Book Review: Water Moon
TL;DR: Reading this book is like falling into a poem... It's delightful and entirely unique.
If you could set down the choices you regret and walk away lighter, would you do it?
That’s the intriguing question posed in Water Moon, by Samantha Sotto Yambao. The story chronicles the quest of young Hana Ishikawa, the inheritor of a mysterious pawnshop where customers trade the choices that led to regrets for boxes of special tea.
Sounds like a no-brainer, doesn’t it?
But what do you give up when you leave your choices behind?
This book is a fascinating exploration of fate, choice, memory, and regret through the setting of an alternate world where everything is symbolic. I found it very tough to put down; it balanced beautiful writing, philosophical musing, and plain old fantasy adventure in a way that kept me turning pages.
Here’s the Amazon blurb:
On a backstreet in Tokyo lies a pawnshop, but not everyone can find it. Most will see a cozy ramen restaurant. And only the chosen ones—those who are lost—will find a place to pawn their life choices and deepest regrets.
Hana Ishikawa wakes on her first morning as the pawnshop’s new owner to find it ransacked, the shop’s most precious acquisition stolen, and her father missing. And then into the shop stumbles a charming stranger, quite unlike its other customers, for he offers help instead of seeking it.
Together, they must journey through a mystical world to find Hana’s father and the stolen choice—by way of rain puddles, rides on paper cranes, the bridge between midnight and morning, and a night market in the clouds.
But as they get closer to the truth, Hana must reveal a secret of her own—and risk making a choice that she will never be able to take back.
General Thoughts
Overall rating: Five stars. This book doesn’t exactly grab you so much as lure you in with its language, imagery, and questions. It’s like falling into a poem.
Yambao’s writing is approachably lyric. Each sentence, paragraph, page, chapter feels carefully constructed for maximum cadence and impact. It feels like she painted the words onto the page.
Anyone who has followed me very long knows that I absolutely adore Kazuo Ishiguro. I’ve also read a little bit of Japanese literature besides Ishiguro. Samantha Sotto Yambao’s website says she is “based in the Philippines,” so I don’t know if you could consider her work as belonging to any particular nationality, but it did remind me a lot of Ishiguro’s work, especially An Artist of the Floating World and The Buried Giant.
The plot is interesting and unique and unfolds a little bit at a time over the course of the book. It’s a bit episodic in that much of Hana’s adventure with her new friend, Keishin (Kei for short), jumps around from setting to setting. However, I didn’t find that troublesome—it just contributed to the sensation of being in an anime dreamworld.
A note on the anime aspect: I have no real experience with anime, but this book is exactly what I imagine anime is like. In fact, the book mentions My Friend Totoro a few times, and reviews and blurbs mention Studio Ghibli. I think fans of anime would very much enjoy this book.
Representative Quotes
“Broken things have a unique kind of beauty, don’t you think?” — Hana’s father Toshio to a client of the pawnshop
“Because if we don’t hit walls, we can’t break through them.” — Keishin to Hana when she says they’ve reached a dead end
“There is something about autumn that makes things more beautiful. Out of all the seasons, it is the most honest about time. Summer and spring blind you to its passing with their colorful displays. Winter paints over everything in white. But autumn is not shy about things coming to an end. It welcomes it, waving leafy flags of red, yellow, and gold. It celebrates its sadness.” — Hana to Keishin
Observations
Parallel Universes
I’ve always been captivated by stories that take place in a world just beyond our own. I think it’s partly that my worldview demands a willingness to accept that there are forces and powers beyond the material that influence what happens in this world.
But I think there are people who believe what I believe and aren’t drawn into those stories like I am. I love the idea that there are doors, veils, passageways, and other entrances to something just beyond—worlds that operate by their own rules and in their own times and may or may not cross into or influence ours.
Water Moon is one of those stories. Toshio and Hana’s pawnshop is a gateway into a dreamworld where human-ish beings deal with choice, regret, and all the things surrounding those. Everything Hana leads Kei through has a poetic explanation or explains something about the “real” world—a pearl that contains a memory, a bridge of dreams that crosses to morning.
Or a pawn broker who can take your regrets and allow you to walk away lighter.
Memory and Regret
The premise of this book is both thought-provoking and chilling. Toshio trades his special blend of tea for items that are symbolic of choices his clients made that led to deep regret. For Izumi, the first client in the book and the last client Toshio serves before he disappears, the choice is represented by the bus fare it would have taken her to get from her childhood home to the ramen restaurant she intended to visit.
The idea that by trading our choices we can relieve ourselves of regret is a tempting one. How many of us wouldn’t love to go back in time and make different decisions to avoid the regrets we live with today? How many of us can identify forks in the road where simply taking the other path would have, we believe, led us to a better outcome?
But this kind of thinking traps us in the past—keeps us inside our brokenness and prevents us from integrating our mistakes into who we are in the present.
The idea of beauty in brokenness is spelled out in Toshio and Izumi’s conversation in the very beginning of the book:
Izumi traced the bowl’s delicate gold joinery with the tip of a perfectly manicured finger. “Some things wear their damage better than others,” she said softly, so softly it was as if she were worried that her voice might shatter the bowl.
“I have found beauty in all manner of broken things. Chairs. Buildings. People.”
Izumi looked up from her tea. “People?”
“Especially people. They shatter in the most fascinating ways. Every dent, scratch, and crack tells a story. Invisible scars hide the deepest wounds and are the most interesting.”
Toshio promises that those who take his bargain can walk away lighter—unburdened by the regrets from past choices. He says that no one has ever returned to the shop to give back his tea and reclaim a choice.
This leads one to consider—what are you without that choice?
A Quest… With a Twist…
In many ways, this book follows a fairly standard quest motif with shades of the Hero’s Journey. Hana discovers that her father is missing, and as she starts her search, a stranger shows up to accompany her. She’s reluctant, but Keishin is insistent, so she lets him join her. Together, they leapfrog through a wide array of settings, seeking clues and information that will help Hana find her father.
The twist?
The entire quest is basically psychological.
Every setting has something of a psychic parallel. In traveling through this parallel world with Hana and Kei, we are traveling through our own psyches, facing our own choices and regrets and attempting to reconcile who we are now with who we wanted to be or wished we could be.
A while back, I wrote about art, craft, and work, and I suggested that we all, ultimately, are trying to put the world back together through our various endeavors. We all seem to understand that the world is broken, and I think when most of us look at ourselves honestly, we see that we are part of that brokenness. We look at our past choices and think “if only” and assume that choosing differently would result in a different outcome.
What we don’t like to acknowledge is that the different outcome might have been just as bad or worse, or that the choices we did make ultimately led to something good, or even that a lot of choices were pretty good, but still didn’t turn out exactly the way we dreamed at the time.
Annie Duke calls this “resulting”—that is, we judge a decision based on its outcomes. The outcome of a decision doesn’t indicate the quality of the decision or the thought process that went into it; it’s a retroactive application based on how we judge the choice from where we stand now.
Or, in other words, the predicate for regret.
The truth is that we can only choose based on the information we have at any given moment. We can improve our decision-making capabilities. We can put careful thought into choices. We can ask others for advice and guidance. We can pray or seek divine wisdom. But ultimately, as temporal creatures, we only have what we have.
That’s what Hana discovers during her quest. She makes decisions and choices based on the information she has, the clues she uncovers, and the help and guidance that Keishin provides.
And while the end of her story isn’t exactly what I expected, I think, ultimately, she is able to move on without regret—and without giving up any of the choices she makes along the way.
Would I Recommend?
Yes, especially to fans of anime or Japanese literature.
Will I Read More of This Author?
I might. I’m intrigued by A Dream of Trees.
What’s Next on My List?
I am currently re-reading the first four books of the Hitchhiker’s Guide to the Galaxy series, but it’s taking me a while because I reserved about seven or eight non-fiction e-books at the library, and they keep coming available… I’ve already postponed delivery of a couple, but there were also a couple that I was really, really anxious to read, so… yeah, I’m jumping around a lot.
As to why I’m only reading the first four books of Douglas Adams’s series?
They’re the only ones I own.
I don’t remember reading the fifth one, Mostly Harmless, and I know I didn’t read the posthumously published And Another Thing, which was actually written by Eoin Colfer. I doubt I’ll pick those up, because honestly, I sort of liked where So Long, and Thanks for All the Fish ended. Given the overall farcical nature of that entire series, I feel like Adams might approve of my decision.
I’ll be back to review those books again when I’ve finished my re-read, but before that, I think I’ll review The Invisible Life of Addie LaRue, by V. E. Schwab. I read it a few months ago and decided not to review it, but some of the ideas have just kind of lingered. I think a book that hangs on like that deserves a review.
So expect that review in two weeks, and then I’ll revisit the whole farce that involves Arthur Dent, Ford Prefect, and the number 42.