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I can’t believe that Genshin SP is this week already!! I haven’t done much in the game lately because I was too busy with my Japanese novel. I really want to finish the WQ before the new version…

Since I started 百年の時効, I haven’t read anything else… Usually, I’m fine with reading three books at the same time, but sometimes there are books that require all your attention and you really want to entirely focus on them. That was the case with 百年の時効.

I didn’t have any currently reading book in Chinese, and I had just finished a chapter of my Korean novel (each chapter is focused on a different case, so they are semi-independent and taking a break is not that punishing), so I only read 百年の時効 for a whole week.

Now I think that my focus for the rest of the month will be to finish 교통사고 전문 삼비 탐정. I will also buy a new Chinese novel soon, and think about my next Japanese read. I will probably go for something lighter this time!

百年の時効 was absolutely amazing, it’s such a great police procedural and so well written, so well documented and so engrossing all along.
The novel really shines with its setting, it spawns three eras, Showa, Heisei and Reiwa, and we follow four police detectives working on the same case: the brutal killing of a family that took place in 1974.
The novel is a real exploration of Japan’s society, politics and economical landscape of the second half of the 20th Century, everything felt very real and very documented. Real criminal cases, persons and major events that completely shook Japanese society are present in the novel, but what I really loved is that they also affect our plot and our fictional characters, even sometimes dramatically, so the story felt very real and anchored in reality. Many times I had the feeling that I was reading romanised true crime and had to remind me that it was fiction… that’s how real it all felt.
The police detectives we follow are also all very different, influenced by their generation, their background, the era in which they grew up. It’s also true for the way investigations are conducted, from the time when the police actually cooperated with criminal organisations, to the developments in psychology or forensics. I personally found this aspect of the novel very interesting, it sometimes gave me Mindhunter vibes!
Not only does the novel spawns decades, but the plot is also closely linked to Japanese history: the setting is not just a setting, it influences the plot, so we travel through these eras while investigating the case. I really loved it, the author really managed to keep the novel engrossing, with a really good pace all along. It never felt like the case was a pretext to depict Showa society or something like that, the plot really stays central all along and it was impossible to put the book down.
The novel is really a solid police procedural, but it also borrows from other genres, sometimes feeling like a financial thriller, sometimes like a shakai-ha mystery depicting societal corruption and the connections between politicians, banks, yakuza and the police, sometimes like a honkaku mystery (the end in particular felt like the big reveal of detective novels).
The plot is very complex, there are a lot of ramifications and it’s important to have a clear vision of the characters’ relationships and what happened when. Even though I read it everyday until I finished it, I still had to take some notes to remember important facts or how characters were linked.
There is not a single thing I didn’t like, I find 百年の時効 really impressive, I really hope it gets translated into English!

I finished it! The end was so… both amazing and unexpected, it felt like reading a honkaku mystery all of a sudden, I was not anticipating that! I thought that the mystery was solved already, and it was just a matter of finding enough evidence, but the end still manages to surprise the reader.

I finished the Heisei chapter! I didn’t think the plot could get more complex than it already was, but it did! The roots and ramifications of the case go much deeper than it looks at first, this book is really impressive.

Reading Sandrone’s character details in Chinese made me realise something!
Alain initially called her 小玛丽安 “Little Mary-Ann” as a souvenir of his sister, then decided that Sandrone deserved her own identity, and only continued to call her Little Mary-Ann in his heart.
People in Snezhnaya call her 木偶 mù’ǒu, which means “puppet” or “marionette”.
But in the English translation, both 小玛丽安 and 木偶 are translated to “Marionette” which is confusing and does not convey Alain’s initial intention as well (to me, “marionette” does not sound at all like something related to the name Mary-ann).

I should level up her skill to 9, but… I haven’t played Sandrone a lot in difficult combat, and I also don’t have Yae Miko, so for now, she’s driving Bineffa…? I really don’t feel motivated to improve and artifacts, so that’s Sandrone’s build for now.

I made some progress on 花之歌, I find this one a little bit more difficult to understand than the other ones.

I saw the trailer for the new Where Winds Meet version… it looks amazing! I’m still at the beginning of the Kaifeng chapter…

I’ll probably listen to 只有你听到 Calling You later today, I haven’t listened to it for a while…

I finished the event! I didn’t like the mini game all that much, I’m not a fan of the shooting gameplay generally speaking, but this one in particular didn’t feel that interesting to me…

Not reading as much as I would like today, but I do want to read this book every day if possible, because the plot is so complex, I’m afraid I will forget details. Writing this book must have required a lot of research and work, it’s crazy how good it is. I’m 3/4 into it, and the book has been extremely engrossing all along.

I thought I had reached 11% of 霜月 (Frost Moon) as a region, but now I realised it’s actually 11% of 月之高地 which is one of the three regions of the Frost Moon!
I’ll have to pick up the pace if I want to complete (80%) the exploration before Snezhnaya…

I was afraid that after the Showa chapter, the story would lose its pace and suspense, but the Heisei chapter is as good as the previous one!