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

[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

[rachelmanija.livejournal.com]

Interesting, thanks! In the English version, the narrator is definitely revealed as a woman in the end.

[kyuuketsukirui.livejournal.com]

Yeah, I read the very end first and saw the mother/daughter thing, so this is all very confusing. XD

[homasse.livejournal.com]

Ditto in the Japanese. Til then, I thought the narrator--and everyone in the hospital room with him--was a man.

[homasse.livejournal.com]

Not only that, the writer does things like saying Satomi went with them out fishing and bug-hunting (stereotypically 'male' activities) and so ended up tanned, but now was pale and beautiful. So yeah, definitely setting Satomi up as a woman. Especially since Satomi always uses polite speech.