steaktlsideblog

[steaktlsideblog]

Intro

I've made this blog to post translations and/or commentary about the 高校事変 (Koukou Jihen, High School Catastrophe) novels by 松岡圭祐 (Matsuoka Keisuke). I'm not the most prolific reader of adult-oriented Japanese media [eg: seinen manga, non-"light" novels], but a couple years ago I came across Koukou Jihen randomly on Bookwalker and decided what the hell. I almost never go for non-fantasy stories that take place in the real world, so this was a real leap for me. The reviews said it was a pretty light read though and had "action movie pacing", so it seemed like a decent jumping-off point. The author also churns out a full novel every like 2 months, so that also gave the impression it would be a lighter, "pulpier" read. That was ultimately true about the writing style, but it still took a lot of work at first because of how unexpectedly detailed it got with political stuff. But by the time I finished the third novel I realized I'd found something pretty amazing that I want to share. Or at least talk about. So this blog is probably for both of those things.

Anyway, what's so great about Matsuoka Keisuke's novels? The best I can really describe it is, imagine thriller novels like "The Da Vinci Code" but if they took themselves about as seriously as "National Treasure", and contain buttloads of tongue-in-cheek social satire. While also being legit good thriller novels at the same time, of course.

The characters and dialogue are really special too. Even for characters who barely get any "screentime" and are basically "extras" if this were a movie, they end up feeling human and memorable. And every line feels like it has a purpose; Matsuoka wastes no time with frivolous over-describing. He gives exactly as much detail as we need to illustrate the character/scene/mood without sacrificing pacing.

By the way, despite taking place in the real world, bonkers shit does indeed still happen in these books. I never feel unsatisfied by the end of one. Oh, and the novels are all self-contained plots that start and resolve within a single book, fyi. Which is really nice, and he does an excellent job of adding continuity with serialized elements while also keeping the overall "episodic" pacing.

The series is complete at 11 novels, of which I've read 4. Rather than continue to book 5 I got the urge to reread book 1 for some reason and while looking over the first chapter I felt like I had a lot to say about it, and felt like maybe this could be an important story to share in English. At the very least, I want to share this series with other learners of Japanese like myself, because it's really fun and written in a conversational, understandable way. I want other learners to see that they can expand their horizons beyond "light" novels with fantasy battle plots or harem romance or whatever. You can read novels with real things to say about [Japanese] society, which portray people like real people behave. It's extremely rewarding. Anyway, I'm getting off-track....

But the first ~20 pages of the first Koukou Jihen novel are extremely dense and politics-filled, which make it quite daunting and inaccessible to the people I'm trying to rec it to. So that's kind of another reason for this blog: to guide people through the dense opening and expose them to this rewarding series.

Also probably this will sorta will be my liveblog of rereading the novel, at the same time.

FYI there is a manga that appears to cover the events of the first novel. I read part of chapter 1 and skimmed the rest of the first volume, and... I don't think it's good. Sorry, it's just not a very good adaptation, for a number of reasons I might talk about when it's relevant. Even when I was originally reading the novel, before knowing the manga existed, there were parts where I thought "this could only really work in writing". And I was correct.