This is a preliminary review that covers the first volume, “Folklore Studies”, as it was the only one available in English at the time of writing. At just over 200 pages long, it’s a short read anyone can finish in a day or two.

As it’s the first novel, Folklore Studies spends a lot of its time laying the groundwork to establish the characters, setting, and story structure. Most interestingly, in spite of the fact that the titular character has a fascination with the supernatural, the novel takes great care to depict how unknown phenomena can have quite normal explanations. Of course, through the protagonists’ unique abilities the novel suggests that folklore such as tengu existing might be true.

Speaking of, the novel has a cool way of depicting the abilities of one of the protagonists. As written in the synopsis, Naoya Fukamachi has the ability to hear lies, and the novel depicts this ability by changing the font at certain moments during dialogue. Throughout the novel key pieces of dialogue will be visually different, and from there the reader can figure out what’s a lie and piece together the truth. Although it doesn’t happen very often, it’s fun to predict how the story develops based on this information!

Overall, the first novel is a fun read that’s very easy to end up binge reading. With its short length and its monster-of-the-week format for each chapter, the first novel is something that can be easily enjoyed by anyone without needing to get heavily invested.

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