toki

really powerful, haunting ruminations on the effects of child abuse throughout your life. i think labelling this book as "weird girl lit" or anything similarily reductive is doing a huge disservice to the way murata portrays disassociation, trauma, and a society that inherently neglects children & fosters their abusers. heart-wrenching, stomach-turning, nail-biting, but ultimately a very tragic and sorrow tale about abuse.

maybe i missed something with this one? i disliked a number of things:

- all the voices blurred together, which might have worked with the theme of unity/disunity, but all the statements were so bland and insipid that i didn't really care to distinguish them. there was a funeral director, certainly, but they were so same-in-tone and same-in-attitude as everyone else that nothing really interested me about their perception of life/death as a funeral director.

- because the voices all blurred together, good chunks of the narration were dedicated to being too obvious to the extent of being unrealistic, e.g characters outright introducing themselves as human or humanoid. the existential philosophy here didn't work for me; it felt like platitudes from ham-fisted raisonneurs rather than a diverse range of beliefs on what it means to be human

- i felt as if the themes were underdeveloped, particularly regarding capitalism. humanoids are essentially created to work, being used as a form of cheap labor, and yet, this book dances around the idea. sure, there are some snide comments here and there, but no real exploration on life as inseparable from capitalism.

overall, i feel like there are better books that do the same thing the employees tries to do, both in style/form & substance.

this was such a fun read! darko dawson is such a sweet and delightful character who has genuine love for his wife and son, to the extent that it propels his character and the plot forwards. honestly, most of my enjoyment came from reading dawson's inner dialogue & his interactions with others

i really wanted to like this book, esp because it was such a labor of love, but it just wasn't to my tastes :( i wish kyoko was given more time, esp wrt her relationship to her mom. really disliked how kornell was depicted; i think his character could have been more fleshed out. as it stands, he feels like a caricature existing only to emphasize kyoko's "smallness" or to further her arc .... their relationship was very sweet so i'm sad he didn't get more than what he did.

did not like daniel, did not like how much sympathy & time he was afforded.

i was very much struck by the writing, so maybe min's first book is better suited for me?

brilliant; about 30 pages in, you start reading this book differently. it transforms from a collection of (seemingly random) quotes & factoids into themes you have to read between the lines for. markson changes the way you read / think / interpret and the way he does it is incredible