tldr; narrator has zero idea how to pronounce Japanese words and there’s a lot of Japanese.
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I went into this book completely blind because I needed something new and this had a high rating. At first I was pleasantly surprised there was so much Japanese cultural inspiration, but this turned out to be the absolute worst part.
At first I thought it was a “me problem” and that I was too snobbish turning my nose up at heavily accented Japanese, when the book is primarily English. I would just do my best to brush off early parts of the book when the characters snickered at those who had trouble pronouncing the Japanese, while as a listener it felt like every single character had trouble pronouncing Japanese.
It progressively got worse as the book went on. It took a brother calling her older sister “older brother” for me to realize just how bad his pronunciation was (mixing up “ii” and “ee” sounds). Up to that point I thought the book had a lot of made up words because of the fantasy element, but it was just the narrator’s poor pronunciation (took me over half the book to realize he was trying to say “dad” instead of what I kept trying to figure out if it was some made up title/name).
Since I don’t have the physical book, I do wonder if some of this could be the author’s error as I did notice the author doesn’t have mastery over the language either. The odd misuse of formal/informal for the period of Japan the book is inspired from shows the lack of mastery, leading me to assume a buddy or google translate helped in certain areas, BUT I add this just for awareness — it’s not as immersion breaking and I think most Japanese can live with it since it’s an English book.
All in all, it’s a good book but BRACE YOURSELF, the narrator is TRASH. If you go in prepared for that maybe you’ll be able to enjoy the book a little bit more.