The teeming mass of humanity depicted here is nightmarish. This is truly the best depiction of "there are too many damn people" I've ever come across.

Anyways, this is an engrossing book. It fits into the fun "trapped in a twilight zone" sort of genre that I like so much. Like the regular world, but the regular rules of the universe are slightly askew.

I suppose the book gets bogged down a bit in the middle as Budai tries for the nth time to decode the language, especially since we can deduce that he will never figure it out. And as a few people have noted, the translation has a lot of typos. I don't mean translation errors, but actual typos. They are mostly present in the first third, which makes it feel like the publisher accidentally used a first draft of that section when the book went to press. Weird.