|𝑮𝒐𝒕𝒉-𝑶𝒕𝒔𝒖𝒊𝒄𝒉𝒊|

“What exactly is death?”

“Goth” is a collection of events revolving around the 2 main characters. The girl, who always wears nothing but black clothing and never speaks to anyone in class, has a cold white face akin to a marble statue with long dark hair. On the contrary, the boy is an easy-going, amiable person but only when he converses with Morino does his true face reveal: a sicko. What brought the two together was neither friendship nor love but murder cases which chill any sane person to the bones. It could be said that they were brought together through death.

“The only time I didn’t feign expressions was when talking to Morino. If I’d been speaking to anyone else, they would wonder why my face was so blank, why I never flashed a smile. But when I was speaking to her, none of that mattered.”

Whether coincidentally or deliberately, they relate to each other through many horrifying cases. In two of them, one involved a notebook which has murders written down and the other a refrigerator stuffed with large and small hands. Two more were a series of puppy-kidnapping cases which happen every Tuesday and Friday and the event of Morino's hanging. The rest were cases of a child buried alive and a tape which records voices of the dead. Each time, they would witness the acts before their eyes yet they do not report, simply watch them unfold calmly.

“I knew that was hardly appropriate. The killer was someone who deserved to be punished. He should not be looked at the way you would a revolutionist or an artist.”

Goth is not just a horror detective story, for it contains sorrow, life contemplation, the nature of humans and enlightenment. Some people are born in darkness. There are those who submerge completely in it, and those who are only-half submerged, exposing the other half to the light. Otsuichi pushed the main characters to the boundary of light and dark so that they could find out the truth as a way to satisfy their curiosity, to drag them out to the light when they were about to be consumed by the dark. By doing so, he gave us a world twisted and distorted to a horrifying degree. However, beneath all the horrors lay pitiable souls who felt lost and terrified trying to blend into a place they did not belong.

Otsuichi has managed to create a society filled with murder, a scoiety where “there are only the killer and the killed”.