Magical realism short stories in a book with this little pink cover by a Japanese author famous for their ‘off-beat’ fiction? I thought this could be fun and cute…

But I truly hated it. These weren’t even ‘short stories’—36 different stories in a book that was only 120 pages?! They were just a handful of paragraphs each. And they became seriously monotonous.

And the tone was—I’m just going to say it—unbearably obnoxious to me. The narrator was giving Holden Caulfield from Catcher in the Rye vibes and I couldn’t handle it. The titular people in this girl’s neighbourhood felt too much like caricatures and I just couldn’t bring myself to chuckle at all their misfortunes. I couldn’t chuckle at their SA, either.