What a weird little book this was. An enjoyable, weird little book.
Halfway between Ghibli's Spirited Away and a Neil Gaiman novel, this 200-pages long trip took me by surprise. It's split roughly in half - the titular 夜市 ("The Night Market") and the slightly longer 風の古道 ("The Old Road of the Wind").
If I had to compare the two stories, I'd say they're very similar in setting (modern-day Japan), and they both depict young people who inadvertently stray into "other worlds" and find other societies, hidden from the layman's eye but still complex and full of rules and deadly intricacies.
Monsters, spirits, dead people, demons roam the lines of this book, but Tsunekawa's supernatural is of a scientific and codified kind, its mechanisms laid bare before the eyes of the reader (and the unfortunate adventurer): the strange happenings that the unwitting protagonists encounter during their forays are not random or unexplained, but precise consequences to their (or somebody else's) actions.
Tsunekawa uses a simple style, his sentences are not overly long, his prose is essential (but often poetic) and his vocabulary never strays in the "what-the-hell-is-this-kanji" territory. A more than adequate read for the intermediate Japanese learner, I'd say.
I give this neat little adventure an 8/10, for offering a thought-out and compelling universe, for having a well-done approach to the supernatural and last but not least for being the first Japanese book I've read to engage me this much.