At the end of March, a crime occurs in a public park full of blossoming cherry trees. A woman in a white dress is stabbed. The suspect: a man in black clothes…
The Sakura Mystery is a story on Sakura Tadoku Lab by Harada Teruko and with illustrations by Koyama Junko.
The story is divided into 4 chapters that can be read in any order as each chapter reveals a different piece of this puzzle. There is a chapter about the incident itself, a chapter about the police interrogations, a chapter about the victims marriage and a chapter told from the point of view of a child that became involved.
I read the chapter in the exact order they occured, but it’s an interesting idea to switch up the order to solve this mystery. The conflict that led to this incident did not really convince me, though. I do feel like there would have been other options for the people involved.
The vocabulary in this story is quite accessible because important information and new developments are usually repeated in different ways.
The simple grammar also adds to that accessibility as readers can focus on understanding new words through context without worrying about grammar too much. There is almost exclusively です/ます even in direct speech.
To read this story on Sakura Tadoku Lab, you will first need to create an account. They will only ask you for a user name and a password though. Reading any story on this site is completely free of charge and each one is downloadable as an epub file. There are even comprehension quizzes available for every story.
Length: 8000字
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