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Heaven's Memo Pad #1
神的記事本 1
「我可不是普通的偵探，是尼特族偵探。專長是搜尋全世界，找出死者的話語。」
統率聚集於暗巷中尼特族的『尼特族偵探』──愛麗絲如是說。
高一那年冬天我和彩夏所捲入的怪異事件，以及侵蝕都市的惡質毒品『ANGEL．FIX』，
所有謎底都是由足不出戶的少女偵探愛麗絲解開的。
「了解真相可能會破壞你以往平靜的生活，即使如此你還是想知道嗎？」
因為我的回答，平日無所事事的尼特族為了解決案件而出動了！
描寫尼特族青少年有點不堪、有點可笑，又帶著一絲淡淡哀愁的青春冒險故事。
統率聚集於暗巷中尼特族的『尼特族偵探』──愛麗絲如是說。
高一那年冬天我和彩夏所捲入的怪異事件，以及侵蝕都市的惡質毒品『ANGEL．FIX』，
所有謎底都是由足不出戶的少女偵探愛麗絲解開的。
「了解真相可能會破壞你以往平靜的生活，即使如此你還是想知道嗎？」
因為我的回答，平日無所事事的尼特族為了解決案件而出動了！
描寫尼特族青少年有點不堪、有點可笑，又帶著一絲淡淡哀愁的青春冒險故事。
200 pages, Paperback
First published January 25, 2007
11 people are currently reading
89 people want to read
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Displaying 1 - 5 of 5 reviews
August 23, 2021
Tl;dr: This fan-translated light novel is an interesting twist on a murder-mystery story, I'll be reading the next volume soon!
The main character, Narumi, finds himself joining a "NEET" (Not in Education, Employment, or Training) detective agency which is led by a girl young girl named Alice. The ragtag group of NEET members use their particular skills to solve cases in their own ways.
Volume 1 revolves around the drug called Angel Fix, where the NEET detective agency tries to find and stop it's source from spreading the dangerous drug. Being the first volume in the series, it starts off pretty slow but picks up steam after around chapter 3 when a character named Toshi shows up.
"Kami-sama no Memo-cho" (translated to Heaven's Memo Pad / God's Notebook / Heaven's Notebook) wasn't officially translated from its original source material, but each volume was fan-translated and available to find online.
Partially because of this, I'm not sure if it's fair for me to claim the main reason why I'm docking a star from my rating is solely because I felt lost when multiple characters were talking to each other - I don't know if that was a fault of the translators, or if that's just Hikaru Sugii's writing style.
An example being:
“Have you ever thought about marriage?”
“Never!”
“Why is that?”
“Actually I have a person that I truly love in my heart, so I can't marry other women.”
“But then is it okay for you to live together with them? Don't you feel that you're doing something wrong on the girls?”
“I feel that I'm wronging them as well, but I couldn't change it, this is my lifestyle.”
“Go to hell!”
You can tell this is a convo between two people... but when they're in a room with more than just the two people speaking, it would take a bit of backtracking to reconnect the voices to the characters. This type of conversation structure occurs multiple times throughout the story and was a bit distracting.
However, I can't say these type of conversations pulled me away from the story itself. I am a sucker for murder-mystery type novels - and this novel's hook grabbed me pretty quickly after the slow start.
I'll be back for another round in volume 2.
The main character, Narumi, finds himself joining a "NEET" (Not in Education, Employment, or Training) detective agency which is led by a girl young girl named Alice. The ragtag group of NEET members use their particular skills to solve cases in their own ways.
Volume 1 revolves around the drug called Angel Fix, where the NEET detective agency tries to find and stop it's source from spreading the dangerous drug. Being the first volume in the series, it starts off pretty slow but picks up steam after around chapter 3 when a character named Toshi shows up.
"Kami-sama no Memo-cho" (translated to Heaven's Memo Pad / God's Notebook / Heaven's Notebook) wasn't officially translated from its original source material, but each volume was fan-translated and available to find online.
Partially because of this, I'm not sure if it's fair for me to claim the main reason why I'm docking a star from my rating is solely because I felt lost when multiple characters were talking to each other - I don't know if that was a fault of the translators, or if that's just Hikaru Sugii's writing style.
An example being:
“Have you ever thought about marriage?”
“Never!”
“Why is that?”
“Actually I have a person that I truly love in my heart, so I can't marry other women.”
“But then is it okay for you to live together with them? Don't you feel that you're doing something wrong on the girls?”
“I feel that I'm wronging them as well, but I couldn't change it, this is my lifestyle.”
“Go to hell!”
You can tell this is a convo between two people... but when they're in a room with more than just the two people speaking, it would take a bit of backtracking to reconnect the voices to the characters. This type of conversation structure occurs multiple times throughout the story and was a bit distracting.
However, I can't say these type of conversations pulled me away from the story itself. I am a sucker for murder-mystery type novels - and this novel's hook grabbed me pretty quickly after the slow start.
I'll be back for another round in volume 2.
January 21, 2021
Realmente es una novela que esperaba leer y siento que es muy tensa con el tema de la droga, no a los narcotraficantes, que es el el objeto de esta novela y varíe en los 8 restantes volumenes, también espero que no sea el monotono caso de los juegos de Phoenix Wright Ace Attorney donde todos sus casos son sobre descubrir al asesino de turno y nunca se arriesgan a sacar casos de drogas, corrupción o secuestro por no mencionar casos más fuertes
This entire review has been hidden because of spoilers.
December 28, 2011
I've been wanting to read Kamisama no Memochou (variously translated as Heaven's Memopad, God's Memopad and, my preference, God's Notebook) since watching the anime over the summer. Not that the anime was very good -- the best episodes were slightly above mediocre -- but I heard from people who'd read the novels that the series had butchered Sugii's story and characters. Thankfully someone at Baka-Tsuki has translated the book, and despite being a rough fanlation I can see just how badly the anime screwed up.
The story is told by Narumi, a kid who's just transferred to a Tokyo high school. Narumi is an antisocial prick who doesn't even bother learning the names of his classmates, much to the consternation of Ayaka, the girl who sits next to him in class. Nonetheless, Ayaka drafts him into the Gardening Club, of which she is the president and sole member. Narumi goes along mainly because he has nothing better to do and the school requires everyone to participate in an after-school activity.
Ayaka eventually drags Narumi to the ramen shop she works at -- that's real ramen, not the cup of noodles crap you buy at the supermarket -- where he encounters a group of NEETs.
NEET is a demographic acronym standing for "Not in Employment, Education or Training," but in Japan it's morphed into a catchall for people who are unable or unwilling to take part in traditional career paths, ranging from outright hikikomori (people who lock themselves in a room and only come out when absolutely necessary) to freeters (people who take low-paying, usually itinerant and part-time jobs). Mainstream Japanese society looks down upon NEETs, but in recent years there's been some pushback in literature and anime with works like Welcome to the NHK, Eden of the East, and Kamimemo.
The NEETs that Narumi encounters are a varied lot -- Tetsu is a gambler and sometime boxer; Hiro is a gigolo; and the Major is a military otaku who attends university, but only for the library facilities (he keeps class attendance balanced so that he'll neither be expelled nor graduate). But their leader is Alice, an hikikomori who lives over the restaurant and styles herself a NEET detective (one of the criticisms of the term "NEET" is that it includes the self-employed and founders of startups, so that Mark Zuckerberg, Bill Gates and Steve Jobs all would've qualified early in their careers).
So how can an hikikomori be a detective? That's one of the neat parts of the book. For years now, mystery fans have complained about the use of cellphones in stories -- if the detective has a cellphone on him, he can always call for help, so writers come up with lame workarounds, like the detective being a technophobe who won't touch a mobile phone, or the battery running down at a critical moment, or the detective being a Verizon subscriber. Not Sugii -- indeed, this is a story that couldn't exist without cellphones. Alice is a 1337 h@x0r who uses the 'net for her initial investigation and then instructs her Baker Street Irregulars through their phones. This leads to one great moment when Alice sends Narumi to unlock a door at school without telling him why -- only for him to find Yondaime, a gangster who helps Alice with her investigations -- on the other side.
About half the book is set-up, establishing all the characters and the nature of Alice's detective agency. The actual mystery doesn't kick off until halfway in when a certain character commits suicide and Narumi asks Alice to investigate. It's not the most complex mystery in the world, largely consisting of tracking down the person responsible, but it's as dark as any fan of Spillane or Stark could ever want. I know some people argue that the sort of ending required to make a story noir precludes the possibility of a sequel, but I would point to this book as a counterexample. The ending bears a marked resemblance to Siodmak's The Killers and that famous line, "Don't ask a dyin' man to lie his soul into hell," but is far, far more vicious.
Character-wise, Narumi and Alice get the most attention this time around, though the Major comes off as distinct while Hiro and Tetsu are somewhat interchangeable. Like all the great detectives, Alice has a unique philosophy and methodology for her work, which she sums up with a pithy mission statement:
Narumi, as you might expect, becomes her Watson, though he's far more interesting than the good Doctor or Archie Goodwin. If anything, he resembles a less sociopathic and arrogant version of Ii-chan from Nisioisin's Zaregoto series.
Of all the fan-translations I've read through Baka-Tsuki and other sources, this is the only one, apart from Toradora!, that is both good and could appeal to the typical American reader. Hopefully if Yen ever licenses more light-novel series, this will be one of their acquisitions.
The story is told by Narumi, a kid who's just transferred to a Tokyo high school. Narumi is an antisocial prick who doesn't even bother learning the names of his classmates, much to the consternation of Ayaka, the girl who sits next to him in class. Nonetheless, Ayaka drafts him into the Gardening Club, of which she is the president and sole member. Narumi goes along mainly because he has nothing better to do and the school requires everyone to participate in an after-school activity.
Ayaka eventually drags Narumi to the ramen shop she works at -- that's real ramen, not the cup of noodles crap you buy at the supermarket -- where he encounters a group of NEETs.
NEET is a demographic acronym standing for "Not in Employment, Education or Training," but in Japan it's morphed into a catchall for people who are unable or unwilling to take part in traditional career paths, ranging from outright hikikomori (people who lock themselves in a room and only come out when absolutely necessary) to freeters (people who take low-paying, usually itinerant and part-time jobs). Mainstream Japanese society looks down upon NEETs, but in recent years there's been some pushback in literature and anime with works like Welcome to the NHK, Eden of the East, and Kamimemo.
The NEETs that Narumi encounters are a varied lot -- Tetsu is a gambler and sometime boxer; Hiro is a gigolo; and the Major is a military otaku who attends university, but only for the library facilities (he keeps class attendance balanced so that he'll neither be expelled nor graduate). But their leader is Alice, an hikikomori who lives over the restaurant and styles herself a NEET detective (one of the criticisms of the term "NEET" is that it includes the self-employed and founders of startups, so that Mark Zuckerberg, Bill Gates and Steve Jobs all would've qualified early in their careers).
So how can an hikikomori be a detective? That's one of the neat parts of the book. For years now, mystery fans have complained about the use of cellphones in stories -- if the detective has a cellphone on him, he can always call for help, so writers come up with lame workarounds, like the detective being a technophobe who won't touch a mobile phone, or the battery running down at a critical moment, or the detective being a Verizon subscriber. Not Sugii -- indeed, this is a story that couldn't exist without cellphones. Alice is a 1337 h@x0r who uses the 'net for her initial investigation and then instructs her Baker Street Irregulars through their phones. This leads to one great moment when Alice sends Narumi to unlock a door at school without telling him why -- only for him to find Yondaime, a gangster who helps Alice with her investigations -- on the other side.
About half the book is set-up, establishing all the characters and the nature of Alice's detective agency. The actual mystery doesn't kick off until halfway in when a certain character commits suicide and Narumi asks Alice to investigate. It's not the most complex mystery in the world, largely consisting of tracking down the person responsible, but it's as dark as any fan of Spillane or Stark could ever want. I know some people argue that the sort of ending required to make a story noir precludes the possibility of a sequel, but I would point to this book as a counterexample. The ending bears a marked resemblance to Siodmak's The Killers and that famous line, "Don't ask a dyin' man to lie his soul into hell," but is far, far more vicious.
Character-wise, Narumi and Alice get the most attention this time around, though the Major comes off as distinct while Hiro and Tetsu are somewhat interchangeable. Like all the great detectives, Alice has a unique philosophy and methodology for her work, which she sums up with a pithy mission statement:
A detective is the representative of the deceased, looking for words lost from their graves, hurting the living for the sake of protecting the honour of the deceased, and condemning the dead for the sake of consoling the living.
Narumi, as you might expect, becomes her Watson, though he's far more interesting than the good Doctor or Archie Goodwin. If anything, he resembles a less sociopathic and arrogant version of Ii-chan from Nisioisin's Zaregoto series.
Of all the fan-translations I've read through Baka-Tsuki and other sources, this is the only one, apart from Toradora!, that is both good and could appeal to the typical American reader. Hopefully if Yen ever licenses more light-novel series, this will be one of their acquisitions.
November 1, 2012
It's my third series by Hikaru Sugii.
The first 1 is enjoyable, but not memorable nor any part of the series is particularly strong(SPS).
The 2nd 1 is the latest series by him, the first volume is like a replica of volume 1 of SPS.
So how does Kami Sama no Memo Chu fare?
I like it. Definitely much more well written than the other 2 series I've read. I'm surprised. The strongest point is definitely the dynamics between the characters.
The first 1 is enjoyable, but not memorable nor any part of the series is particularly strong(SPS).
The 2nd 1 is the latest series by him, the first volume is like a replica of volume 1 of SPS.
So how does Kami Sama no Memo Chu fare?
I like it. Definitely much more well written than the other 2 series I've read. I'm surprised. The strongest point is definitely the dynamics between the characters.
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December 29, 2013False
Displaying 1 - 5 of 5 reviews