REVIEW: Decapitation: The Blue Savant and the Nonsense User - NISIOISIN

• Year first released:  2008 (Japanese), 2017 (this English translation)
• ISBN of the edition I read:  1945054212
• Publisher of the edition I read:  Vertical
• My rating (out of 5):  4

Looking at the cover of this book, it’d be very easy to form a quick judgment of it. It sure looks like one of those crazy Japanese cartoons, doesn’t it? – and, therefore, it must be for people who like all that that weird Japanese stuff, right?

Well…not really, no.

Yes, Decapitation is a Japanese “light novel” – basically a popular short novel. (The closest thing we produce here in the U.S. would probably be a mass-market paperback.) They don’t generally serve as examples of the highest quality of Japanese literature. And yes, very often, light novels are written that tie-in to manga.

This isn’t a book that’s necessarily targeted at teens, though, nor is it exclusively for people who are already into Japanese media. Instead, Decapitation is a locked-room mystery that is more likely to remind you of Agatha Christie than a comic. Technically, it takes place on an island off the coast of Japan, but there’s very little about the plot or the setting that feel particularly culturally exclusive (for better or worse).

A group of eight strangers – all geniuses – are summoned to an island palace on the whim of an incredibly wealthy and highly bored heiress. Soon enough, one of them ends up dead – decapitated, as you might guess from the book’s title – and, of course, everyone on the island is a suspect in this inventive, twisty novel.

Admittedly, the writing takes a small amount of adjusting to get into. I found myself a bit confused for the first 20 or 30 pages. It wasn’t that the setting or the action was hard to follow – everything was explained/displayed well enough – it was simply hard to understand exactly why things were being expressed in just this way. Wait…is this character speaking right now, or just thinking? Why are some of his thoughts in quotation marks, but not others? etc.

After that first small stretch, though, either it got better, or else I somehow acclimated – it’s hard to say which for sure. Either way, it stopped being of concern very shortly into the book.

Once I got past this small bump in the road at the beginning, the rest of the book came together rather nicely. Though the subject matter was serious (we’re talking about a murder mystery here, of course), NISIOISIN still managed to sprinkle in a healthy amount of levity, without being too obnoxious, cutesy, or out-of-left-field (all things I’ve noticed are sometimes a struggle in other manga and light novels). In fact, the overall tone of the book was fantastic - a definite highlight, all things considered.

The story moved along quickly, the characters were distinct (with the intentional exception of the triplets, of course), and the twists were enjoyable. I wasn’t as shocked by the ending as I’ve been by other similarly-themed novels, but, since Decapitation gives us more to enjoy than just an ending, this wasn’t particularly problematic or distracting. 

I highly enjoyed Decapitation and veritably raced through it. And, if you're at all a fan of mystery - especially one that's more quirky than most other stories in the genre - you probably will, too.