FINISHED READING - Lost Souls Meet Under A Full Moon by Mizuki Tsujimura

Imagine you can meet someone from your past ife, with whom you had a strong connection. It could be a lover, a friend or a relative. And even though they are now dead, you can arrange to meet them between dusk and dawn during a full moon. To perhaps resolve some long burning question, ask their advice or help with an issue, or simply just to spend time with them once more. You can only do this once in your life, so chose carefully.  If you chose to do so, you have to contact a 'go between' who asks you who you need to see and why, and then dialogues with the deceased about whether they wish to meet this person or not. If they do, they go ahead and make all the arrangements for a meeting in a hotel room. This is the basic story set up of Lost Souls Meet Under A Full Moon. 

And so we meet Manami Hirase, a young woman whose lived a life which she feels is of no significance to anyone. She feels internally in constant despair. The one highlight of her life was encountering Saori Mizushiro, a TV celebrity, when she was excessively drunk,, hyperventilating in the street, and Saori had calmly helped her in a peak moment of distress. Saori has recently died unexpectedly, and Manami wishes to talk to her again as she feels her life no longer has any point.

Another 'go between' client, Koichi Tsuchiya is a successful and very busy businessman. He starts a relationship with Kirari Himukai, all goes well, they fall in love, she moves in with him. But then one day she appears to pack her things and leave never to be heard of again. Seven years later, a tortured and embittered man, Koichi is wondering whether to have her legally declared dead, so he can finally draw a line on this relationship. But then he hears about the 'go between' and has to consider whether knowing she was alive or dead would really help.

These are just two of the often complex life stories touched on in this sensitively written book. All the clients the 'go between' helps are living lives that in someway cannot move on because of an issue that has stubbornly remained an obstacle. Each time Tsujimura describes the background of her characters life dilemmas and how they discover the 'go between'. These meetings with the dead may resolve the central issue, but not always in the way the client expected or desired. Some feel released to live their lives more fully, others remain haunted by something reprehensible they did, which their meeting with the deceased still fails to resolve. 

Tsujimura's writing style ( as translated ) is composed quite simply and plainly. In very grounded real terms the messiness of emotions and issues at play in any single life, are revealed. It deftly avoids stepping into sugary sentiment, which given the subject matter is often laced with tragedy, it could so easily do. The lives she describes come across as universally relatable, filled as they are with quite ordinary guilt, envy, love, loss and remorse, everything is here.

The final chapter about the 'go between' we've see appearing throughout the book, provides a satisfying twist at the end of the book. Lost Souls Meet Under A Full Moon was a huge success in Japan when first published, and has subsequently been adapted into a movie. It does, in many ways mine a recurring vein in Japanese fiction, of the closeness of ancestors, being able to meet and dialogue with the ghosts of your relatives, crops up incidentally quite a lot. This novel also has the recognisable tone of gentle quirkiness which a lot of mainstream Japanese fiction employs. It's not an earth shatteringly original book, but it is very well written and I for one found it a really engaging and satisfying novel to read.

CARROT REVIEW - 5/8

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