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.
It comprises of 2 novella, with common themes between them. The title work, Night Market, is about a night market where many bizarre things are sold and a child wandered into it and exchanged his younger brother for baseball talent. 10 years later, he went to the night market and tried to get his brother back. In the second story, The Old Road of Wind, it’s about an old road that connects every part of Japan. A 7-year-old boy wandered into it accidentally but exited unscathed. 5 years later, he and his friend took that road again to use it as a shortcut to reach a park in another part of the town but this time, it became much more difficult to get out. Instead of horror, both stories are filled with melancholy and both are beautifully written. Each has a unique set of rules of how that special world, whether it’s the night market or the old road, operates like who and what can get out. It’s also nice that each has a cameo appearance in the other story, but I like the second story much more. It is so captivating. This collection of 2 short stories is relatively short. Highly recommend it.
It's interesting that this is categorized as horror. To me it feels more like fantasy. Make no mistake, there are definitely horrible things in this book, and the overall tone is pretty depressing. And yet I still got lost in it's magic.
There are actually two stories in this book, "夜市" and "風の古道, though both are very similar in theme and setting. Both are about different worlds in which humans from ours stumble into, and by the supernatural laws, can't escape from except if they meet very special conditions. Both have death in them and well as a rather gloomy overaching feel. They also both have a kind of bittersweet ending that I really enjoyed.
ไม่รู้ทำไมตอนอ่านนึกถึง Sen to Chihiro no Kamikakushi มันมีมู้ดความอึมครึม ลึกลับตลอดทั้งสองตอนในระหว่างที่อ่าน โดยรวมชอบเลย ไม่ได้รู้สึกอิมแพคเท่าไหร่แต่ก็คอมพลีทดี