I picked up All You Need is Kill for two reasons. The first was that I loved the movie version, Edge of Tomorrow. If you haven't seen it, you should. The second was that I was in an airport, and I was only around fifty pages until the end of Gone Girl, and my choices were limited to bestsellers I'd already read and bestsellers I had no interest in reading.
There was a lot about this book that I liked. Most of all was the violence. All this rad brutality tended to come quickly and without warning, and it never failed to charm. I also really enjoyed the "war is hell" mindset and cynical voice of the point-of-view character. I liked that he was in the war because he was a fuckup and needed somewhere to go. I liked his honesty about ogling women and being lazy and being a coward. All of that was fun.
On the other hand, there was some weird stuff, too. Mainly, this book was very Japanese. I know what you're thinking. What the hell is that supposed to mean, you racist? Well, let me explain. The POV character, who started off acknowledging his weaknesses and talking about how much of a failure he was--not only as a soldier, but also as a man--had, though the course of the first hundred or so pages, become the most skilled and amazingly powerful warrior in the entire world. He was one with his powered exoskeleton and he was zooming across the battlefield like an axe-weiling bolt of lightning, killing motherfuckers like it ain't no thang.
To clarify: he was essentially a robot-suit-clad Goku. He was the hero half of the "hero shows up, bad guy screams 'It's a Gundaaaaaaaaaaaaam!' just before blowing up' equation. He was Dante.
Now, I haven't watched anime in about a million years, so maybe my memory is like the rear-view mirrors in a car, where instead of objects being closer than they appear, it's animes being more ridiculous than they really were. But still, when you look at a Western story similar to this, you see Rocky training a lot and trying really hard for a month or two and still losing, and then getting a sequel and continuing to train and trying really hard for more months and then eventually winning against great odds, while in the Japanese version, Gohan goes into the Hyperbolic Time Chamber and trains for a year in the space of a day and emerges as a Super Saiyan.
So, the hero in All You Need is Kill starts off a bum, gets stuck in a time loop and trains for an infinite amount of time, and eventually reaches combat perfection.
Also, remember how, in the animes, people seemed overly expressive? Like, say for example, a character gets embarrassed about something, so his face turns into this:
You see that and you don't think about it much because it fits contextually because you're watching anime. Fine. But then imagine you're reading a gritty book about fighting in a war against crazy aliens who go around murdering everyone, and then there's a part where people are eating some sour fruits, and then you get to a scene like this:
She poked at it two or three times with her chopsticks, then threw caution to the wind and put the whole thing in her mouth. The sourness hit her like a body blow from a heavyweight fighter and she doubled over, grabbing at her throat and chest. I could see the muscles twitching in her back.
"Like it?"
Rita worked her mouth without looking up. Her neck tensed. Something went flying out of her mouth--a perfectly clean pit skidded to a halt on her tray. She wiped the edges of her mouth as she gasped for breath.
"Not sour at all."
See, people don't really do that when something is sour. Her face might have puckered, tightened, turned into a grimmace. Maybe she'd clench a fist as she tried to power through the unpleasant taste. Maybe if it was really bad, her eyes would water. Maybe.
This book was full of stuff like that. These weird, exaggerated displays of feeling. Is it a game-breaker? No, but it's enough to remind you that this book did not originate from within a Western culture, which isn't bad, just weird. Different. Different in the way that in Europe, they drive on the right side of the road. Different in the way that in Sweden they serve hashbrowns with everything. Different in the way that in Canada, the IHOP stores have a maple leaf in the middle of the O. Different in the way that in Oregon, people still pump your gas for you. And so on.
Anyway, moving on. The thing that really gave me a hard time was, about halfway through, there was a crazy tonal shift. First and foremost, the POV switched from a first person to a third person. Now, I am a firm believer that you can do whatever you want, so long as you do it well. The trouble is that I couldn't figure out the point of this POV shift. It lasted for sixty pages and told us the female lead's life story, and I spent the whole time wondering when we were going to get to the part that made me care about learning the female lead's life story--and it never came. And, as far as I can remember, she never recounted said life story to the protagonist, so I don't think he cared, either. It was a weird distraction, and if I was in Hiroshi Sakurazaka's critique group, I would have asked him to consider whether the reader needed to see those sixty pages in the level of detail that we got them, or if he could simply summarize them in a few lines. Furthering the tonal shift was the afore-mentioned cartoony stuff--the book was exceedingly gritty, and then suddenly it wasn't.
Would I recommend All You Need is Kill? I guess. It's super fast-paced (except for the sixty pages of random backstory, which you'd probably be safe just skipping, honestly) and a quick read. What the ending has in weirdness, the beginning makes up for in cool grittyness and tone, and there's thrilling action and violence throughout. And, if nothing else, as what is essentially novelized anime, it's an interesting look into the fiction of a different culture in a medium that you might not be that familiar with.
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