バウワウ! Two Dog Night [Bauwau! Two Dog Night]

Etsusa Ōhashi #1

by Ryohgo Narita, ヤスダスズヒト (Illustrator)

『バッカーノ！』の成田良悟が贈る待望の新作！

佐渡と新潟の間に架けられた世界で一番巨大な橋。　その中央にそびえる名前がつけられる事のなかった人工島――不況によって放置されたその島は不法滞在者やチンピラが住む九龍城さながらの無法都市と化していた。
その島を訪れた二人の男。　一人は気弱で大人しく、もう一人は危険な匂いをまき散らす。
社会から隔絶された無法都市で全く違う道を歩む二人。
だがその姿は、鏡に映る己を吠える犬のようでもあった――。

Genres: Light Novel

302 pages, Paperback

First published December 10, 2003

About the author

Ryohgo Narita (成田 良悟, Narita Ryōgo) is a Japanese light novelist. He won the Gold Prize in the 9th Dengeki Novel Prize for Baccano!, which was made into a TV anime in 2007.[1] His series Durarara!! was also made into a TV anime, which began airing January 2010


There are two traits found in most of Narita's works:
* Narita writes extremely fast, one volume a month if he wishes - with tons of spelling errors and missing words as a tradeoff. The editors like to leave them sometimes just for fun, though.
* His work titles often have an exclamation mark at the end (i.e. Baccano!, Vamp!, Durarara!!, etc.).

Kanji names: 成田 良悟 & 成田良悟.

Reviews

[Johanna · Rating 5 out of 5]

The stage where the story takes place is an island that was just built for the sole purpose of supporting a bridge that should have connected two major islands in southern Japan. But the bridge never got finished and now leads to nowhere, getting referred to as "Etsusa Ôhashi/Etsusa Bridge" by the general public, but the small, floating island is still there and became a universe on its own, where all sorts of gangsters, assassins and Yakuza (the typical Narita stuff) began to settle in. After a gang war between a self-declared kind of autonomous police force and the local Chinese mafia (apparently they are a branch of the same group from that dragon-motorbike gang in Durarara) the island got divided in the western district and the eastern district. There also is a place called "The pits" which is the underground of the island (and also the most dangerous part) ... well, during the course of the story it sometimes became a bit confusing for me where everyone is at the moment because the cast of characters is massive. There is the night active Chinese assassin Lilei Ei who is infamous for smashing her enemies heads with a lead pipe and being always sleepy during the day, the thoughtful and actually quite romantic serial killer Yakumo Amagiri who just kills because the sky is blue and can speed up his perception of movement and therefore slow down everything around him, the friendly and introverted member of the guard team Jun Sahara, who is extremely passionate about engine mechanics and the urban legend "Spring heeled Joplin" who actually is a network of people (and apparently has close diplomatic contact with a certain information broker on the Japanese mainland, who seems to be Durarara's Izaya Orihara, but thankfully doesn't wish to interfere with the chaotic shit from that island.
So, I would completely recommend reading those four or five volumes (it sadly is quite the short novel) if you are a fan of Narita's other works, even if it is a bit more chaotic than Durarara and not as complex as Baccano

[Genma496 · Rating 5 out of 5]

What an absolutely awesome book. I seem to always vibe with what Narita writes, so I expected to enjoy it, but I didn't expect to enjoy it as much as I did. I think the fact that it was written with the intention of being a self-contained one-off story and not necessarily a series made him focus on delivering as much of the potential of this setting as he could, and deliver he did. The city on the bridge is such an awesome location to set a story, and the characters inhabiting it are equally great. Souji and Hayato are definitely going into my top Narita characters. And the way the themes were all brought together in the climax was just awesome. I was also surprised at the lack of supernatural elements in this one. I've always enjoyed how the supernatural elements in his stories come together, but this one is no less satisfying just because it has none. I won't say its a perfect story, it is after all one of his earliest works, but as far as I'm concerned, it's a book I could always come back to. Looking forward to reading the rest of the Etsusa Bridge novels.

[Cecille · Rating 4 out of 5]

This feels like a distillation of a lot of what I like about gunplay action films, while also retaining a surprisingly poignant emotional core within the conflict between the book's three protagonists. Though this story works well as a stand-alone thing (which I imagine was what it was meant to be originally), the book also sets up a lovely cast of and a colorful world that's cozy and grimy in equal measure, and I'm excited to see where the later Etsusa Bridge books take them.

[John · Rating 4 out of 5]

This is a short novel that has an interesting trio as it's main cast, and if you like Ryohgo Narita's anime Durarara i think you'll like this because of some of the similarities.