The term “light novel” can be misleading. While it is generally accepted as the term for the Japanese equivalent of Young Adult fiction (and as anyone who's read any English-language YA can attest, they're often very heavy), it's also hard not to just assume that the books themselves will be “light:” the kind of story and writing that doesn't necessarily require a lot of brain power and is easy to read in its literary style. While series like Kieli have shown that the subject matter can get quite dark, the first Kagerou Daze novel demonstrates that the writing style can also be very dense, making the 176 page book feel at least twice that length.

Part of the multi-media Kagerou Project, which also involves music videos and the Mekaku City Actors anime series, In a Daze (the title of this first novel) follows two siblings, eighteen-year-old shut-in Shintaro and his sixteen-year-old sister Momo, a popular idol. In a somewhat bizarre move, the first chapter is narrated in the first person by Shintaro while the second and third are narrated by Momo, with the much shorter epilogue returning to Shintaro's voice. While other novels, light or otherwise, have certainly played with narrative voice in a similar way, this leads to some confusion as to which sibling we're supposed to be more invested in, which is a minor problem when you take into consideration the fact that they both sound exactly alike. There is virtually no difference between their narrative voices, and in fact when Momo first takes over the task, I thought it was still Shintaro until she said something about wearing a skirt. Whether this is a problem with the original Japanese or with the English translation isn't clear, but it certainly disrupts the flow of reading when with each new chapter you have to wonder who the narrator is.

The story itself, while a bit confusing, is still fairly interesting. Shintaro, who apparently had a traumatic experience two years ago, is forced to leave his room when he spills soda on his keyboard and mouse, ruining them. Because it is the Obon holiday, no sites are offering next-day delivery, and Shintaro feels he can't live two days without his computer. Thus he is forced to actually get dressed and go out of the house, heading to a department store that recently opened in his neighborhood. He is accompanied by a strange AI that infected his computer via email, which takes the appearance of a perky teen girl. Her name is Ene (apparently short for “enemy,” at least in his mind), and Shintaro appears to have love/hate relationship with her. In the second chapter we meet Momo, his younger sister, who is basically Shintaro's exact opposite: a highly visible idol. Momo can't go anywhere without being swarmed by fans, and she reveals that she's always been highly visible, even before she agreed to become an idol. Fleeing from an unruly crowd and abruptly quitting her job, Momo meets Kido, a woman who is barely visible at all. It's not that she's physically invisible, but more that others simply don't notice her. She takes Momo back to her home, where Momo meets Kano and Marie, two other people with strange quirks like her visibility and Kido's invisibility. When the group offers to help Momo, she eagerly joins up. The group goes out to the same department store where Shintaro and Ene are headed, where they all meet up in a strange terrorist attack.

We actually get the entire story in Shintaro's first fifty-page chapter; chapters two and three simply retell them from Momo's point-of-view, adding in what sends her to the department store. The major difference is that when Shintaro tells the story, he doesn't have all of the details of Momo's group's abilities. It isn't quite enough to really make reading the same story twice fully worth it, but there is no denying that author Jin is trying to make the added details intrigue us. Part of the problem is that he doesn't really make use of a technique many authors use known as “chunking.” What this means is that rather than relaying every step of a process or activity, authors clump or chunk things together, assuming that we as readers will understand that, for example, someone would have to pick up a towel before using it. This works to his benefit during descriptive scenes when feelings are being portrayed; the emotional writing is strong. It is less successful when describing everyday life or a sequence of physical events; in these cases, it gets bogged down by too many words.

Also an issue is the fact that, unusually for Yen On, there is a consistent grammatical error present throughout the text. Stuttering is denoted by use of a comma instead of an hyphen, so that something that ought to read “h-he” instead is written “h,he.” While your grammar tolerance may be higher than mine, this was a continual annoyance throughout the book and not something I would expect to see in a profession work. Fortunately the rest of the translation seems fine, and the color fold-out in the front is a nice bonus.

Kagerou Daze's first novel isn't the most striking of the light novels to come out in English thus far, but it is still interesting. While it has its narrative issues, there is something intriguing about the plot itself, and the descriptions of panic and fear are very nicely done. It may be that once Jin gets his writing legs under him this will improve – and this was just good enough to stick around for another volume to find out.