Calling You, by Otsu-Ichi

[rachelmanija]

Three fantasy novellettes, plus illustrations by Miyako Hasami. (Prose novellettes, not manga.)

Click here to get it from Amazon: Calling You (Novel)

The first, "Calling You," was my favorite. A lonely girl who doesn't have a cell phone because no one would ever call her imagines herself one... and one day, it rings. The working out of this conceit is clever and, despite what I at first saw as an overly melodramatic twist, quite moving.

"Kiz/Kids," about two lonely kids in a special ed class, didn't grab me as much as the other two despite featuring one of my favorite tropes, psychic powers. I did enjoy the gruesomely logical approach the kids take toward exploring the limits of the power, which is to move injuries from another person onto the psychic kid's body.

In "Flower Song," the narrator recovers in a hospital from a tragic train crash, and there discovers a flower with a woman's face. I liked the slow movement from numbed stasis to connection and healing, and how the flower isn't quite what it first seems to be. I'm not sure if the very ending was supposed to be as surprising as I found it...

ETA: If you speak Japanese and don't mind being spoiled, please read the comments and help us out!



I assumed the narrator was male because it never occurred to me that shared hospital rooms could be co-ed, and the roommates are male. Am I crazy? Are co-ed hospital rooms common in Japan or even in the US, and I just didn't know? Or was that a completely unlikely circumstance intended to create a surprise gender twist at the end?

Comments

[anachred.livejournal.com]

"'I' and 'you' are gendered"

This is not really true. Especially in writing, "watashi" could be used by a man, though they don't use "I" and "you" the way we do. They drop it a lot.

It seems strange to me that the hospital room would be co-ed. Not impossible, but strange.

Even back in the bad TB days I think they had separate rooms, if not wards, necessarily. I read a memoir in Japanese by a Japanese author, so it's a bit fuzzy, but I'm sure she was rooming with women, because of the way she describes relationships with men taking place. This is in WWII days, or thereabouts.

[anachred.livejournal.com]

{Clarification: men don't use "watashi" really, but in speech in *general* the Japanese don't use "I" or "you" the fastidious way we do in English.}

[homasse.livejournal.com]

men don't use "watashi" really

Yes, they do--they do in polite situations where using "ore" or "boku" would be inappropriate. Where I lived in Gunma, NO ONE used "boku" unless it was a kid reciting something for school (same kids used "ore" as soon as they were back to normal), so men's choices were "ore" or "watashi"--so men being polite dropped "ore" and used "watashi" frequently.

[anachred.livejournal.com]

Sorry, I meant to say that they drop it completely a lot. I realized that was unclear and tried to clarify, guess I didn't do a good job. ^_^

Thanks for the catch!

[rachelmanija.livejournal.com]

Thanks, I'd forgotten that men also use watashi.

[homasse.livejournal.com]

I was in a Japanese hospital for 5 weeks, and the rooms are most definitely separated--the male patients weren't even supposed to go into the women's rooms (but we could go into theirs--or maybe it wasn't really enforced as much with us women).