What does the deceased owe the deceased? What did the deceased do to make a living? There are no answers to these questions here. still, Mizushima,author Lonely castle in the mirror and Schools that are frozen in timeencourage readers to think about them in this bittersweet story, a beautiful story that acts as a family between life and the dead. Every living person who manages to contact in between may ask for a night with the lost person, and each dead person can answer a request so that each person has two opportunities to connect in between.
The book records the demands of four different people, while Chapter 5 follows the bondage between himself. Everyone has a different reason – a young woman wants to connect with the dead who changed her life, a man needs information about his late mother, a man seeking answers about his missing fiancé, and a high school girl struggling with her best friend’s death. Nothing is what you expect, all four stories organically lead to a fifth story about the fifth between one another, an exquisite combination of melancholy, mundane, and magic.
For each of the four situations, the tone is somewhat different, and if the narrative voice is not always very different, it feels like a deliberate choice. Tsujimura is similar to the sadness and loss experienced by different people for different reasons, and one constant is emotional pain. Not everyone expresses or feels this in the same way, but it is still universal. The most “traditional” description of sadness is in the fourth story where salary is looking for answers and closing his fiancé, who disappeared seven years ago. One piece of him knew she must have died, even though his friend suggested she was a liar and left only after getting what she wanted. But he was sad and if he could endure the pain, he needed an answer. Even if he knew it was somehow present, he didn’t want an answer. But knowledge is a reason for liberation that ultimately breaks and expresses one’s feelings and finds closure for life and the dead. It’s not a story that makes you cry, but the kind of story that makes you cry quietly before you realize the tears fall.
It also provides a great bookend for the first story. In that story, a young woman lost in the world demands a meeting with a celebrity who is the most recent (and suddenly) deceased. She was a fan and sent gifts, but in fact, it was a memory of an era when a famous woman stopped and helped her bring her new lease on the street, so learning that her reasons for life were greatly affected. The theme of this story is to understand that life is valuable, even if it feels like it is destroying, a death will not kill the world your world. Both this and the fourth story show how the memory of the dead becomes a catalyst for life.
This is tested in the third story, about a high school girl feeling intimate about the death of her best friend. Thematically speaking, this story is the closest novel to Tsujimura’s previous translation. Lonely castle in the mirror. It explores the emotional upheaval of adolescence and its destructiveness, and is a teenage barbarian. It’s shocking that no real catharsis is found in this story – especially considering that the character interacts with the middleman on a point-to-point level before interacting with him. The preview of the book’s sequel suggests that the story will be returned, and unlike other stories, it seems to warn of bad behavior and tamper with areas where you shouldn’t be, which seems intentional.
Lost souls meet under the full moon It is a magical realist exploration of the intersection of sorrow and life and death. With a sense of mythology from multiple belief systems, the story asks readers to think about how they deal with grief and the purpose of ghosts and memories. In his novel Johnny and the DeadTerry Pratchett noted, “The town you just passed still exists in the rearview mirror”, which refers to the past we are looking back. But how we deal with the past depends on us – Tsujimura believes that somewhere in between can only provide us with means.
If possible, who would you meet? Whose request would you answer? How will this change the rest of your life?
