Lost Souls Meet Under a Full Moon

A young woman from Tokyo wants to meet a dead TV star who once helped her. She contacts a go-between who arranges meetings between the living and the departed, and the person who turns up is a teenage boy, Ayumi Shibuya. He wears a designer duffel coat and carries a tattered notebook.

Ayumi receives his clients in a luxury hotel and sets out firm rules. Each reunion happens once. The dead are free to refuse. The service costs nothing, and the meeting can only take place during a full moon.

The book follows several of these requests, so it reads as a set of linked stories built around one figure. One client is an eldest son, still resentful, who hopes his mother can tell him where the deeds to a plot of land are.

Another client is a teenage girl who blames herself for her best friend's death. A third is a tired businessman who wants to know why his fiancée vanished days after he proposed.

The premise is a fantasy, but the questions the clients bring are ordinary and personal: guilt, grudges and unanswered loss. Each meeting turns on whether the dead person agrees to appear, and what the visitor wants to hear if they do.