Who's the Shadow? / シャドウ

Who’s the Shadow? is about Ousuke Gamo, a boy whose luck would give the Baudelaires’ a run for its money. First his mom dies, and then his best friend’s mom dies, and then his best friend gets hit by a car. And that’s just the start of the book.

And it’s honestly as much as you need, because this book is mediocre. There’s no explicit crime in the story, just tragic and vaguely odd occurrences that keep building up until the resolution, which isn’t particularly shocking or vindicating.

Ousuke is an oblivious idiot, which, okay, fine, might be fairly reasonable for a preteen boy. But there are a few places where he fails in basic human knowledge beyond the level of “stupid boy,” and it makes it particularly jarring at the end when he becomes a super-genius able to deduce everything that happened.

Or maybe not, because some of the deductions are based on extremely weird connections. And sometimes characters actively tried to hide these connections, lest the deduction be made, even though it’s incredibly far-fetched. This is a bit difficult to describe without going into specifics, but…. I’ve already used the Yu-Gi-Oh Abridged joke “Rare card? That sounds vague enough to be the Blue-Eyes White Dragon” to exemplify an issue in another review, but here it’s like the inverse: if Yugi’s stance had instead been “I can’t let anyone know my grandpa has a rare card, or they might figure out he has a Blue-Eyes White Dragon!” Yes, it’s true, that’s technically possible, and there is actual cause-and-effect, but the odds that anyone would actually jump from one to the other (especially with no other information or context) is extremely narrow. This makes the characters feel like they’re operating under incredibly contrived sets of deductions.

To me, Who’s the Shadow? is basically the Japanese version of Every Fifteen Minutes. Ousuke’s dad and Ousuke’s best friend’s dad are both involved in mental health, so both novels have consistent references to psychiatry. Both involve lots of character drama, and vaguely criminal events that are explained in the end. And neither is particularly satisfying. Since it’s Japanese, Shadow is ostensibly more thoroughly clued and based on deductions, but as I explained in my previous paragraph, it doesn’t come anywhere close to the catharsis of a proper detective novel.

Probably my biggest problem with the book: the title barely matters. It’s an evocative title that sounds like it could be referring to the villain or perhaps even something supernatural (or even both), but ends up being something completely different that’s basically a minor part of the book that isn’t even satisfying.

Neither the mystery nor the drama of Who's the Shadow? is particularly good, meaning the book doesn't contain anything worth the time or effort it takes to read.