Before I go further, I will be spoiling the ending, so if you want to avoid spoilers, leave this post now.
First of all, I really enjoyed this book and cherished every opportunity I had to read it. I don't read a lot of crime books, but I am a fan of Japanese literature and this one appears on all the lists, so I'm glad to have finally read a copy I've had lying around for years.
As soon as I finished, I logged it in StoryGraph, put up my score and checked what others were saying, only to discover the majority of people saying the ending was awful. I was shocked. Because I loved the ending. While it was graphic and had intense depictions of rape (which, naturally, could be a very valid reason for not enjoying the ending), to me, it showed Masako getting so close to finally escaping her existence, only to be clawed back into the grime by this despicable human being, making choices for her and somehow managing to merge with her and get under her skin. The fact that she started to have feelings for him was disturbing, but again displayed the difficulty of escaping her reality. When she looked out over Kabuki-cho, she was still under his spell. But then she managed to push through the surface and emerge from the darkness of the old factory and realise she had made it out. She went to get her airplane ticket. She'd survived it.
Maybe I'm talking rubbish – I'm not the most well spoken person when it comes to literature, but the fact that she got close, got dragged back but still managed to find the resolve to survive and escape was the ending that I wanted, and the book delivered.
What do you think of the ending of this book?
by DogsAreGreatYouKnow