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Carrying on the legacy of "The Tatami Galaxy", "The Night is Short, Walk on Girl" is yet another of Tomohiko Morimi’s masterfully crafted novels telling an absurd and magical story of a university student living a quite miserable life of his own in Kyoto. This time however, the story is told from two perspectives – one of our protagonist, and the other one of a black-haired maiden, the target of protagonist’s secret affections. There are many fantastical and bizarre things that happen to our couple throughout the book. Elements of witty humour, Japanese culture, total absurdity, amusing coincidences, philosophy and romance clash together to produce this beautiful novel. The city of Kyoto is described in great detail. Every character is an extremely fascinating individual with their own unique quirks, traits and problems, elevating the story and saturating its colours.

As our couple constantly cross paths with each another, a brave and fortunate gal discovering adulthood and an often unlucky but dedicated guy, who slowly tries to fill the moat to her crush’s heart, to strike at the right time that never comes, will they ever manage to fell into each another’s arms? Seems like the universe will try everything to prevent them from doing that, but at the end of the day there’s nothing else but “Do all you can and then wait for providence”.

I had high expectations for this book at the beginning. It starts off as a beatiful story of a cementary keeper, Violette, living in a small house in the French countryside, tending to graves, plants in the garden, selling flowers to visitors and quietly but thoroughly observing the funerals and people attending them. We slowly learn about the backstory of Violette and the lives of people surrounding her - gravediggers, the priest, morticians etc. - it's beautiful, well-paced and very often moving.

However, at some point we learn about a tragedy in Violette's past and from then on things really start going downhill. We no longer only get the perspective of Violette now and Violette in the past, but of so many different random characters she encountered in her life. Be ready to keep notes of the dates and character's names because I really coudn't at one point. What's more, the book gets so obnoxious when it comes to love and sex. Practically every chracter is cheating at one point. So many scenes of one-night stands in hotels, sex on the side of the road, or my favourite - nephew inviting his aunt to to the garden so that she could watch him making love with his girlfriend, which was supposed to be some kind of revenge for her rejecting him? Who even thought of that? Shortly after that I stopped reading because all of this was just getting ridiculous. Such a letdown in my opinion.