STrange Pictures by Uketsu

 

This was a weird little book. The art is supposed to be a big thing but the pictures didn't really make any difference in my ability to follow the story; the story is really disjointed, very nonlinear and not entirely coherent, it loops and sworls and kinda trundles its way through to the end. The nonlinearity is handled in such a way that I found that much of the narrative tension was lost; the solution to at least one of the parts of the story turned out to be much less interesting than what the narrative seemed to be pointing toward, the story didn't much reward trying to think ahead. Clearly there's something cultural around it, but the novel itself seemed not all that--not bad, but not sensational, either. I have a sense there might be translation issues, here, the voice itself seemed almost stilted at times; I have a known tendency to struggle with translated books, though, this might be my priors speaking.