This review is based on an eARC (Advance Reading Copy) provided by the publisher via NetGalley in exchange for an honest review. Lost Souls Meet Under a Full Moon was released on August 26, 2025.
My first exposure to Mizuki Tsujimura was a couple years ago when I read the tremendous Lonely Castle in the Mirror. So when I saw that another of her books was being translated into English, I jumped at the chance to read an advance copy of Yuki Tejima’s translation of Lost Souls Meet Under a Full Moon.
Lost Souls Meet Under a Full Moon is a short novel in five parts. The first four chapters—roughly 40 pages each—are first-person accounts from four different characters seeking an opportunity to have one last conversation with someone they’d lost, whether it be an idol, a parent, a lover, or a friend. The fifth is about twice the length, switching to third person to retell the first four stories from the perspective of the young go-between who arranges the meetings.
Lonely Castle in the Mirror used a fantasy premise to explore mental health (in that case focusing on tweens and school), so it’s not much surprise to see Lost Souls Meet Under a Full Moon going back to the well. All four first-person narrators are being psychologically crushed, whether by depression, familial expectations, lack of closure, or guilt. Some of them are self-aware about it all and some are not, but none of them are coping well. And so they seek comfort in the dead.
After backstories that shade a bit toward the melodramatic, the conversations themselves can be surprisingly understated. The narrators never get exactly what they’re expecting, and their chapters end without a whole lot of falling action to allow the reader to see whether the meetings made any difference. They’re easy reading, but they feel incomplete—likely intentionally so.
It’s the fifth chapter that both pulls back the curtain on the entire enterprise and provides the necessary context to allow the reader some closure—regardless of whether the characters get some of their own. The go-between is new to the job and has his own questions, both about how the whole thing works and about a tragedy in his own past that has left both his parents dead and him in the care of a grandmother. Taking time to consider the spiritual and philosophical implications of meeting with the dead adds a layer of depth to the story, and the go-between is able to see things in the first four narrators that they can’t always see in their own perspective chapters. It makes the whole novel feel a little bit less like a mosaic story and more like a cohesive narrative, even if it’s one that doesn’t have a strong central plot. The individual stories still feel a little more simplistic than the ones in Lonely Castle in the Mirror, but they do offer five satisfying narrative arcs, and they do a good job addressing a wide variety of people, even if none of the individual stories go incredibly deep.
Overall, Lost Souls Meet Under a Full Moon doesn’t manage the depth and nuance of Lonely Castle in the Mirror, but it has similar goals, using fantasy to explore a variety of psychological maladies. And while the individual sections are much shorter and don’t go quite as deep, they do go quite wide, and the capstone segment adds both depth and closure. This one isn’t a stunner, but it’s a good read all the same.
Recommended if you like: magic for mental health reasons.
Can I use it for Bingo? It’s Published in 2025 by an Author of Color.
Overall rating: 15 of Tar Vol’s 20. Four stars on Goodreads.