Mizuki Tsujimura fans, this one sounds like another slow-burn emotional hit.
Anime News Network has reviewed How to Hold Someone in Your Heart, the sequel to Tsujimura’s Lost Souls Meet Under a Full Moon, and the big takeaway is simple: this is not the kind of story that weaponises sadness for cheap tears. Instead, it continues Tsujimura’s strength — writing about grief, memory, and love without making everything feel overly sugary.
The novel, translated by Yuki Tejima, picks up seven years after the events of the first book. Ayumi, who serves as a go-between for the living and the dead, is no longer a high schooler trying to understand his role. He is now an adult working as a toy designer, but his strange responsibility has not gone away. He still helps people meet the dead for one final encounter, even if those meetings can only offer temporary comfort rather than proper closure.
That career shift matters. Ayumi’s work connects him to a woodworking workshop also tied to his father, a furniture designer. At the same time, his duty as a go-between links him to his grandmother’s legacy. So the sequel is not just about the people asking for help — it is also about Ayumi slowly figuring out what kind of adult he wants to become, and how his family history shapes him.
ANN’s review highlights how the book explores different forms of love through each case. Some are about parent-child relationships. One especially heavy chapter follows two mothers who both want to meet daughters they lost: one a six-year-old who drowned, the other a young adult who died of breast cancer. The point is not neat healing. Both mothers are still trapped in guilt, still wondering if they failed their children. But by encountering someone who understands that specific kind of pain, they find a small, fragile kind of comfort.
Another story looks at a young man dealing with complicated feelings toward his absent father, while another follows a historian who wants to speak to a figure from his hometown’s feudal past. The final case, involving an old man who has spent decades trying to meet a girl who died at sixteen, seems to be one of the book’s strongest sections. What begins with a simple assumption about romantic love turns into something more layered — affection, duty, memory, and maybe even selfishness all tangled together.
For Malaysian and SEA readers who enjoy Japanese novels beyond the usual anime-adaptation pipeline, this sounds like the kind of book worth keeping on the radar. Tsujimura is already known internationally for Lonely Castle in the Mirror, and this duology sits in that same emotional zone: quiet, human, and a bit painful in the best way. Not flashy, not action-packed, but the sort of story you read at night and then stare at the ceiling for a while, bro.
ANN notes that the sequel may not hit quite as hard as the first book, and that the seven-year jump leaves Ayumi feeling slightly underdeveloped at times. Still, the review praises the prose, translation, emotional restraint, and the way the novel handles love without turning it into melodrama.
If you like stories about grief that do not insult your intelligence, How to Hold Someone in Your Heart sounds like one to add to the reading list.
Source: Anime News Network