“I was drenched with my tears.” Moderator Nozomi Uematsu’s recollection of Mizuki Tsujimura’s Lost Souls Meet Under a Full Moon encapsulates the moving nature of the novel. It follows a mysterious teenage ‘Go-Between’, who arranges meetings between the living and the dead, but only under certain terms and conditions. The evening’s discussion proved just as emotionally evocative, as the crowd thoughtfully listened to the inspirations behind Tsujimura’s work.
Beginning with a passage from the book, Tsujimura highlighted a conversation between two characters on whether meetings between the living and dead are mutually beneficial. Interpreter Bethan Jones translated seamlessly, making clear the story’s core conflict for those who had not yet read it.
When questioned on what led her to storytelling, Tsujimura admitted that she loved books from a young age, alongside manga, anime, video games, films and music. She mentioned that her alignment with writing simply stems from it being a medium where you can create on your own. All you need is a pen and paper. However, this reason can be understood in terms of tangible resources, as she proceeds to say that what she finds most attractive is “the collaboration between the writer and the reader”. A story is only as good as its reader since they need “to accept, to interpret and to imagine the story”, creating subjective meaning.
The novel’s fantastical element, the ability to communicate with the dead, was also explored. Tsujimura’s books have been widely categorised as magical realism, and this seems to be accurate as she likes to focus on “an element of bizarre taking place in everyday life”. She attributed this to keeping “a thread of reality”. In Lost Souls, the living have one opportunity to meet the dead, and the dead have one request they can accept. This lends the story a sense of real-world urgency, allowing the reader the opportunity to reflect on various hopes and struggles.
A delightful part of the evening was the discussion about Tsujimura’s other English-translated works. Although they were both published in the UK around the same time, Lost Souls’ sequel, How to Hold Someone in Your Heart, was released eight years later in Japan. She outlined her thought progression as such: in the first book, characters are seeking to solve their problems, whereas in the second, she found herself writing about people over 60 making requests in order to determine whether they had lived a meaningful life.
Uematsu then brought up Tsujimura’s Lonely Castle in the Mirror, a work about teenagers, and asked what sort of message she wanted to convey to the youth of Japan. Tsujimura stated she wanted to create a kind of safe space. The public reception to the book in Japan had been good, and she attributed this success to revisiting her own teenage years “as an adult with a camera.” She said she never wants to forget what it is like to be a child, especially as adults largely view children and childhood through unfair biases. Her belief that “there’s something universal about childhood across every generation” explains the widespread resonance with her books.
Mizuki Tsujimura’s literary worlds lend themselves beautifully to exposing the intensity of emotions whilst also emphasising their universal qualities. During the Q&A session, one audience member wanted insight into her creative process. In response, Tsujimura emphasised that “there’s a limit to one’s words inside themselves,” so to write, you must read. Recalling her previous comment about a story holding meaning through a collaboration between writer and reader, her answer invokes a satisfyingly cyclical structure, one that denotes the writer and reader in perpetual conversation.
Rating: ★ ★ ★ ★ ★
