Goth

• by Otsu Ichi
• Kadokawa

This book won the Honkaku Mystery Prize and yanked Otsu Ichi out of light novels and into mainstream success.

Six short stories starring the same two characters - the nameless narrator, and a girl named Morino Yoru. Both are equally fascinated by death and gruesome crimes. But the real horror is not the killers or the crimes by the narrator's own lack of revulsion.

It's a fascinating book. I can't help but feel like there's a significant gap between what Otsu Ichi intended to do and what he actually accomplished. He seems to have wanted to write a mystery novel and show all the mystery tricks (lots of identity tricks in here) that he loved reading himself. So it works on one level as a well done, clever thriller. But he seems to have accidentally made it something much more than that. The characters he probably created as just an interesting way of looking at the story (the other five chapters seem to have been written largely because his editor happened to like the two of them) end up turning the book into an examination of a particular type of flaw, a particular type of mind that just genuinely doesn't understand why killing people is bad.