Book Review: Lost Souls Meet Under A Full Moon by Mizuki Tsujimura
About the book
I bring together the living and the departed.
I am the go-between.
When a young woman from Tokyo contacts the go-between to request a meeting with a deceased TV star who once helped her, she doesn’t expect a teenage boy to show up. Dressed in a designer duffel coat and carrying a tattered notebook, Ayumi Shibuya offers an extraordinary service: he reunites the living with their dearly departed.
Meeting his clients at a luxury hotel, Ayumi lays down the ground rules: each reunion is a one-time arrangement that the dead can refuse, the service is entirely free, and the meeting must take place during a full moon.
As Ayumi arranges these reunions, we encounter a resentful eldest son who wants to ask his mother to unearth the deeds to a plot of land, a teenage girl who blames herself for her best friend’s death, and a weary businessman seeking answers about his fiancée’s disappearance days after he proposed.
Already a multimillion-copy bestseller in Japan, Lost Souls Meet Under a Full Moon is storytelling at its finest.
Captivating, cosy, and compulsively readable, this is an unforgettable page-turner in which the living and the dead are given one last chance for closure.
Why we love it
If you've been following our book reviews for a while, you'll know we're awfully partial to uplifting and contemplative Japanese story-telling. The episodic style makes them easy to dip into when life gets busy and I always come away from them feeling like I've enjoyed a little moment of respite from this crazy world we're living in.
Lost Souls Meet Under A Full Moon has been on my radar for a while so it's a delight to report that this quietly magical read is every bit as wonderful as I'd hoped, the sort of book that makes you feel like you've stumbled on a secret you weren't meant to know about.
As with Before The Coffee Gets Cold (also a firm favourite here with us), the concept is simple: that for one time only, under the night of a full moon, a person may request a meeting with someone who's dead, though not necessarily someone you might have known in life.
Each chapter follows a different character, offering them a chance for resolution of whatever regrets, grief or unresolved questions they're burdened with. Inevitably, some characters will resonate more than others and certain moments will hit harder emotionally, or at least it did with with me, but the book’s overarching sense of interconnectedness and consistent style keeps it engaging from start to finish.
As with any sort of magical realism, you do have to suspend logic and belief for a while and just go with the flow, accepting the premise as it is. Mizuki Tsujimura writes with such beautiful simplicity that the elements of magical realism never risk overwhelming the story. Instead they act more as a mechanism for exploring themes of memory, loss and regret so that the more emotional moments never feel forced or overly sentimental.
Overall, this is a reassuringly warm and reflective read - perfect for anyone in the mood for something thought-provoking yet comforting.
