レーエンデ国物語
Finished — 2024-12-24
Upon moving to Tokyo I was determined to get reacquainted with the current landscape of fiction, with how to navigate the overwhelming bookstores, and to choose something just right to read through like a relatively normal member of the Japanese-language reading public. On visits to my local bookstores, this volume kept standing out to me. I committed to reading it, and diligently dungeon-crawled through more than half of it at about a page or two a day. I took a break to read some other books in Japanese, namely the lighter Recovery Kabahiko and some manga. It eventually called me back and I was proud to finish it just over a year after beginning it.
Tasaki has a prodigious number of books out in this series and others, highlighting how hard it would be for me to truly latch on to an author and follow all of their work. She can write quite a lot faster than I can read. I likely won’t continue on with this series any time soon. But it felt like a fine journey to take on my first year living here, and it’s a book I’ll always look back fondly on.
My enjoyment of what turned out to be a pretty standard fantasy novel was closely correlated to how much it felt like a Dwarf Fortress campaign (charting the geography of a potential trade route, secrets of castle architecture, carving a defensible complex into a mountainside, risky endeavors in controlled flooding), and inversely to how much it felt like an anime (“You mustn’t go, it’s too dangerous!” “No you mustn’t go, it’s too dangerous!”).