For me, the best thing about this book is that I’m done with it. And I can check off a square in my 2012 personal reading challenge….
With due respect to the subject matter, I did not care for it at all as a novel. The writing is, for the most part, terribly stilted. The dialogue, in particular, is just unbearable. Whether that is the original or the translation, I don’t know; so the result on the page is all I have to go by. There is maybe 20-50 pages of material that is stretched into 300, numbingly repetitive -- just like Shigematsu’s endless trudges from one town to the other and back and forth and on and on.
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