I have to admit, the story had me hooked. I was invested in the fate of the main character. Too bad this is not what this novel is about. Not most of it. The one interesting storyline is abandoned after the first few volumes. I kept reading, hoping that this story will continue but the closer I was getting to the latest volume, the more I realized that it all I'll be getting is some cameos here and there and there will be no satasifying conclusion.
Juuni Kokuki turns into a disordered mess of stories that would fit much better as a spin-off. "Disordered mess" is in general the biggest flaw of this novel. First, the novel suffers from a severely bad case of infodumping. Now, I'm not against some nice worldbuilding here and there, but when most of the volume is useless side info that serves nothing but to create an illusion that this fictional world is well throught out, that's where I draw the line. And yes, infodumping can be made in an entertaining way. Look no further for example than Legend of the Galactic heroes, which reads as a historical fiction and the occasional infodump is very much in character for the narration and doesn't take your attention away from the story progress.
Another part that makes Juuni Kokuki more of a choir to read is the mess concering names and terms. The cast of this novel is huge. But save for some of the main protagonists, they blend with each other too much. This isn't helped much by the fact that the naming system uses words that all feel so similar, making the cast forgettable by both their character and their names. Which in turn means you'll be getting lost in who's who, what's happening and why should you even care. I'll give you an example: "Sekki, Seishuu, Shoukou, Suzu, Shisui". Those are all names that apperar within a single page of text. Good luck with not losing a track. Up until reading this novel, I found character summaries at the begining of the books useless. I mean, take a look for example at Baccano that does have this summaries. Baccano cast is huge as well, and the story is jumping from one storyline to the other even more frequently than Juuni Kokuki. Yet, the characters are memorable individuals that the reader has no problem to distinguish. Oh, how I wish Juuni Kokuki had the characters summary that Baccano had, maybe it would make more sense.
And of course, this is not just a matter of names of the characters, but the in-universe terminology too. Most of it seems to be based on Chinese and I'm not sure if I should blame the translator here, but the terms stay untranslated. So not only you have to keep track of the characters, you also have to keep track of the world's terminology that only grows more and more tangled. Indeed, later volumes feel not as reading a fiction, but as if reading a boring history textbook. I'm sorry, but I don't exactly like having to take notes in case I want even a hope of having track of everything. And certainly, this end up with you forgetting some of the terms and getting confused more and more as the story goes on and the burden of having to cram terminology to be able to "enjoy" the story increases.
This gets even more ridiculous with the latest novel, in which the translation makes the choice of hyperlinking the names which redirects the reader from the ebook into the translator's notes and also keeping their name in kanji in parenthesis after the name in romanji in every single occurence in the text. While hyperlinking the terms is at this point probably the most viable method to make this even slightly understandable, it also highlights how close to reading a random wikipedia article it feels to reed Juuni Kokuki. And keep in mind, it didn't took me *that* long to get through the volumes (and when I paused, it was because I was bored too much to keep going, not because I had to wait for more to be released). Those that started reading Juuni Kokuki back when it started now had to keep their memory fresh for almost thirty years while more volumes were sporadicaly released. I have no idea how this still has any fanbase.
To expand a bit on the latest (currently) volume, it's a collection of three short stories. Yes, a coherent storyline was apparently given up on. Though, one of them has at least some interesting theme - wheter or not to allow a death sentence. Now this should, at least in theory, be an interesting short story to read. But no, the points and takes you could find in this novel only ammount to what you would find in any randomly picked internet discussion of this dilemma. Juuni Kokuki has long outlived it's lifespan. And again, I'm not against including short stories as a part of longer novels. In fact, Spice and Wolf does this very well with the Spring Log volumes. The difference might be in those stories felling like they still belong as a part of the overal story.
It is by no chance that I have mentioned multiple light novels that do something similar that Juuni Kokuki does and execute that in much better way. Because that's exactly what you should be doing instead of wasting time with this title - read some different, better novel instead.
