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Lost Souls Meet Under A Full Moon

Lost Souls Meet Under A Full Moon
By Tsujimura Mizuki
Translated by Tejima Yuki
Doubleday (2025)
ISBN-13: 978-0857529657
Review by Laurence Green

You meet a mysterious teenager. A curious kind of middle-man. “The Go-Between”'. You have heard the strangest rumours - they say he can offer you a remarkable opportunity: the chance to meet someone, a loved one perhaps, who has passed away. But there is a catch - this is a one-time only deal, and your hours with them are limited. Once you've met with them, neither you, or anyone else, can ever request a meeting with them again.

Such is the premise of the interconnected short stories offered up in Lost Souls Meet Under A Full Moon, the latest book from Tsujimura Mizuki (originally released in Japan in 2010 and translated here by Tejima Yuki) following on from the remarkable success of Lonely Castle in the Mirror (which was adapted into a feature-length anime film in 2022). As with that book, we are in high concept, fantastical premise territory and there is something fascinating about how often this kind of quasi-transactional, systemised, rule-bound approach to death crops up in Japan. Indeed, Lost Souls Meet Under A Full Moon is hardly the first to attempt this kind of thing - the Before The Coffee Gets Cold series, which utilises a similar gimmick to allow customers to go back in time (invariably conversing with a deceased person in the process) has been wildly popular, and more broadly speaking, Japanese culture - from literature to movies to anime and manga - are littered with these kinds of shinigami type figures who offer up deals of some sort or other to do with death and/or time travel. There are almost so many iterations on the theme now that they surely rival the number of Japanese books now in translation about mysterious shops/cafes/libraries/cats, or for good measure, all of these mixed together.

As with so many works in this sub-genre, there is a bathos laden melodrama that is hard to palate at times. A schmaltzy sentimentalism that will either have you in floods of tears or shaking your head in disillusionment. But if you can get past the core premise (meeting and conversing with a dead person of your choice) then the deeper psychological by-products of the setup start to ring true - if you only had one chance to talk to a lost loved one, what would you say? And more importantly, what would they say to you?

In one of the more effective tales here - an average salary man meets a troubled girl struggling to make ends meet, they end up dating and everything looks set to indicate a happily ever after. Then, suddenly, without warning, she disappears - he is unable to discover what has happened to her, and waits seven years (the amount of time before a missing person can be declared presumed dead in Japan), hoping for an answer. That is, until he consults the Go-Between - and closure, of a sort, is provided. Coming halfway through the book, it is clear from the off where this particular vignette is going, but part of its charm is that the couple's budding romance offers a pleasant tonal diversion from the inevitably morbid conclusion.

As we move through a succession of the Go-Between’s clients, the minutiae of Japanese everyday life is well observed, in particular the mind-numbing drudgery of the typical office worker's day-to-day, and it is this, held up in contrast to death, that you get a sense of what perhaps these kinds of novels are trying to say, and why they are so popular - a clarion call that seems to shout: 'snap out of it, you only get one shot at life, so don't waste a second of it'. They are palliative care in literary form - a strange kind of meaning-making in a seemingly purposeless, meaningless world; a memento mori for the modern age.

The clockwork like repetition of the short story-esque formula, which clearly attempts to offer a kind of comfort in its ceaseless familiarity (we see the same events play out from both the clients, and then the Go-Between's, point of view), works both in and against the novel's favour. This is a book designed to be dipped into for short five-minute segments on the morning commute, the unerring reminders about the “rules” of the Go-Between ensuring you will never forget the core premise. One of the joys of Lonely Castle In The Mirror was that it kept you gripped with its slow release of information, gradually building an engrossing and convincing fantasy world and a cast of distinct characters. But here each tale feels like a TV sitcom - hitting the same familiar beats week in week out. Charming in small doses, but a little wearying if gulped down in a single sitting. There is also a question mark about the no-doubt marketing motivated decision to change the book's title from the original Japanese Tsunagu (literally, the Go-Between, or “to connect”), to the poetically wrought Lost Souls Meet Under A Full Moon - a choice surely made to bring it in line with the flavour and cadence of Lonely Castle In The Mirror, complete with matching, prettily illustrated cover art.

Ultimately, for those who rankle at the novel's overly sentimentalised treatment of death, be warned that this book - as with so many others in what seems to be a burgeoning category - wears every inch of its tearjerker status on its sleeve. It will either leave you a sobbing wreck, or exhaust you in its attempt at it. And for those that simply can't get enough of this kind of stuff, you're in luck; a translation of the sequel - How To Hold Someone In Your Heart - is already scheduled for release in July 2025.