Zaregoto Series (Light Novel discussion)
 

Title:戯言シリーズ (The Nonsense Series)
Author:西尾維新 (NisiOisin)
Illustrations:take

It's completed at 9 Vols and 6 Titles

Summery of Vol 1:
Trapped on an island owned by Akagami Iria, a disinheireted "princess", surrounded by geniuses, and mildly annoyed that someone has started cutting their heads off, the Zaregoto series' inhumanly alienated narrator Kunagisa Tomo's escort/guardian/assistant "li-chan" decides he can't wait a week for the detective to get there and starts trying to solve the case himself. As it's not like he hasn't seen a dead body before.

Um, I request a mod edit the topic title.

Zaregoto is a LIGHT NOVEL series, and it should be states as such in the title.

I actually own the first volume which was released by Del Rey. I've began reading it and I must say its very interesting and I'm really getting into it. ^_^

-Matt

Necro-ing another dead topic.

Any other readers out there besides the ones that hang around in the LN Rec topic? I recently just finished the 6th volume (5th title), and I must say that ... is a tough one to stomach (before this it took like 3 months to finish the previous title). This series is a long process of hurt and small but quick heals. The goal seemed to be how much can you screw a person over before he completely breaks down, then you tape that person back up and you hurt him even more than ever.

There ... are so much mental and physical abuse to Ii-chan that at some points for me I had to stop reading and go do something else before coming back to the plot. The novel at the basis is a mystery novel, yet at the core there is a much greater enigma that I still don't know wtf is going on (since he just introduced a TON of shit that he never mentioned in the previous 5 novels). One thing I like about this series is every ALWAYS without fail come to a really good explanation at the end of each title.

Another point is the characters, I just kinda brieftly looked at volume 7 and there are around 40 characters mentioned at the bios. Usually with huge long epic stories I can't remember who the hell is who by the end of like 2 volumes, but here I still remember almost all of them because each of they are so unique with their own idiosyncrasies and personalities that set them apart in an unique unforgetabble way ... though the sad (awesome) thing is that they almost all end up dead yet still come back to haunt Ii-chan in some way.

With volume 2 recently released in English I think this might be a good time to bring the thread back up and see if I can get more people interested in this again =P.

Still waiting on my copy of Vol 2 to ship! Is there a tentative date for Vol 3 set yet?

I was lucky enough to receive mine on the morning on my trip (the beauty of pre-orders) so I had planned to finish reading throughout my vacation, but the moment I started flipped the first page, I went ahead and finished the whole thing in 2 days :heh:

So yeah, The Kubishime Romanticist ended up, surprisingly, better than the first book. Not that I thought that The Kubikiri Cycle was bad, but it didn't really leave me with such a strong impression as this book had done (evident in that aside from the premise, major events and some characters, I couldn't really remember what had happened in the first novel even though I re-read it a month ago) Now perhaps I'm being a little hot-headed since I recently finished it and it's still fresh in my mind (and it's the only thing aside from Gosick 2 that’s anime related I have here to help me pass the time) but I think I can attribute the stronger impression to the increased amount of deception that the story gives, not to make the murder cases and mysteries more difficult to figure out but to hide the true nature of the characters and just how fu*ked up everyone in this story really is.

Just like stuopidget had mentioned, this story may dress itself as a murder mystery, but underneath that it is all a look on how twisted and horrendous can people truly be all the while hiding it under a scarf of pointless arguments and vocabulary meant most of the time to distract the reader from what's actually going on but leading us somewhere all the same. I seriously have no idea how can Nisioisin can manage to keep increasing the level of depravity with each book after this for 5 more instalments. I can only imagine what sort of insanity lies in Vol. 3 *_*

I will say this: after this book, whatever happened in Ikkun Ii-chan's past better be something absolutely revolting, because while TKC might've given us some hints with him burring bodies in the past and what not, this one showed just how ''damaged'' he really is.

Hm, if the subsequent novels final explanations get treated like in TKR then I'll proplly agree. If they end up like book one however, good isn't what I'll use to define them.*Winces at bold text*

~_~

Yeah, I noticed that as well. For some reason, I can't remember the names of the characters in this series that well (I bet I'll have a hell of a time just fliping back to the bio page every 5 seconds when I get to that book then!), but I can recall thier personalties with ease (maybe they just have forgettable names? Reason for Ii-chan's poor memory? Maybe that's why he only has a simple nickname to avoid this problem? XP) The only one though that I can remember without fail is Maki the fortune teller. Maybe because she struck me as being the most interesting one of the whole punch in that book.

To me, it's hard to say if anyone actually leaves an actuall impression on Ii-chan, since I had completly misread him throughout this book, so I have no idea about that *_*
I'm guessing that the release of book 3 rides on how well 2 does, because my copy didn't have any advertisement for it's release (or maybe thing changed since book 1)

Knocked off the first 100 pages today, took me a dozen or so pages to click with me but I've enjoyed the start to this quite a bit. Kinda depressing I might not get a chance to finish this series.. I don't mind the long wait in between.. I'm a Wheel of Time reader ffs lol... but they could pull the plug on this at any time... :(

I can see this happening as well. Better cross your fingers for an anime then (though most readers would agree an anime will probably be subpar to the text version since that guy thinks wayyyyyyyyyyyyyyyyyyyyyyyy too much, but SHAFT did do a decent job with Bakemonogatari and WF isn't doing too shabby with katana).

Maybe you guys can help me, then.

I just finished The Kubishime Romanticist and there's one part I'm still confused about; what is the x over y riddle? When Ii-chan asks Kunagisa if she knows what it means, she asks if its in cursive. When he says yes, she says "look at it in a mirror and turn it sideways". Needless to say, I tried to do this, but couldn't figure out the meaning behind it. Did I just miss something obvious?

I had a really good picture for it on some blog, but I can't find it anymore, so you'll just have to settle with this crappy one.



Cursive really screws you over doesn't it.

More like Ii-chan's unreliable narration that does that lol

Maybe its just me, but that doesn't look like and x or a y or any of the English alphabet for that matter.

Haha indeed. I could imagine many people couldn't figure it out and end up discussing it over forums to come to the conclusion (I sure as hell didn't get anywhere close using the standard x and y to try to figure it out). And like I mentioned, that one isn't the best photo I've found so just have to bear with it XD.

Oh!
....
Oh? That seems... odd. Is that really what it is? Weird that everything else would be so detailed but that one thing N. leaves the fans to figure out. It's even harder because so many people have their own style of cursive...



Thanks for the help though, that was likely to drive me nuts.

Or maybe he explained it in the dictionary (yes he wrote a dictionary for this series), so I don't know.

Np.

She tells him when they're talking in the mess hall. Not that he cares. (page 34)

Oh, so that was the answer to the x/y thing. Thanks, was driving me nuts.

Still, I felt bad for Mihoko.

Mikoko's story's pretty sad, but on the this-is-fucked-up-chart she's on a pretty low spot in the series.

Probably, but she does get some extra bonus points from me because she reminds me of Satsuki from Tsukihime.

But hopefully Del Rey will continue with this series and release the third volume some time in the future.

I hope so too. I would understand if they're hesitant about do 4 because it goes together with 5. 3 is still stand alone and introduces 2 really cool characters, and is the first one that Jun gets involved extensively.

So am I the only one who thought Mikoko reaped what she sowed? I didn't think it was sad, just pitiful.
So it's the shortest book in the series :heh:?