Nagasaki

It's a good concept for a story, but it didn't go in any meaningful direction. Written in French, translated to English and set in Japan, so it has some strange ideas.While I'm no expert in Japanese culture, this book had an underlying feeling that the author wasn't either and seems to be packed with clichés about Japanese life. It has a bunch of surface level criticisms of capitalism but then throws a curveball at the end where the female character, who was established to have lost her job, was a militant drug addict in a past life, which ads literally nothing to the story. This basically undermines the criticism of capitalism by giving her a moral failing that justifies her homelessness. The ultimate twist that the house was her childhood home would have worked if there was an enduring mystery about how she got into the house in the first place, but the door was unlocked so it doesn't matter and it comes across as sappy. Also, in Engish, it's the "uncanny valley," not "mysterious valley."