpower him even if he had a gun (as the POV character herself had pointed out) but what happens is whenever someone tries to come at him, they step on a can that keeps rolling up and down the aisle of the plane. 'Find the Blood!' is a string of unfortunate events surrounding an old man who wakes up and finds himself covered with blood. Turns out someone has stabbed him and it was only his inability to feel pain that he'd slept through the whole thing.Or so we think. This leads to a straight man/stupid man comedy routine with the dying old man playing the 'straight man' to the rest of his family members, who are all useless and are pretty transparent about wanting him dead so they can help themselves on the family riches.
But there's also a lot that deals with the heavy topics of divorce ('SO-far', which is one of my faves), child abuse ('Kazari and Yoko'), and that pressure that young people feel from their parents when it comes to school and conforming (mostly all over the whole collection, but the main point of 'In a Falling Plane' and 'Words of God').
Mostly a mixed bag, with the kind of plot twists that I've grown to expect from Otsuichi. Very well-crafted and 'Seven Days' was enough to make me cry because I'm a baby.
Before I end this review, I admit that I saw someone talk about 'Wardrobe' (which is another fave) and had this to say:
At the story's end, you find out that the narrator isn't who or what you thought. Then you realize that they were withholding information from the audience for no reason other than to support the twist ending. It's hard not to cry foul on that one.
Oh I think he played fair. Ichiro, Miki's husband gets mentioned all the time and yet he had no speaking lines. I think this would have been less awkward in Japanese because it's a language that allows for vagueness more than English and its, say, gendered pronouns. But I've been half-suspecting Ichiro halfway through because of sentences like 'everyone was at the table aside from Ryuji' but at the same time no one ever talks to Ichiro? Not even his own wife. There has to be a reason for this non-presence. And there was.
Overall a pretty good read. One of my faves from this year.
There's a lot here that's absurd. In 'In a Falling Plane' we have an entrance exam re-taker (a ronin, if you will) hijaking a plane. This guy looks so unprepossessing that it would have been easy enough to overpower him even if he had a gun (as the POV character herself had pointed out) but what happens is whenever someone tries to come at him, they step on a can that keeps rolling up and down the aisle of the plane. 'Find the Blood!' is a string of unfortunate events surrounding an old man who wakes up and finds himself covered with blood. Turns out someone has stabbed him and it was only his inability to feel pain that he'd slept through the whole thing.
But there's also a lot that deals with the heavy topics of divorce ('SO-far', which is one of my faves), child abuse ('Kazari and Yoko'), and that pressure that young people feel from their parents when it comes to school and conforming (mostly all over the whole collection, but the main point of 'In a Falling Plane' and 'Words of God').
Mostly a mixed bag, with the kind of plot twists that I've grown to expect from Otsuichi. Very well-crafted and 'Seven Days' was enough to make me cry because I'm a baby.
Before I end this review, I admit that I saw someone talk about 'Wardrobe' (which is another fave) and had this to say:
Oh I think he played fair. Ichiro, Miki's husband gets mentioned all the time and yet he had no speaking lines. I think this would have been less awkward in Japanese because it's a language that allows for vagueness more than English and its, say, gendered pronouns. But I've been half-suspecting Ichiro halfway through because of sentences like 'everyone was at the table aside from Ryuji' but at the same time no one ever talks to Ichiro? Not even his own wife. There has to be a reason for this non-presence. And there was.
Overall a pretty good read. One of my faves from this year.