How to Hold Someone in your Heart

PICK UP YOUR NEXT READ FOR FANS OF LONELY CASTLE IN THE MIRROR and BEFORE THE COFFEE GETS COLD - the story of a young man with special powers to connect the living with the afterlife.


Ayumi is a young man with special powers to bring back the dead to meet the living.
A gift passed down in his family, he is able to arrange meetings according to strict rules and always under a full moon. After years in this role, he begins to question its meaning, and how his powers affect his own desires in the real world. Meanwhile, he helps out five characters:

-A young film star finds resolution with the father who abandoned him, but not as he expected;
- An amateur historian is obsessed to meet a minor warlord of the sixteenth century;
-Ayumi anxiously juggles two meetings on the same evening, both have lost their daughters;
-A former cook, whose request to visit an upper-class young woman in the afterlife has been repeatedly rejected, is finally granted his wish.

Find out how Ayumi and his clients learn to lose their regrets, open up to the unexpected, and cherish what they already have in this profound and moving novel by Japan's leading storyteller.

About the Author

Mizuki Tsujimura (Author)
MIZUKI TSUJIMURA is the much-loved author of million-copy-bestselling mystery and puzzlebox novels. Lost Souls Meet Under a Full Moon explores our relationship with the memories of deceased loved ones and what gives our lives meaning. It was made into a high-budget Japanese-language film and won a newcomer award. Its sequel, How to Hold Someone in Your Heart, was also a huge bestseller, cementing the appeal of Tsujimura’s unique combination of emotion, mystery and magic. She is the author of the groundbreaking novel Lonely Castle in the Mirror, which was also adapted for anime and manga and which combines real-world fantasy with important themes of mental health and friendship. Tsujimura has won many awards, including the Japan Booksellers' Award and the Naoki Prize, and is published worldwide. English-language editions of many of her works, including True Mothers and Arrogance and Virtue (now a major Japanese-language) are due to be published soon.

Yuki Tejima (Translator)
Yuki Tejima is the translator of Mizuki Tsujimura’s Lost Souls Meet Under a Full Moon and How to Hold Someone in Your Heart, Kumi Kimura’s Someone to Watch Over You, and the sequel to Tetsuko Kuroyanagi’s bestselling memoir, Totto-chan: The Little Girl at the Window 2. She moved from the US to Tokyo, where she now lives.