I first heard about The Night Parade when Wendy at Literary Feline reviewed it … in 2016. Yes, this has been on my TBR list for four years! But it’s about Obon and Japanese culture so I was definitely going to read it sooner or later.

In The Night Parade, Saki is dragged from her friends in Tokyo to the countryside where her grandmother lives to celebrate Obon. Sulky and pretty much determined not to have fun, she falls in with some of the village kids and rings a sacred bell, invoking a death curse that has to be lifted in three days. If Saki doesn’t find the Moonlight Prince in time, she may never make it back to the human world.

It was great to see a book based on Japanese mythology. I really enjoyed characters such as the nine-tailed fox, the tanuki, the tengu, and even all the Tsukumogami. The concept of all the yokai gathering in a night parade during Obon was an interesting one and I enjoyed it.

I also liked Saki’s character. She’s a sulky teenager at the start of the book but the three nights in the spirit world has definitely had a good effect on her. I wish we could see more but I liked the changes that I saw – especially when it came to her interactions with a bully friend. Japan has quite a serious bullying problem so it was interesting to see it touched upon.

That said, there were a few things about the book I didn’t quite like, some of which is probably due to my nit-pickiness stemming from my time in Japan.

In terms of plot, I thought that the three night quest to find the Moonlight Prince too disparate. There’s a new guide each night and Saki essentially starts from zero so it felt like the second night could be cut out completely without the plot suffering too much. The first night helped set the scene and the third night was all about finding the prince but the second night felt superfluous.

As for language, some of the language felt unnatural. For example, Saki’s grandmother calls her “dear” and a tanuki refers to her as “sweetheart”. Those are perfectly natural in English but there isn’t really a good Japanese equivalent for them. I don’t know if my Japanese skills are on fritz but from my experience, pet names for children tend to involve using “chan” or a nickname based on their name.

I also didn’t quite buy that her parents would ignore Obon for so long. While I only live in Tokyo for a year (and another four in Fukuoka), Obon was a big thing among my classmates at university, in Tokyo and Fukuoka, and from what I understand, a big thing for the Japanese in general. It’s an opportunity to travel back to family and I find it hard to believe that Saki’s parents would just ignore it for years at a time.

Overall, this is a fun book that reminded me of Spirited Away. It’s great to see books that are written with Japanese cultures and although it’s been some time since it’s published, I hope that it can create demand for Japanese middle-grade books to be translated to English. I used to read some to practice my Japanese and there are some really fun stories out there.