What a Zashiki-warashi Can Do

座敷童にできるコト

by Nanae Hirotaka
published by Dengeki Bunko.

Zashiki-warashi are pretty high up the list of famous Japanese youkai. They look like human children, and as long as they live in your house, that house will have good fortune. If they leave, so does their protection, and karmic backlash frequently destroys everything. But it is not commonly known that Zashiki-warashi protect the earth.

Moriya Katsuki arrives in his high school dormitory to find he's been relegated to a small private room that hasn't been used for ten years. Opening the door, he is stunned to find a girl in a sailor uniform sitting there, who identifies herself as Mirin, his Zashiki-warashi.
Katsuki's initial stunned reaction attracts the attention of Sanzenin Masato, prefect and chairman of the science club, who swoops in wearing a white coat and stethescope and instantly diagnoses Katsuki as a sexual deviant with a fixation on sailor uniforms.

Sanzenin is one of three legendarily crazy siblings who terrify the school. His younger sister Kashiwagi Youko believes firmly that her memories were erased by people from the future, and spends much of her time convinced Katsuki is a subterranean dweller. She carries a stungun covered in purikura stickers. Their half sister Madenokoji Yuna is the student council president and, with her black cloaked army of die hard fans, is attempting to restructure the school's educational program in line with the principles of black magic.
All three of them fixate on Katsuki and make his life extremely miserable (Katsuki essentially panics all through the book, making the exact wrong decision all the time.)

Additionally, on his way home from school he is attacked by a Warashi-modoki, the natural enemy of the Zashiki-warashi, which Mirin fights off in telephone-pole-as-a-weapon style splodo.

I waited till I'd read the second book in the series before recommending it, though, because he does make a few mistakes. The first book is 300 pages of pure genius and then the climax takes place in mystic crypto zone (like the end of Spriggan) and felt like a let down; the second book takes way too long to get rolling (you don't really need to reestablish the status quo so much, since nobody's going to start reading from the second volume) but once it does is really good, progresses things quite nicely, and has a much more satisfying ending.

But this series is a rare chance to see a writer improving exponentially as they go along. It seems like most writers get that growth out of the way before they are published, or stop forcing themselves to new and greater heights once they have. The third and fourth novels in this six volume series kick the arc plot into high gear while working as a complete, satisfying novel in and of themselves as well. Little, almost unnoticed character tensions start paying off big time. The characters described as extremely intelligent, if crazy, prove themselves actually capable of frightening competence. The balance between the drama and the comedy is becoming tighter and tighter; while previous novels put the comedy in the first half and the drama in the second, the fourth novel blends it all the way through, very effectively. The shit really hits the fan in the fifth and sixth novels, leading to an incredible climax, and making this series one to remember. It doesn't seem to have made anything like the impact it deserves in Japan, but I'm going to keep it up my sleeve as one to try and talk companies into translating someday.

easternstandard