Dear God but Piranesi is oogey-making reading. Like a bad dream or the faintest recollection of something else I read somewhere else but can't trace. For no good reason I think that something else is certain scenes in Hamabe no Kafuka, which doesn't read at all the same in English as in Japanese. In Japanese it's all quite straightforward, almost commonplace, because the language is, even when everything else is surrealistic. In English it's both oogey and menacing, and I'm not sure if that's due to the removal of the language scrim- which normally makes things look more resonant, not less- or the translator's word choice. Am not good at noticing stylistic choices in English unless they're anvil-to-the-head stuff like Lovecraft.