5/5 stars on Goodreads
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| Associate Professor Akira Takatsuki’s Conjecture by Mikage Sawamura |
Associate
Professor Akira Takatsuki’s Conjecture is a Japanese light novel set in a
university in present day Tokyo. Naoya Fukamachi is a first-year student trying
to figure out college life and what he wants to study. What he doesn’t want are
activity clubs and friends. If at all possible, he would stay away from people
completely.
Naoya has a
unique ability to hear lies. It’s a distortion of sound that is painful for him,
so much so that if many people lie around him, he might faint. To survive, he
hasn’t a single friend, and even casual acquaintances are upsetting, because he
doesn’t want to know when they lie. Large lecture halls are a nightmare.
But they
can’t be avoided. On a whim—or so he tells himself—he attends a course on folklore that
specializes in urban legends, ghost stories, and strange phenomena. It’s held
by professor Akira Takatsuki whose enthusiasm for his topic keeps the students
glued to their seats—or it’s because he’s very handsome.
For extra
credit, Naoya submits a story of a strange event that happened to him, and even
though he doesn’t tell everything, Professor Takatsuki knows it’s real. He’s an
eccentric person who gets excited fast, and so he decides to make Naoya his
assistant, mostly because Naoya has common sense the professor lacks and can read
maps. And then he learns about Naoya’s ability and it turns out that the
professor has a similar story in his past.
The book
consists of three cases the pair investigate. There’s a haunted house, a curse,
and a girl who has been spirited away. They’re fun stories, though not
particularly difficult to solve, with some exciting action too. And they are
good windows to Japanese society and folklore. A lot of folklore. The author is
either a folklorist himself, or a true enthusiast. Occasionally the book reads
like lecture notes, but everything is always interesting—at least
for a historian like me.
But the
main mystery remains unsolved for now. What happened to Naoya and the professor
when they were children. Were they genuine supernatural events or something
more mundane. What they know is that both have been permanently altered because
of it.
This was a
good start for a series. The cases were complete and the book ends at a natural
point and not with a cliffhanger. Naoya and Takatsuki were great characters and
complete opposites of each other; the teacher student dynamic was occasionally
upside down, which probably doesn’t translate well to western readers. For a light
novel, the story had a more mature feel than I usually associate with them, and
it reads more like a paranormal cozy mystery than a young adult novel. I’d very
much like to read more and I hope the rest of the seven volumes are translated
too.
I received
a free copy from Edelweiss in exchange for an honest review.