𝐿𝑒𝑒.

The weight and warmth of Tamayo's body in his arms, her virginal fragrance like fresh-picked fruit, the pulsing of the blood in her silken skin...

Ah! some good Good Old Japanese infantilization! EW.

So Tamayo was just a pretty face afterall. Why am I not surprised? Sighs.

I don't know what I was expecting from the ending but that was... disappointing.

This was definitely not mindless by any means. Kafka's prose offers incisive examination of human nature, exposing our capacity for selfishness and conditional love with unsettling clarity.

But it wasn't a fun read. Definitely recommend if you want to be fucking marinated in misery for a few hours. I mean, there is already so much bad in the world, I don't want to want to immerse myself in more of it when I pick up a book. So I'll just rate it a little lower. Maybe I was not in the mood for something so emotionally suffocating.

I would say the reveal was good enough, not something we've never seen before but okay.

You don't see it coming, and that's definitely not because it's such a sharp, unexpected twist that it completely blows your mind but rather because the rest of the story is not good enough to match up to the twist itself. It doesn't build up the reveal.

The plot is non-linear, but you don't know it up until that very moment. It's intentional. It's just also very run-of-the-mill.

Not to mention, this twist worked only because we're listening/reading. It won't work in a movie (Yeah, there's a movie in the works). Or maybe my pea-brain can't seem to comprehend how it will.