Beginner Japanese Book Club // Now Reading: ひとりぼっちの〇〇生活 // Next: ルックバック

This will be a long shot, not sure how appropriate or fitting it is for a general book club, but here I go

ウスズミの果て (Usuzumi no Hate)

No alternative English title as far as I can tell

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Natively: Level 25

Summary

Japanese summary

生命が滅亡した地球を、少女はひとり歩き続ける。
彼女の任務は生存者の捜索と土地の浄化。
果たして、人間は見つかるのか?

English summary (translated from Japanese)

A lone girl is walking the desolate Earth. Her job is to look for survivors and cleanse the land. Will she find anyone?

Availability

Digital: Amazon, Bookwalker
Physical: Amazon, CD Japan

Personal Opinion

I absolutely fell in love with the book the second I started reading. It’s certainly not a light read, it deals with some heavy philosophical topics, but all of them are executed very well and they aren’t bogged down by difficult language.

The art is hands down beautiful. The manga has this pencil drawn aesthetic to it, with cross-hatching doing a ton of the detail work. Some of the double spreads actually made me pause to look around because of the amount of detail in there.

Difficulty-wise, it might seem very long (232 pages), but it’s not very text heavy. The actual text-length could easily make it into an ABBC nomination if it had furigana. With that and the fact that there is a decently limited vocabulary at use, I would say that it’s a great introduction for anyone into reading furiganaless books. The fonts themselves are also very legible, only rarely does it get switched out, and even in those situations it’s not bad.

And now for the part I’m hesitant about.
Content warnings: Very slight violence, dead bodies, dead children

Pros and Cons

Pros

  • Relatively simple, low text density
  • The sample is very long, the entire first chapter and around half of the second

Cons

  • Heavy material in some cases
  • Long chapters

Pictures

First Three Pages of Chapter One



Additional Pages



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