That last line made me go "MWAHAHAHAHAHAHAHAHAHA!!!!" really loudly inside my head. MWAHAHAHAHAHAHAHAHA!!!

I had no idea what to expect from this. I totally picked it for the cover - look how pretty! Blood blossoms in springtime. Awwww!

Turns out, this is a good, old-fashioned-like crime-solving mystery, a la Sherlock Holmes or an Agatha Christie novel.
You see the parts, you follow the misleads or you don't, but it all dovetails nicely in the end and you get your resolution.
So was I surprised? No. I'd figured it out pretty quickly (I think that has a lot more to do with the reader than with my ability to solve mysteries), I just didn't understand the why. Actually, I'd come up with a different, slightly more sinister why, one that was related but more like the flip side of the coin.
Was I, therefore, bored?
Not in the least. It was comforting to watch everything unfold. I could be smug when I was correct (The cat! THE CAT!) in my assumptions but my eyebrows rose several times when I was proven wrong (The new wife! THE NEW WIFE!)
It's a tidy story, well-written and nicely-composed even with the translation which, I suspect, was heavily Americanized.

This just came out last year so I was wondering why it was placed in the mid- to late-90's. Turns out, that wasn't a device; this was originally published in 1996. It all makes sense now. Mystery solved.

So it's an enjoyable read for mystery-lovers who don't need deep, psychological twists, who don't need blood and gore and a dame who has a knife. On the surface, it's fairly light, despite there having been a murder.

Underneath, though, is a darker issue, something I think we tend to overlook, judging by our crime novels and television shows and blockbuster movies:

Spoiler

the simple emotion of pure hate born without a source, how it festers and grows and creates malice and, yet, is based in nothing. The bullys' simple answer "Because we didn't like him" was reason enough for them to torture a kid to madness. I think we often forget that sometimes there is no trauma, sometimes there is no reason, sometimes feelings are random and they create random responses and you know what? That's scary.

By the way, I really want books written in other countries by authors of those countries to please have narrators who fluently speak the language of said country because, dude, while this reader is good, his Japanese is very American.

I was confused at the midpoint of the book when the killer confessed. Normally that's near the end of the book, so it was intriguing to see that there was still a lot more to go. And the last half was wonderful, with unexpected twists and turns. I also enjoyed the changing of narrators chapter by chapter so I got the story from various vantage points. Very much enjoyed this one and I will be reading more. Oh, and the translation from Japanese is wonderful.

This was a fun read! I usually don't like mysteries but this one had interesting, fleshed out characters, and some great twists and turns.

decent mystery/thriller but the motive of the villain is not that strong

Awkward beginning but gets better

I'll start off my review saying I don't read a lot of murder mysteries, so I'm not intimately familiar with their normal conventions. The structure & plot struck me often as gimmicky, but a fairly entertaining gimmicky nonetheless. I'm still not totally sure I follow the ultimate conclusion of the book - so that could have been more clearly plotted. The writing itself was mediocre, but I'm used to reading literary fiction, so maybe that's to be expected. I imagine this would be a good "beach read" for mystery fans.