Translating Lost Souls Meet Under a Full Moon by Mizuki Tsujimura: A Guest Post by Yuki Tejima

A young man known as the “Go-Between” helps bridge the complex gap between life and death by arranging meetings between the living and the deceased in this sharp, fantastical story about loss, closure and the afterlife. Read on for an exclusive essay from Yuki Tejima on translating Lost Souls Meet Under a Full Moon.

A few months ago, I sat in the dimmed auditorium of my high school in Los Angeles for the first time in decades, enthralled by the performance of In the Heights that would go on to win several national theater awards. At the helm is my closest childhood friend, who launched the drama program at our alma mater where she began teaching straight out of college. “Because we never had it,” she says. Watching the talented troupe light up the stage, I am transported back to those fragile years—how could I not be?—and I feel our teenage presence, my friends and I, in all manner of baggy clothing with our bulky backpacks strewn at our feet, as we laugh, whoop, and whistle in the seats, trying not to let our vulnerabilities show in public. We were, in a sense, always performing.

In the months leading up to the show, I was thousands of miles away in Tokyo translating Mizuki Tsujimura’s bestselling novel Lost Souls Meet Under a Full Moon, envisioning myself in that very auditorium. In chapter three, high school drama students Arashi and Misono are best friends who appear inseparable, though a closer look reveals that one believes she is a born star, and the other’s place is strictly in her shadow. On the page they speak Japanese, but as I translate, they take on new life as English-speaking teens rehearsing in the auditorium I know well (and where my own friend has mentored thousands of students just like them), awaiting their cue in the wings, maneuvering through the hand-built sets, and gossiping with castmates after rehearsals. I am drawn in by Tsujimura’s details: The jealousy that washes over the ravishing Arashi as she watches ‘plain’ and ‘untalented’ Misono laugh and joke with castmates, her shock upon hearing that Misono has tried out for the lead, competing against her, and the hatred that erupts when Misono gets the part. Where Tsujimura shines as a storyteller is that she does not allow them a chance to mend the rift in their friendship. After one of the girls is killed in a bicycle accident, the only way for the former friends to reunite is through the go-between, a young man with the ability to bring the dead and living together for one moonlit night.

Though my friend and I never fell out like Arashi and Misono do, thank goodness, I felt the weight of the girls’ affection and envy in equal measures, the insecurity of those years that Tsujimura depicts with both intensity and ease. To learn she wrote the chapter in two days because she’d mistaken the deadline (this novel was originally written in installments for a Japanese literary magazine) and had been startled by the dark turn it took, seemed to explain why it felt so true. There are no tropes here—I know those girls. I just hope they found the closure they needed.