Shiki

I'm not normally big on writing about half remembered books read six years ago, but there's enough misinformation running around about Shiki I felt the need to try and get things straight somewhere. Shiki is a novel -- not light novel -- by Fuyumi Ono, author of the Twelve Kingdoms books (which were actually light novels. Confusing!) The hardcover edition was two massive volumes, and the bunko edition was FIVE volumes, each of which ran for five hundred odd pages. It took me two months to read (although I was reading other books in between each volume of Shiki to keep myself from getting burned out.)
Fuyumi Ono intended Shiki to be an homage to the Stephen King novel Salem's Lot; the story is essentially a Japanese version of that basic concept. A very old fashioned, traditional Japanese mountain town is plagued by a mystery disease; it eventually transpires that the new residents in town are vampires, and are attempting to convert the entire town in the hopes of creating a safe haven for their kind.
While the story is an ensemble cast, and frequently changes the point of view as different characters play their roles -- I wound up writing down people's names and roles in a massive map scrawled all over the book cover, just trying to keep it all straight -- the two primary characters are the town doctor, and a Buddhist monk who writes surreal fiction in the style of Edogawa Rampo.
The novel is a very slow, creeping dread that takes a thousand pages to even reveal the vampires and goes on for another volume well after the point you'd have expected it to end. Ono's dense, literary prose can be a bit of a slog at times, but incredibly evocative at others, and it's well worth a read if your Japanese is up to it.
It's a very strange choice for a manga and anime adaption. I haven't read the manga, but it's by Ryu Fujisaki. I read the first volume of his Hoshin Engi and found it pretty dull, but at least coherent; I then read his Waq Waq when it ran in Jump and found it completely unintelligible. While his design sense can be extraordinary at times, the flow from panel to panel is gibberish, and he's prone to fits of stylization so extreme you can't even figure out what he intended to depict in individual panels. He's an incredibly poor choice for the material, and the garishly lolita gothed out character designs are about as far removed from the source material as it is possible to be. Judging from the ads from the Shiki anime, and the covers of the manga, he's also shifted the focus to the two high school characters; relatively major characters among the supporting cast, and if the storyline in general were stripped down to just their stories it would probably still be a coherent whole. I'm cautiously voting this as actually a pretty smart move on Fujisaki's part. I'm definitely curious about the Noitamina anime, and hoping they can manage to meld the manga art style to some of what made the original novel work for me, but it's very much an unknown quantity at this stage.

Kura no Kami / Zashiki-warashi

Four children go into a room to play a game. The game is based on a scary story about four travelers who devise a flawed plan to keep themselves awake all night -- they each take a corner, then one moves to the next corner, taps the person there, and that person moves to the next, round and round the room. But obviously, this would never actually work. When the fourth person reached the corner where the first person was standing, he would find it empty. But when the children try it, things turn out just like the story. When the lights go on, there are five children in the room. All of them remember there being four, but each of them remembers the other four being there all along.
A zashiki-warashi has joined in their game.
Before they can tell anyone, someone poisons their parents. All the children are visiting the house of a rich relative with no direct heirs -- one of their families stands to inherit a fortune, and someone is playing into some old legends about a curse on the family, trying to scare the parents away. Only the children, lacking both grown-up skepticism and grown-up greed, see what is really happening. So they -- and the zashiki-warashi -- set out to solve the mystery.
Written by Twelve Kingdom's Fuyumi Ono for the 2002 launch of Kodansha's Mystery Land line -- a line of old fashioned hard cover in slip cases that are ostensibly children's literature, but which also claim to be books for adults that remember how much better books for children used to be -- this is pretty much the last thing she wrote before dropping off the face of the god damn earth.
For most of the length, she carries off the throwback writing style and neat twist on a few central mystery novel conceits, and the book is a fairly enjoyable read...but towards the end I'm afraid it not only gets bogged down in excessively tedious conversations in which the children -- who barely have personalities -- attempt to use deductive reasoning to work out who could be behind this. These conversations usually pay off, and I understand that certain mystery fans are quite keen on this sort of exhaustive tediousness, but I've never been able to stay awake long enough to care. There's also an exasperating bit where two characters spend ten fucking pages discussing the god damn moral, suggesting she is aping entirely the wrong parts of old children's books.
I enjoyed the first two thirds of it a lot, so it's a shame that the last third winds up exposing a lot of the flaws in her central conceit, and ends up soft balling a few climactic revelations. Not that horrific illustration placement -- an issue throughout the god damn book -- doesn't spoil a few twists anyway. Seriously, I mean, the art is sort of shit so all the kids kinda look the same, but fucking putting a god damn green glowing mystical dot that isn't even in the actual story in front of the zashiki-warashi four fucking pages before they actually work out who the zashiki-warashi is? Fucking bullshit. Hunh. I think I started this review planning on recommending it despite a few late flaws, but I'm definitely coming down the other way now -- this is a book that had a lot of promise, but doesn't come through in the end. Shame.

The Twelve Kingdoms: The Vast Spread of the Seas

If Fuyumi Ono made an entire series devoted to covering Shoryu and Rokuta over the 500-year period of the Ever-King's reign, I would import them and then rebuy the books should they be published in English.  The Twelve Kingdoms: The Vast Spread of the Seas is addicting that way, centered on delivering overblown fights over the roles of kings with manuvering by very important and intelligent people.

This story also has the benefit of not coming across as an afterthought like it does in the anime adaption, as well as avoiding the awkward attempt at a frame tale to preserve Yoko as the main character.

What is distressing, though, is the current lack of availability here.  Probably just a short print run by Tokyopop, knowing the economy and their situation, but it's still not satisfying.