狐笛のかなた (Koteki no Kanata) Home Thread

Oh, I see! If you join the read aloud sessions, you’d know exactly what to discuss in a given week since we’ll have just reread it. Though I guess you couldn’t really participate in the reading part itself since you don’t have a copy of the book available. :cry:

Yeah, that makes sense. Similar to Nicole, since I can read on my own at a faster pace now, I’m finding it harder to follow along week after week for several months. And like I mentioned, this would be 6+ months per book which is really long.

As I mentioned, I need a break. But I might be interested in reading the first 守り人 book at some point. Definitely not the whole series though, and probably not 鹿の王 since it’s four books. We’ll see.

In the meantime, I’m just going to try to get a read aloud session going for an upcoming intermediate or advanced book club pick if it’s one I’m interested in.

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Ah, it’s not the fantasy setting that bothers me - it’s more it being so simplistic… (will save more comments for the after-book-discussion :grin:)

I’m looking forward to it :slight_smile:

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But maybe her other books are more like 獣の奏者!

It would be interesting to read some fantasy targeted at adults rather than young teens, but I wonder how painful that might be. :thinking:

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“Painful” + “fantasy” makes me think of Lord of the Rings :rofl:

I almost died during the intro, and I read it in GERMAN, mind you!

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I, err, didn’t feel the book was more simplistic (or not) than 獣の奏者, though. In fact, I could pretty much use the “management needs you to find the difference between those two pictures books” meme.

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I felt like 狐笛のかなた was almost a practice run for 獣の奏者. There are similarities for sure. I just felt like 獣の奏者 had more depth in terms of characters, story, and worldbuilding.

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I feel like that’s just down to page count, though. With more pages, you can just scale the number of details (including the number of factions, give them additional goals/motivations, etc). It’s like looking at a more zoomed in (or zoomed out, depending on which book you take as reference) version of the same fractal :stuck_out_tongue:

For me, the book definitely lacks nuances. What I mean with this is that at least from (top-level) chapter 2 onward, one had a pretty good understanding of who was “good” and who was “bad”, there were no doubts, no inner conflicts, no ambiguities. That (missing) aspect is what I personally would call “depth”, and that’s definitely not related to numbers of pages (i.e. length of narration) but to quality of narration. Granted, Kemono was also a children’s book, and it had lots of simplistic aspects, but in general there was more variation and more surprises. And more characters where it was not obvious from the start how they would behave and develop (e.g. Semiya, but also the Touda-Clan princes, and probably a few others).

Apart from that, what I really find boring is the obnoxious OP-ness of the characters.
“Oh, by the way, of course the foxes can move fast enough to catch an arrow in-flight.”
“Oh, by the way, of course if you get bitten by a fox, the spit is toxic.”
“Oh, by the way, of course the foxes can run day and night without getting tired.”
That narrative is missing the “human element” of being fallible, which makes everything so much more relatable (for me at least). Erin also came across as pretty OP in many situations, but she still had her moments of failure and doubt.

And, last not least, I really dislike when the world lacks logic without that being properly addressed. I know that it’s a fantasy story, and I’m not referring to magic or shape-shifting or these things, but e.g. the foxes being able to remove their poison from a person’s body after it has entered the blood stream? How does this work, do they have a blood filter in their tongue? Things like these just trip me up and make the story boring for me because it feels like “Oh, we need a solution to this problem… By the way, we have this OP character here who has this ability that I never bothered to mention before, but boy does it come in handy right now!” I know the author can do better (e.g. in 鹿の王 she explained all sorts of medical intricacies in every detail possible, and think of her explanations of Erin communicating with Riran in Kemono).

Well, I was planning to write this up only after the club ended, but I couldn’t help it :sweat_smile:
I tried to blur the possible spoilers, but if you think I should blur more, please tell me.

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Well, also skipping straight to the post book discussion then :joy:
(Not that I feel bad about it, since I was really waiting for that)

I strongly disagree with that statement. From my point of view, literally everyone was some (usually dark) shade of gray. I.e., everyone was either neutral or bad. Ah, I guess the mother of the main character was good? But she’s dead, so :woman_shrugging:
In 獣の奏者, it was pretty much just Uncle Creepy who was bad, others were gray (possibly manipulated) or good (although, that’s pretty much just Erin by the end of the story, and maybe the new ヨジェ? I’m really bad at names. Ah, that’s Semiya, I think?).

Hm, that didn’t really bother me, but that’s probably because those characteristics are fairly standard for 妖怪 and assimilated :thinking: If you think that’s OP, then, probably, かくりよの宿飯 is not the book series for you :stuck_out_tongue: (and it’s mostly about cooking, too…).

Ah, that one is really standard in (Japanese?) fantasy. Dog-like 妖怪 (which include foxes, I guess?) can cure by liking wounds. Well, Ponyo as well, even though she is a fish… My point is, liking = curing in pop culture, so it did not feel strange at the time.

So, on those points, I’d say that the fantasy element was fairly standard, which made it easy to grasp.

In that specific case, I did not like it so much, since, well, I know how (鹿の王 spoiler) vaccination and serums work. I understand that she has to establish that those characters know that too, but in that specific case, that feels like overtech compared to the rest of the world. Also, speaking of OP, ヴァン? “How am I going to remove my cast iron shackles? Oh, I’m just going to tear them open with my bare hands” (not that I mind it, though, I do like OP characters in general :sweat_smile:)

About this book, overall, I did like that there was no good guy (although you apparently disagree :thinking:), pretty much everyone has a “good” reason for not backing down (e.g. they humiliated/murdered my family), which is also a staple of tragedies, but felt relatable (to me).

The one thing that made me go “what” was at the very end when the female fox (?) tells the main character to blow in the fox whistle just because, who knows, it might work? And then it does and solves the problem of her not being able to get a proper romance with … fox. (Yes, I don’t remember any name from the whole thing. The main character was 小夜? Then some characters had names riffing on 春? Eeh…)

In the end, I think I liked the story better than 獣の奏者, but that might be due to other factors. (Also, I am technically only halfway through the whole story of 獣, so that might change later).

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My point was not that most people were “good” but that it was clear from the start for most characters which “side” they belonged to :slight_smile:

But while we’re at it, I think quite a bunch of them were “good”:
Our protag 小夜 was quite naive but good through and through
Her childhood friend was good as well (but he got turned around by the evil forces in the middle part which might have led to some ambiguities but was presented quite clearly as such)
The people from the estate in the plum tree forest were good as well
The lover fox was also good (although we learn in chapter 1 already that he should be bad really) although that belief got a bit contested when he stabbed that other dude during the inauguration ceremony
The kitchen lady from the other estate was also good
and probably a few others I’ve forgotten already :sweat_smile:

I can totally understand that for normal wounds (I mean that’s even how normal everyday dogs work), just together with the poison inside the body, I found that very unbelievable. But if that’s standard, then that might explain it a bit better.

And that’s exactly my point: Given I’m reading a fantasy book, if something that’s unrealistic / wrong / strange is explained coherently, I can totally follow along and agree with that explanation in the context of the book. Like in 鹿の王 (have you read further than the first book yet? Otherwise spoilers) the story about the mosses and their healing powers that saved the two protags.

Hehe, true! Well, I’m not saying that the author only had OP-free characters in all other books of hers :sweat_smile: (Erin and the medical dude from 鹿の王 come to mind as well) It’s just that in this book the characters were just too black-and-white, too OP, with not enough depth and nuances for my liking.

I think I wouldn’t mind the cooking bit at least :stuck_out_tongue_winking_eye: But I have a hunch that a lot of the stuff that’s being discussed e.g. in the 多読 thread by you and others would not be for me… :woman_shrugging:

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@NicoleIsEnough and @Naphthalene: deeply analyzes the story, characters, and world

Me: “was it fun?” :laughing:


I do agree with that, though it would have been better if we saw more from the other side’s perspective too. They were portrayed as “the bad guys” simply because we saw everything from one side. You could easily have told the story from their side and portray them as the tragic hero getting revenge or something like that. But unfortunately it was told very one sided.

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Finally have the time to reply :smiley:

Ah, in that case, yes. But that was not a problem for me (I did not even think about it), since the focus was more on the tragedie (both sides would rather not fight, but have to as doing anything else would be political suicide, plus the issue is very loaded emotionally for both sides).

Hm, I don’t agree with all of those statements.

  • For me 小夜 is neutral. She does care about the people she is close to, but she doesn’t care about the feud with the neighbors, despite the impact on human life. Instead, she chose to just go home (until someone she cares about got involved). Arguably, saving the fox as a child was good, though, but I feel that can be attributed to innocence rather than being good.
  • Childhood friend was amicable when he was a kid (and maybe good as well, but it’s hard to say). I think it’s his upbringing that made him harder rather than the curse. The curse made him feel more distant, though, since he believed it was a dream.
  • The people from the estate in the plum tree forest are pretty much just doing their job. They are nice to 小夜, but that’s mostly because they have a connection through her mother. They are not bad, but they certainly don’t go above and beyond to try to stop the feud or save lives or feed orphans.
  • Lover fox is definitely not good. He only cares about 小夜 and a bit about childhood friend, other foxes and half Tengu friend. He will not give half a thought about killing people.
  • We don’t know enough about the kitchen lady, but sure, she was nice.
  • The one character I thought was good in the book was 小夜’s mother.

Ah, I want to clarify that I meant that as a combination of “妖怪 fox can provide magical healing” and “magical healing can cure poison, even magical poison”. (Plus, it was “fox” poison too, so it felt reasonable that it would work on it). If the world was more grounded in the laws of physics (like 獣の奏者) I would not find it as “believable”.

I have, but I haven’t reached that part yet :sweat_smile: I’m having a lot of trouble securing time to sit down and read a physical book these days (or, when I do, I’m already in the middle of an ebook and read that instead).

I see what you mean. Still, I did not really see a difference in depth compared to, say, 獣の奏者, just a difference in volume :thinking:

Yeah… sadly, they are often not for me either and yet I’m still reading them. I should probably try to be more okay with just dropping books. Especially since, if I like a book or series, I’m having a hard time starting to read it, since I’m weirdly excited about the experience (and at the same time am afraid of being disappointed). For something I don’t care about? Whatever, I just plow ahead.
That attitude has been strongly biasing my reading toward stuff I do not really enjoy :confused:

This is fun

Right. Maybe I’m just adding depth to the book on my own :stuck_out_tongue: I guess I was thinking too much about the leader of the side shown being an a**hole for not letting the water through for considering him a “good” guy. Obviously, the other side can live without that resource, but it would make a world of difference. The only tool they have at their disposition is spy/foxes, so when all you have is a hammer, everything looks like foxfood. But indeed that’s just me overthinking the situation and it’s never made explicit.

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If we’re doing this now… :slight_smile:

Thoughts on the book and shades of grey

I personally felt there was a lot of grey in the book as well. The book is told mostly through 小夜’s pov, and people on ‘her side’, i.e. her country. So as a reader we naturally expect to, and naturally do, identify more with this side. We simply learn and get to know more about them and their motivations.

For a good while, things are portrayed like that. This side is good, the other side is bad. They really get a villain’s introduction too. :sweat_smile:

But then later on we find out that it was the ‘good’ side that started the conflict, and learn more about the ‘bad’ side’s motivations as well.

And while 小夜 thinks it is a useless conflict and they should just share the country and water that’s in the middle of it, she does indeed not try to do anything about it. Throughout the course of the book, I felt most of her actions were dictated by what other people told her to do. (I’m not saying that’s bad.) She did choose to go home for some alone time, and she did choose to go save 野火 in the end. These are motivated by selfish reasons in my opinion, rather than a motivation to be good.

Which is good, I like that much better in a character.

春望 (I think. 小春丸’s father) as well is certainly not good. He is the head of a country, and he thinks of people and even his own kids primarily as political pieces to carry on the feud. He chooses to continue the feud at the cost of his people’s lives. But in the end he makes a ‘good’ decision and prioritizes his kids’ lives.

While I found enough nuance in here to enjoy the book (even the first half :D), I can totally understand wanting a more complex story. It is a children’s book and told rather simply.

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Not sure whether I can add significantly to this any more, I just wanted to mention that I realized that I was using the term “good” in a much narrower sense, but I’m having a hard time describing it exactly :sweat_smile: Maybe it’s more the strong predictability of the narrative that made me dislike it…
To give you a counterexample to this, e.g. in Yougisha X, we had the protagonist who was very likeable but at the same time killed a person which produces a nice conflict in the reader’s mind (at least, in me and also in you, given your comments) and made me reflect on my values. Also the math teacher was totally hard to be classified - at first he was described as an unpleasant person, but then he helped the protag, which changed my point of view of him quite a bit, but on the other hand the question of “why did he do this?” remained the whole time, and in the end it turned out that he also killed a person which then flipped everything around again. Every twist and turn kept me on my toes, and it was very interesting to observe how the author played with my viewpoints and judgments and tossed them around throughout the course of the story.

I must say I liked the aspect of the conflict, but again it was so predictable that each side just kept clinging to their pov of “the others did so much wrong to us, we cannot cave in” and the obvious solution of sharing the water again in the end. No surprises to be had here. :woman_shrugging:

I’d definitely be up for that :slight_smile:

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On to chapter 4!

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I almost forget to post these every week. :sweat_smile:

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Second to last week!

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Well that’s all! I’ll put up some polls later in the week.

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Here are a couple of polls now that everyone has finished the book.

How much did you enjoy 狐笛のかなた?
  • 1 - Hated it
  • 2 - Disliked it
  • 3 - Neither liked it nor disliked it
  • 4 - Liked it
  • 5 - Loved it

0 voters

How did you like 狐笛のかなた compared to 獣の奏者 (books 1 and 2)?
  • Liked 獣の奏者 better
  • Liked 狐笛のかなた better
  • Liked 獣の奏者 and 狐笛のかなた about the same
  • Didn’t read both books / Not sure

0 voters