Review: Secondhand Memories by Takatsu

Kindle eBook, 529 pages
Published 2015 (originally 2008)

Acquired February 2015

Read September 2019

Secondhand Memories by Takatsu

This begins melodramatically, and it never gets out of that mode. The narrator is a high schooler who is just super super in love-- then his girlfriend ends up in a coma. So then he is super super sad. Then another girl comes along, so he is super super torn. And it just goes on and on and on and on for 529 pages... and 852 chapters! The chapters are these short little things, and the paragraphs are tiny, too; sometimes less than a sentence apiece. For example, here's a page literally at random:

I no longer had any patience left.

These dark desires to strike

were horrifying to me.

My patience had worn thin with time.

And it seemed to get worse.

What seemed like a long time ago,

a far off land separated by the seven seas,

while everything was still summer,

where everything was still simple,

I had been agreeable to all.

Slowly, surely,

things changed

and it was eating me

from the inside out.

I was no longer a pleasant kid.

I was no longer an innocent boy.

Worse, I realized this,

in this moment,

staring into the eyes of the Devil,

I realized my own darkness. (ch. 804, p. 494)

Sorry for the lengthy quotation there, but I wanted you to get a sense of just how overwrought the prose is, and just how excruciating its choppy, overemphasized short sentences are to read.

The novel was serialized originally, and gives every indication of being made up as it goes along. Key concepts seem to spring up out of nowhere, especially the identity of the so-called culprit. The end is particularly unsatisfying. This is a short book, and it took me weeks to drag myself through it. Irredeemably painful.