Riku Onda (Japanese name: 恩田 陸), born in 1964, is the professional name of Nanae Kumagai. She has been writing fiction since 1991 and has won the Yoshikawa Eiji Prize for New Writers, the Japan Booksellers' Award, the Mystery Writers of Japan Award for Best Novel for The Aosawa Murders, the Yamamoto Shūgorō Prize, and the Naoki Prize. Her work has been adapted for film and television. The Aosawa Murders was her first crime novel and the first time she was translated into English. It was selected by The New York Times as a Notable Book of 2020.
The good parts are great, but the actual story and suspense parts kinda fall flat. I think the story works best when it just feels like this weird dream state world with good/complex character interactions, but the storyline feels like it tries to explain too much and kinda ruins the mood setup by the calmer chapters.
Truly magical and highly imaginative book. As I flip pages, I felt like I was locked in a tower full of dark secrets; only that I was with classmates who have dark, mystic histories on their own. The heroine goes pretty much tough ordeals to find her identity and retreive her memories. The ending was certainly not predictable. I was highly fascinated with each characters, and even if the background was somewhat creepy, I secretly wished to be admitted to this school.