It's been nine years since the Japanese release of the last Haruhi Suzumiya light novel, the epic two-part The Surprise of Haruhi Suzumiya, and seven years since its English translation. The world has changed a lot in the intervening years, but picking up The Intuition of Haruhi Suzumiya, the SOS Brigade hasn't changed a bit. This new volume collects three stories, two shorter ones previously published in 2013 and 2018 and one longer brand-new one. Those looking forward to a grand return for the series might be disappointed; Haruhi always alternated between big mind-bending sci-fi adventures and quiet slice-of-life stories, and this volume is firmly in the latter category. Those simply desiring an otaku timewarp to an age where no one could stop Hare Hare Yukai-ing, however, will feel like they came home.
The first story, "Random Numbers," goes back a bit in the Haruhi timeline to the January 3 shrine visit mentioned in The Intrigues of Haruhi Suzumiya. Originally written to celebrate the series' 10th anniversary, it's a very low-key story, moe-cute with just a dash of intellectual trolling courtesy of Koizumi's cryptic math challenge. Launching with this story establishes this volume won't be a high-stakes one, but its fun to read Kyon's distinctive voice and hang out with the other SOS Brigade members again.
"Seven Wonders Overtime" brings out more of the series' comedic inventiveness while also introducing a fun new character, the transfer student and Mystery Club member known as T. T gives the non-Haruhi SOS Brigade members a mission: invent "seven wonders" for the school to appease Haruhi's demands. Given Haruhi's reality-warping abilities, they need to come up with urban legends that wouldn't actually be that terrifying if Haruhi consciously or subconsciously made them real. This is a thoroughly entertaining story that highlights Tanigawa's eclectic reference points, from molecular biology to avant-garde music.
The newest and longest of the stories, "Tsuruya's Challenge," borders on being too meta and esoteric for its own good. T and Koizumi are actually joining Nagato in the Literature Club, and the first 20 or so pages of this story are literally just the characters discussing literary analysis of various mystery stories, most of which will be completely obscure to readers outside Japan. Of course, there is a purpose to this: out of the blue, Tsuruya starts sending stories to the SOS Brigade's official email with "challenges" to solve. While solving these challenges is a dry and involved process (including a lot of language issues which just don't read naturally in English, as good as Andrew Cunningham's translation is), the character-based payoffs are absolutely worth it, promising potential new directions for the series' future.
In the afterword, Tanigawa apologizes for taking so long to complete a new light novel. He humbly surmises this book contains "absolutely no important societal themes or even any particularly complex portraits of the human experience," but hopes that "it will bring a look of joy to your face, be that a smile, a smirk, or a grin." The three stories in this book achieve exactly what the author set out to do, but this volume does, in fact, contain some writing of the utmost importance in its final pages, where Tanigawa memorializes the artists from the Haruhi anime who died in the July 18, 2019 fire at Kyoto Animation. Even if you feel like you've moved on from Haruhi as a franchise, you'll want to read this memorial.
The Intuition of Haruhi Suzumiya is now available as an eBook. A physical English-language edition will be published in June 2021.
