The first chapter of Love of a Konbini Idol is a startling introduction to two women on the precipice of a romantic paranormal adventure. The writing is quite straightforward and focuses on the characters and their immediate actions.
Though the serialization has been running a while and is now up to Chapter 36, I'm looking forward to reading the second chapter in a month's time.
The second chapter of Love of a Konbini Idol cements the antecedent relationships between the four characters we met in Chapter 1. It is mostly written in the first person, but the last part (3/3) re-tells some of the story from a second person, and is quite unnecessary.
The development of awkward relationships is nicely done, and there is some clever logic to dispel doubts in the readerʼs mind, such as that there was suspiciously little traffic on the roads that night to witness any strange happenings. The concept of the Eastern ghost is intriguing (compared to the Western concept of a mischievous invisibility).
The stage is definitely set now. I'm looking forward to seeing how the relationships pan out; though I worry at this point that the writing might be too frugal to deal with the subject well, I have seen enough to know that it can at least carry a story nicely.
The plot continues to unfold in the simple first-person narrative, exposing the hero once again to the ghosts and spirits around her. In a trait now becoming established in the prose, the chapter breaks near the end to a different place and time to provide some backstory to the main thread, wherein the hero recounts the time her grandfather married her to some box of mystery.
The exchange is interesting mostly by the exposure of the sexuality of the protagonist: a girl who passes as a boy.
The mix of queer sexuality, Japanese folklore and dark mysticism is heady, and the tension is ratcheting nicely even at chapter 3.
A priest is brought, in protest, to help, but both the stricken girl (whose boss and original lover died and became a ghost) and her saviour fall ill with fever. Eventually they recover, and it turns out that romance is probably not going to happen after all.
The chapter finishes with a cut back to the recent past of the stricken lady, where it is revealed that, conversely, she secretly does actually hanker after her would-be lover.
It is a shallow first-person narrative which focuses on the feelings between people, but is spoiled by way too much self-referentiality, wherein the protagonist decides to write a story about the events taking place in this... story.
The chapter does bring extra complication, and hence interest, into the progressively intertwining lives of the two young ladies. I'm still optimistic that this introduction of characters will lead to an interesting adventure, but at the moment it feels a little claustrophobic and too interested in itself.
Deep, empathetic dive into a dark soul, paralleled by environmental suggestions like, ‘There was a doomed feeling about the place that went beyond the squalor. The shadows were too deep. My eyes kept being drawn to them, expecting to see something move.’
Continuing the first-person semi-interactive narrative, the protagonist continues to discover the nature of the girl she brought home with her: a piece of social vermin ungrateful for any help she gets, offering meaningless sex in lieu of repayment, and generally lost and disconnected behind a veil of ongoing alcohol abuse.
Iʼm starting to really like this serial because it explores parts of humanity far from my own experiences, and does so using a very unsubtle literary armoury, such as the insistent first-person viewpoint, the focus on feelings while the action carries on as a background process, and the constant hints from the environment about the unostensible nature of the discourse taking place; the break-aways at the end of each chapter add an extra dimension to the emotional tapestry, usually giving another characterʼs viewpoint.
This is nice. Just a conversation between two people on a long car journey together, filling in backstories for the reader, strengthening the characters and providing solid backdrop to the story. It is here that we find out that ghosts are not incidental parts of the story, but that the protagonists are aware of them and understand their significance and mannerisms.
One protagonist tells the story of gender-changing, and accepting a ghost into her life, who she eventually marries, from a passed grandfather. The funeral forces her to meet her parents and extended family for the first time as a woman, with the expected result that she is banished from the family and left to live her own life for ever more.
The other tells a story of living with lesbianism through school bullying and social estrangement at the bar she works at as an entertainer. A fanatic with evil intent makes contact with her, and we are led to believe that the fan goes on to ruin the life she might have had.
The work continues in the strong first-person narrative mode, but the point of view swings around between the two people. It makes the read interesting if not a little confusing; between them, they introduce a number of people in their histories and keeping track is quite taxing on the reader, who is asked to filter out the incidental characters from the active ones.
There is an unfortunate footnote at the end of the story, with the author reaching out in the hope that the reader is not feeling lonely like the character in this work of fiction. This rather ruins the experience of reading the story in my opinion: breaking the fourth wall which disconnects the reader from the imaginary world they would have built up in their mind, tainting the fictionality of the story with the supposition that these are events that might happen in the real world, and changing the nature of the exposition from a fable into something that might be construed as autobiographical.