Journey Under the Midnight Sun

Review

My enthusiasm for this book started off low and slowly grew until by the end, I was pretty hooked. The tactic of focusing on different characters in different points of their lives in successive chapters made it a little difficult for me to feel connected to the characters at the beginning, but I would say that that was worth it for the delicious sense of each chapter adding a new facet to the story. The plot was intricate, well-crafted, and full of interesting characters, and I enjoyed the setting in the early days of the internet era, where the notion of what a computer could do was changing by the year. The overall feeling, for me, was one of entanglement in a giant spiderweb, where the truth of the story was the hapless insect slowly being wrapped, chapter by chapter, into a bite-sized bundle. The only thing I would have changed is that I didn't feel like I got to know the antagonists at all. That seemed to me to be by design, but the emotional impact of the final reveal was less intense than I felt it should have been because I didn't really know the characters involved. Semi-unrelated note: This is the second thriller/mystery novel I've read that was originally written in Japanese (after Bullet Train by Kotaro Isaka). I'm not sure whether it's a feature of Japanese novels writ large or the translations I've read or just these two novels, but I found both to be extremely matter of fact and light on stylistic flair. The plot, far more so than the writing, was the centerpiece. It really makes me wonder if that's the way the two come off in the original Japanese.