Book Title: How to Hold Someone in Your Heart
Author: Mizuki Tsujimura
Publisher: Doubleday
Number of Pages: 240
ISBN: 978-0857529664
Date Published: Sept. 4, 2025
Price: INR 620
Book Review
Mizuki Tsujimura’s “How to Hold Someone in Your Heart” is a tender, introspective exploration of love, regret, and the mysterious boundary between life and death. Continuing the universe introduced in ‘Lost Souls Meet Under a Full Moon,’ this novel follows Ayumi, a young man gifted with the ability to reunite the living and the dead under the glow of a full moon. Through Ayumi’s quiet empathy, Tsujimura turns the extraordinary into something deeply human—a meditation on closure and connection that finds meaning not in miracles, but in emotional truth. Each reunion he arranges becomes a small, self-contained story, illuminating what it means to hold someone in memory even when they’re gone.
The novel’s structure unfolds like a series of ripples—calm on the surface yet devastating in their emotional reach. Tsujimura’s restrained prose creates a space for reflection, refusing melodrama in favor of gentle poignancy. Ayumi remains more an observer than a hero; his reserved nature and quiet questioning give the book an understated intimacy. The people he helps—a grieving father, a forsaken actor, a cook seeking forgiveness—become vessels for exploring themes of regret, forgiveness, and the futility of perfect closure. As each encounter concludes, the reader is left with the haunting calm of unfinished goodbyes, balanced by the soft warmth of acceptance.
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“How to Hold Someone in Your Heart” is truly unforgettable because of its fusion of magical realism and emotional realism. The rules that govern Ayumi’s world—the full moon meetings, the one-time reunions—ground its magic in moral consequence. The translation by Yuki Tejima preserves the lyrical precision of Tsujimura’s Japanese prose, letting the story breathe naturally in English. Gentle, soulful, and quietly profound, the novel offers a moving reminder that letting go is not the opposite of love—it’s another way of holding someone, tenderly, in the heart.
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