Reviews and Comments

I genuinely enjoy the kind of story that is presented in Dr STONE, where people are having to struggle together and build solidarity with others in order to survive. I like that they place the science in it as a core narrative component, which makes it kind of fun.

But I hate the direction that it takes starting from around this volume, and it's largely because it's playing into these weird structures of: a) science is inherently good and scientific progress is a straight line from point A to point B to point C and so on; b) the people who didn't like that progressivist structure are inherently violent types who seek to destroy knowledge; c) people against hierarchies inherently want to instill another hierarchy, which also continues to use the propaganda conflation about the idea of 'anarchy' as being 'nothing but chaos' (even when it's not being explicitly stated).

I'm also not a fan of the fact that the anti-intellectual side is also the only side engaging in Malthusian beliefs ("the world can't support 7 billion of us now, so the herd must be culled" is literally a line within this volume), but we know from our own experiences that the intellectuals have also engaged in this belief (even in Japan)... So the values that are being associated with varying people are very... Well, it feels very propagandistic? And it's hard not to notice.

I feel like we could make better books about organising for children than those that focus on charity, and this includes climate- and environment-related actions. So much of what we do to tell children how they can help is to "donate money" or "find sponsors to donate money (while we do difficult things, like swimming)," and it's not... actual action to solve the problem at hand. This is my first issue with this (and many other) books on this subject.

But I also find it frustrating in it not putting responsibility on who (particularly in terms of region) has created a lot of the problems that exist across the globe. Yes, "people are cutting down all [the panda's] bamboo," but why? What is the reason for this? Yes, there has been a decrease in parrots in Mexico "because their trees are being chopped down" but why? Yes, some people steal the horns of rhinoceros, but why?

I think a better structure would be, rather than just writing a book to throw out all the issues animals face, to write about the animal you're wanting to discuss. Or write about actually organising instead of just simply raising funds to donate to some organisation that (most likely) already has a lot of money but aren't using it as wisely as they should be.

My main issues include: The translator decided to use the sentence "She was a Japanese," which I'm surprised wasn't updated in newer versions but... okay. The naming conventions are inconsistent (sometimes last name-first name, other times first name-last name). There's an obvious failure of the translator to know what a child of an American would call their own mother when speaking English (even though this is a well-known difference, and it would've been true in the mid-century setting and when it was translated in the 80s), which is just a little obnoxious. But these are largely just small picks.

What I really think this book suffers from is improper marketing. Its inclusion as a 'mystery' book is correct, but I think its constant description as a 'classic mystery' and being marketed next to things that do fit 'classic mystery' does nothing to really help it. This is because a 'classic mystery' to most people who engage in mysteries is to see it in the realm of there being a detective who you follow with an obvious crime to solve as you do, and this book isn't... that.

And that's fine. But the marketing team at Pushkin Vertigo really need to understand what the book is in order to help it properly find its audience... Especially when they're marketing it to people who enjoyed reading their other translated mystery novels, which are... very different from this.

I also think this book is misunderstood by people who read it (which can stem from the improper marketing), and I'm saying this because of how many people I've seen complain of its tell-over-show quality. The way the story is told is... through telling because the events of the crime have already happened long ago in the past for the characters. You're not following the 'mystery' of the kidnapped child of seven years ago, and that kidnapped child is not really the most important part of the story. He is an important part, but he and his kidnapping are not the core of the story. They are solvable elements, but they're not the point.

The focus is on the loneliness of 'spinster' women. There's a reason it takes place in an apartment block entirely dedicated to the lives of young women (and later older women). It's about the ways in which society completely neglects and overlooks their lives, especially once they're no longer "useful" to society. It's about what loneliness, especially under a variety of circumstances, can drive people to do (even in a very negative form). It's about how we can misunderstand the people around us because, rather than engage with them directly, we're encouraged to gossip and skirt around issues. It's about the assumptions we make of other people using what little evidence we have. Hell, it's even about the grief of loss and how that can negatively impact people.

I originally complained that this book was more like creepy vignettes than a mystery novel, but that 'creepy vignette' structure had a point. It was to show the reader all of these people, everything they do in their loneliness and grief and vanity and... whatever. We're being shown who these people are and what they're driven to do and why they're driven to do it.

The mystery itself is secondary, and that's... fine.

The Kindaichi Kosuke series of books is currently one of my favourite, especially as it does a lot within the genre that typically goes undone. Something that I noticed this time around and was able to ruminate on was that a lot of the books still hold a degree of humanity for the murderer, even when they clearly don't support their behaviour. This is something that I appreciate because it really does highlight that people can and do horrible things but that they're still people (which I think actually makes them more terrifying instead of less terrifying).

I point this out because it's something that is done in the solution to the case, and it's something that I frequently find myself wanting to see more of because I think it's best that we not separate ourselves too much from these horrible people (as in, we can definitely separate ourselves ideologically, but we shouldn't be doing it on a species-wide level... something I've also noticed with real-world politics and problems).

Anyway, it's engaging as always. The translator does a wonderful job, and all of these books feel like they've been written from one person (even though they've all largely been translated by a handful of different people).