The ending was incredibly sweet.

Several times throughout this book I kept thinking about how much more compelling this story would have been to me if the main character was a little girl. I think that maybe it’s because I related to Aoyama and his character motivations. I was also a very emotionally controlled child who considered themself a researcher of the natural world when I was young. I too kept notebooks of scientific observations and wished to be better and smarter than what I perceived myself to be at the time.