Tatami Galaxy by Morimi Tomihiko, the source material for the anime of the same name. It's a novel, not a manga or a light novel btw. I tried the anime but was put off by the outlandishness of the design, even if it was all stylish and unique or whatever. I did enjoy his other anime adaptations more than Tatami, such as Penguin Highway and Uchouten Kazoku/Eccentric Family, but really they've all each had a striking visual style which I felt distracted a bit from the background running themes, which seemed to be about fate, the meaning of life, growing older, coping with the inevitability of death and loss, etc... So I wanted to get at some of the source material directly and see how it felt without someone else's visuals dictating it. It's interesting that the visual picture I build in my head from a book is always very grounded in photorealistic Japan, compared to the kind of visuals you get thrust on you from an anime.

I'm not too deep into Tatami Galaxy yet, but basically it's about a sexually-frustrated, jaded uni student trying to get his rocks off while harangued by a cupid-style kami spirit. I'm not crazy about the premise, but it's clearly got some of the themes of fate and growing older, plus the usual Morimi folkloric surreality that you see in adaptations of his, like Uchouten Kazoku and The Night Is Short, Walk On Girl.

The previous book wasYoiyama Kaleidoscope (Yoiyama Mangekyou), by the same author, which was actually my catalyst for buying most of his books, since it was the most interesting sounding and it hasn't had any tv adaptation yet. It's a jumble of overlapping short stories, set during 'Yoiyama' which is the kind of warm-up festival, the night before Kyoto's famous Gion festival. The atmosphere is a soup of big strange shrines, glowing paper lanterns and ancient folklore (even irl) so the book piggybacks off this, into stuff with a hint of the supernatural and fantastical, in a very gently spooky fashion, all happening during the night of Yoiyama and centering around a missing girl.

I liked it a lot. I suspect Tatami galaxy will struggle to improve on it, given how I simply liked the Alice In Kyotoland setting of Kaleidoscope more. Morimi's atmos - less charitably, his gimmick, since it's in the majority of his stuff - of stuffing loads of Kyoto and festival-style paraphernalia into a setting, while having low-fantasy events happen around it, scratches an itch I can't really describe. I'm curious how his source material for Uchouten Kazoku will hold up, since the adaptation is my favourite of his and among my favourite anime in general, but at this rate I might not work my way around to those books for another year or two.