Reading Zaregoto is a little like watching someone doing one of those wild juggling acts where they swap clubs for flaming torches for bowling balls for chainsaws, all without dropping anything on the floor. It’s a slick, addictive Japanese pop-literary confection, an amalgam of mystery thriller, psychological suspense, philosophical pondering, and all-out weirdness. At first you’re reading it for the who-why-and-how-dunit aspects of the story, but by the end you’re seeing it as a portrait of the oddball mentality of the genius.

“Genius” is a word I now hate, no thanks to being bled dry of meaning after decades of unthinking abuse. When Apple has a “Genius Bar” in their stores (staffed, for the most part, by people who are not whole orders of magnitude smarter than the rest of us, just better trained in things Apple) and the word itself is used as a sit-com insult, there’s not much room left to sink, is there? Zaregoto, though, understands all this and uses it as a starting point. Those with genius express it narrowly—through one skill, one insight, one idea—and even the smartest of people can be undone by the simplest and most underhanded behaviors and motives.