What the hell did I just read? I mean, seriously? I wanted to love this book and if you look at most people's reviews, you'll find that most people wanted to love this book before they started. But I couldn't. I just couldn't love it and after a while I didn't want to. I have some of the same issues as other people do. The setting is WAY too overdone, I wanted to stop WAY back in the beginning of the book because the story made me want to slam my head on a desk. It went nowhere until a couple hours in when the wreck happened.
The characters are bad. Like I don't believe the relationship between or among any of them, nothing felt sincere. Yukiko is a bitch, her dad is lame, I can't even remember most of the other characters because I just didn't care. They were all boring.
And this whole overarching sl with the lotus killing their land. I get it, I get your overdone social commentary about us destroying our world. But really. I can't believe that any world would have gotten THAT bad and that many people would have survived. The rivers and the sky were polluted? We need these to live, why would there still be so many people alive? Go read a [a:Jared Diamond|256|Jared Diamond|http://d.gr-assets.com/authors/1355359393p2/256.jpg] book, this is a society that is clearly choosing to destroy itself. I don't believe it for a second, there's no way it's still functional.
I can't make any comments about the language or culture that's referenced, but I recommend you look up some of the lower reviews that have more expertise.
All and all, waste of time. Fancy names and descriptions do not a good book make.