The Impulse of Fujiko the Homicidal Manic isn't as great as I'd expected. I fully enjoyed the sequel of this book: The Truth About Fujiko the Homicidal Manic: Interview in Cell so I thought the first book would be just as enjoyable. Somehow I was wrong.
We follow Fujiko, an abused girl who lived with her uncaring parents and an equally abused younger sister. Family life and school both brought her nothing but pain and humiliation, there seems to be no way out. Until one day Fujiko's parents and sister were murdered by an unknown person, and the orphaned Fujiko was taken in by her aunt (her mother's younger sister). Things are finally looking up for the girl, and Fujiko vowed never to repeat her mother's mistakes, e.g. bad choices in men, teenage pregnancy, abusive behaviors, obsession with beauty and plastic surgery, etc. Still as she became a teenagers, Fujiko found it wasn't easy to drive the shadows from her past away, and to make matters worse, she started the habit of using murder as a method to solve her problems/take out her anger.
What had gone wrong with Fujiko? Is she really a case of 'like mother, like daughter' or is her tragedy a fault of the society, so to speak?
I adore Yukiko Mari's writing skill and her courage to go into dark and comfortable places when she created her main characters and set up their situation. However, I found the MC, Fujiko is a very stupid woman (she doesn't have anyone to blame for many of her bad decisions) and it is no good reading a whole book filled with said stupid woman making so many bad decisions. Don't get me wrong, I can understand Fujiko's mindset, her murderous behaviors and I can understand how and why the main plot twist at the end of the book plays out: it turns out
I have to admit the author had done a good job in foreshadowing the final outcome of the story, for a couple of times I paused and asked myself: "Something is wrong here, but what is it?" Still the final plot twist kind of takes me by surprise. And for this plot twist alone, I rise the rating from 3 stars to 3. 6 stars.
PS: reading this book does help me to understand some of the events which taken place in the sequel.
PSS: be warned that there is at least one scene of dismemberment being described IN DETAILS in the book and it's truly disturbing. Although.....to think about it more carefully...grown men and women are being dismembered and then disposed like garbage but NO ONE FROM THE NEIGHBORHOOD KNOWS ANYTHING ABOUT IT?