I really enjoyed this, even though it's a strange book and not quite what I was prepared for.

The basic conceit is that a gang of six aimless twentysomething men essentially go to war against a group of six thirty something women-- they literally murder each other, and the stakes escalate till the quite vicious, catastrophic ending. If you couldn't tell from that description, this isn't a serious undertaking, but some sort of satire-- the aimlessness and essential idiocy of the boys is a key component of this, and the female Oba-sans don't fare a lot better in terms of how they come across-- I don't really know anything about contemporary Japanese culture, so I'm sure that many elements of the satire went way over my head. It feels a little like Palahniuk at times, but maybe because it was just-foreign-enough, I didn't feel insulted or beaten over the head I do when I read Palahniuk. Instead, at least for me it's funny and inventive stuff, all balanced around carefully constructed chapters, each keyed into one of the songs of the novel's title, many climaxing in karaoke recreations of those songs.



It's funny and clever as well as being vicious. It's a really brisk read, which I needed after the Slavknikova. A lot to like here.