Book Girl 1: Book Girl and the Suicidal Mime

Mizuki Nomura – Yen Press – 2010 – 15 volumes
this is a novel

I’m always reluctant to start another novel series… but the ones that get licensed in the US are always so well-chosen that it’s hard to pass them up. Plus, the title of this was “Book Girl and the Suicidal Mime,” which is pretty much a guaranteed buy from me. What can I say?

It’s a mystery (another favorite of mine), but it takes some time to pick up as the main characters are introduced. We meet Konoha and Tohko, the two sole members of the book club at their school. Konoha is a child prodigy, a winner of a young novel-writing contest whose subsequent novel was best-seller material. The pressure got to him, and today he lives in obscurity, burned out and jaded from the ordeal. Tohko is a book girl. She eats books, vividly describing the tastes of classics as she chows down on the pages. She’s also Konoha’s sempai, and bullied him into the book club so that he would write “delicious” stories for her to consume. She isn’t aware of his past, but he’s the only one at the school that knows she consumes the written word.

The plot of the novel kicks off when Tohko agrees to help an underclassman girl named Chia write love letters to a member of the archery club she admires. Chia doesn’t have the confidence to write her own letters, so Tohko forces Konoha to do it for Chia. One letter turns into a daily chore when Chia swears that the boy, named Shuji, really likes the letters she gives him. Konoha contents himself with the fact he seems to be making Chia very happy… until he learns that there may not be a Shuji. And that he looks just like a student who died at the school ten years ago. And when he tries to investigate both, he only comes up with blanks.

This was a bizarre book in many ways, but I think its strongest point is that it would fit on the shelf right alongside any other young adult literature. I’m a big fan of giving light novels a cover to make them more comfortable outside the manga section of the bookstore, and this fits the bill while keeping the same cover art as the original (I’m definitely not against changing it, for instance, it works great for the Haruhi Suzumiya novels). Also, the content of Book Girl and the Suicidal Mime is mostly just a straight-up mystery. While YA literature covers a large number of genres, many of the light novels I’ve read have very manga-centric plots, whereas this has a more general feel to it. Good news for me, a bookstore employee, trying to put this into the hands of the masses (although I work at a used bookstore, so me putting it into the hands of the masses has little impact on Yen Press’s success outside word of mouth).

I also love the plot progression. It has a dark prologue and some hints in a bold typeface and diary-style format that indicate a murder may have been committed, but the actual story starts off with a peaceful scene in the book club. It continues in this vein as Konoha writes the love letters for the blissful Chie. And then things go wrong, first when Chie runs crying through the rain, then when all the niceness just caves on on Konoha and the book turns into a full-blown mystery, complete with a conclusion where a character threatens suicide. It’s great stuff, and it was hard to put down once the darker elements really got going. And I loved how it saved the explanation for the diary-like darkness to the very end. I was misled the whole time.

It was a quick, easy, enjoyable, and genuinely good read. And it left enough mysteries surrounding the main characters that I’m really looking forward to picking up the second book. It’ll probably be another mystery, but I do so love Konoha and Tohko, and they’ll be there, too.