Status Updates From Audition: A Novel

‘Nice person, bad person – that’s not the level this girl is at. I can see you’re crazy about her and probably won’t be able to hear this, Ao-chan, but I think you’d be better off staying away from someone like her. I can’t read her exactly, but I can tell you she’s either a saint or a monster. Maybe both extremes at once, but not somewhere in between.’

‘What kind of books do you read?’
‘Foreign mysteries, mostly. Not any particular author, but . . . I haven’t done much travelling myself, so I love reading about foreign towns and cities. In mysteries and spy novels, you get very detailed descriptions of the streets and the buildings and so on, and I really enjoy that sort of thing.’