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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?
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?
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"Zoo" is really, really good (I've read Zoo 1 and have just started Zoo 2), but OMFG DEPRESSING. The first two stories had me going D: the whole time, especially the first one (but then, I react badly to child abuse/child neglect stories).
Goth is next or second to next on my list of his stuff to read (the book ahead of it is a short collection of short stories, and I've already read half of them in other collections) after Zoo 2.