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

[rilina.livejournal.com]

I also assumed the narrator was male--I wonder how marked the gender would have been (or not been) in the original Japanese?

[oracne.livejournal.com]

BTW, did you want to borrow Steven Barnes' LION'S BLOOD, or did you already have that one? I dug it out of its box back when you read that other book of his.

[kyuuketsukirui.livejournal.com]

It's definitely possible to write a story in first person that is entirely ambiguous. Pronouns give some hint, but can be ambiguous since there are many, many pronouns and only some of them are specifically gendered and even those are sometimes used by the opposite sex (and watashi is not female; it's neutral in polite speech, just women tend to use it (or more often atashi) even in more casual speech), plus pronouns are just really rarely used in Japanese, period. The subject is usually left off because it's implied.

Now I'm really curious as to what the original was like. I'm going to try and find the book in Japanese.

[kyuuketsukirui.livejournal.com]

Uh, I think I need to read this story thoroughly to make sense of it. O_o The narrator does use the pronoun watashi, which would make me think maybe female, but not enough to be 100% sure. However, not far into the story, there is a paragraph where Satomi comes to visit, and the narrator says they knew Satomi since they were children, but the actual words are "since we were a little boy and a little girl". It then says that it was unusual for boys and girls to play together. Satomi is a girls' name, so therefore the one who was a little boy must be the narrator.

So yeah. Skimming is obviously not going to solve the mystery here. XD

[octopedingenue]

Yay, I'm glad this one was good! I haven't read it yet but have more incentive now to buy it.

Please read GOTH (book/manga) so I can have another person to flail about it with!