Summer, Fireworks & My Corpse [Paperback]

I am a huge fan of this book and the other works of Otsuichi. It is, much like his other works, mind bending and shocking. Deep emotional undertones. I suggest it for readers of all ages.

"Summer, Fireworks and My Corpse" contains Otsuichi's early works - two novellas and a short story. As a collection of work, it's very good - not disjointed or thrown together, though I must confess some confusion at the order of the stories; from my point of view the book was named for the least effective of the stories, and they feel chronologically backward.

"Summer Fireworks and My Corpse" is a shorter novella from a dead child's point of view, as she follows the fate of her corpse, her friends and the impact her death has on the community. The horror here is more subtle, with touches of black humour and pangs of how people adjust to guilt and death. There are slight twists in the tale to keep it interesting, though I must admit I felt dissatisfied with both the ending and the lack of character development in comparison to his other early work,"Goth" (though the characters are vaguely reminiscent of those in "Goth.") I did, however, find the running commentary of the dead girl interesting- some of her observations are shrewd, while other comments show her growing detachment from her corpse.

"Yuko" is a short story about a girl who goes to work as a housekeeper for a man and his wife in an isolated traditional Japanese mansion. This is a gem of a short story, and though it is short, it feels more fully fleshed out than the previous novella. In a lot of ways, I was reminded of Victorian ghost stories, like those of Le Fanu, where there is both a supernatural and a more earthly explanation for what happens, both of which lend themselves to two separate horrors within the outcome.The writing is dense with atmosphere; creepy insinuations, misleading information and the curiosity of a lonely girl all make this an excellent short story. Again, the horror here is subtle, creeping in rather than jarring, and is all the more effective for it.

"Black Fairy Tale" According to Otsuichi's Afterword, this was the first thing he wrote after college that was "longer than two hundred pages of genko yoshi manuscript." Even as a entry point into writing, the The novella begins with a fairy tale story of a lonely raven befriending a blind girl, and bringing her eyes so that she could see dreams. The eyes would retain the memories of what the original owner has seen, and the little girl would see their memories, right up until the moment the eye was removed. From there the story is told by a teenage girl who lost her left eye, and has amnesia due to the shock of losing the eye; the writer of the fairy tale, who has a twisted gift; and the remainder of the raven's tale, all of which are woven into a tale of mysteries. The main character, Nami, is unable to remember who she was, and is rejected by her family who constantly compare her to her former self, and also suffers from image memories left in the donated eye. She is well developed as a character, which I would have thought to be a difficult thing to do as she is meant to be basically an empty vessel, though some of her reasoning is peculiar, it could be attributed to the eye's influence. The writer of the raven's story is less well developed, but seems slightly sociopathic, definitely dysfunctional. The scenes of his childhood are filled with black humor, twisted jokes, and the exploration of his ability. Both of them are curiously detached in some way - incomplete/disconnected from their actions, but this serves to help define them in very different ways. This is an excellent story, and makes up the bulk of the book (almost 230 pages of the 350).(Note to the squeamish: If you've ever read Grimm's fairy tales as they were originally written, the gore here is just a little updated, and a bit more twisted - enough to make you cringe, but not, say, Clive Barker "Books of Blood" graphic.)

Overall, this is a very good collection, and well worth reading, especially if you enjoyed his other works ("Goth" or "Zoo", for example) or enjoy either modern fairy tales or Japanese horror/mystery. Highly recommended.