Lonely Castle in the Mirror
by Mizuki Tsujimura
translated by Philip Gabriel
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Where to buy: Bookshop.org. |. Amazon. | Libro.fm
Published by Doubleday.
Sometimes, when I finish a book, I want to just press it into someone's hands. Lonely Castle in the Mirror is that kind of book.
Mizuki Tsujimura is one of Japan's most celebrated authors, a winner of both the Naoki Prize and the Japan Booksellers' Award, which is exactly what it sounds like: the award voted on by the booksellers themselves for the book they most want to sell. Lonely Castle in the Mirror is the book that won it for her in 2018, and it went on to sell over a million copies in Japan, spawn a manga adaptation, and become an anime film. Philip Gabriel, who also translated Haruki Murakami, brings it into English.
The story begins with Kokoro, a first-year junior high school student in Tokyo who has stopped going to school. She is not alone in this. One morning, the mirror in her bedroom begins to glow, and when she touches it, she is pulled through into a castle. Six other teenagers are already there, all of them were also avoiding school, and they were all carrying something they hadn't been able to get rid of. A girl in a wolf mask greets them with an offer: somewhere in the castle is a hidden room. Find the key before the year is up, and one of you gets a wish. The rules are simple. Be out by five o'clock every day. And the wish, they will have to decide if that wish is really worth it to them.
What follows is a book that slowly and meticulously takes its time building the world of the castle and the careful, tentative way these seven kids begin trusting each other. Brothers Grimm fairy tales thread through the story. The wolf mask is not decorative. The number seven is not coincidental. Tsujimura is leaving clues the whole time.
Each character is dealing with a specific kind of pain. Bullying takes many forms and Tsujimura handles every one of them with honesty, no suffering is treated as more valid than another. The castle is not a solution to any of it. It is something better: a place where they can breathe.
The ending made me cry. When everything comes together and you really understand these kids, the things that were in play the whole time without you realizing, it is one of the most moving reads I have had in a very long time. The way these kids find each other, helping one another across distances you didn't even know existed.
This is a book I will recommend to every teen and pre-teen I know (I have already sent a copy to my niece), and to every adult who has ever needed a story to remind them that they were never as alone as they felt. For fans of Before the Coffee Gets Cold, The Healing Season of Pottery, and Studio Ghibli films.
Just read it.
Where to buy:
Bookshop.org. |. Amazon. | Libro.fm
