9780857529664 by Smakprov Media AB

How to Hold Someone in Your Heart

MIZUKI TSUJIMURA

Translated from the Japanese by YUKI TEJIMA

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First published in Great Britain in 2025 by Doubleday an imprint of Transworld Publishers

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The Rule of Proposals

As the wind was blowing, I placed my hand on the collar of my coat.

Dropping my gaze from the sky, I noticed a young girl standing beside me on the empty tree-lined street.

‘Yuzuru Kamiya-san?’

Shocked to hear my own name, I croaked, ‘Huh?’ and took a good look at the girl standing before me.

This wasn’t the first time I’d been stopped on the street. I was an actor, and despite my lack of experience, I had been signed with a management agency and was already starting to book steady work. If my face was recognizable at all, I’d say it was to kids in her age group, as I was starring as one of the live-action superheroes on Sunday morning television. The problem for me was how the girl addressed me.

My name was Yuzuru Kamiya, yes, but kids usually

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referred to me by my superhero colour, Blue, or my character name, Kanata. So I wasn’t used to being called my full name, and with the honorific -san, no less.

‘. . . Yes?’ I said to the girl.

Was she in first or second grade? She had refined features and a confident look in her big, brown eyes. Her face was tiny, her jawline sharp. Light eyebrows. Her chestnut-tinged hair was pulled into two curly pigtails and tied with ribbon, and her bangs were parted in the middle to reveal a smooth, shapely forehead.

When I think of children, my mind goes straight to the professional child actors I work with on the show. And like those I meet on set, this girl seemed mature for her age.

We were in a park encircled by high-rise office buildings in the Hibiya business district, situated across the street from a bar-lined neighbourhood. Until today, I had no idea this park even existed. I’d never been in the area on a weekday while the sun was still up, and the daytime energy took me by surprise. The park brimmed with mothers pushing strollers and office workers who were apparently taking extra-long breaks.

‘Um . . . and you are?’

I knew I had the right place and time, and I’d been waiting for a while. But the person I’d been on the lookout for, the person I imagined I’d be meeting today, was much

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to Hold Someone in Your Heart

older – definitely not a girl carrying a pink frilly purse. She seemed to have come alone. She had to be one of my fans. Right?

I was about to flash her my brightest actor smile when she said, ‘Shall we go?’ She turned and started to walk away. ‘Um . . . sorry. I’m meeting someone here.’

‘I know. I’m the person you’ve been waiting for.’

I blinked.

‘I’m the go-between.’

She began to walk away, and I followed. ‘I – I heard that you could arrange meetings?’

She turned around, trained her wise-looking eyes on me.

‘I bring together the living and the departed. That’s what a go-between does.’

I imagined for a second that I was watching a child actor perform. She spoke in a voice as clear as day, and in a daze, I listened.

she led me to a cafe in the basement of a shopping plaza just a short walk from the park. It was one of those oldfashioned coffeehouses with a glass display by the entrance lined with plastic replicas of coffee, cream soda and other menu items.

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In an area that seemed to be unveiling one new sparkling shopping centre after another, I wondered why I was being led – by a child – to an old coffeehouse in an old-fashioned building, but I kept my mouth shut. The coffeehouse was mostly empty but for a few customers – long-time regulars, no doubt. We were easily the youngest there. The newspapers and literary journals stacked in the magazine rack by the door did not cater to a young clientele.

The girl chose the seat farthest from the entrance – normally reserved for the guest of the party – and regarded me with a smug stare. I got the message and took the chair opposite.

‘So . . .’ I said, cowering ever so slightly under her glare.

‘Are you really the go-between? I had heard that it was someone older. I’m pretty sure the person who picked up my call was an adult.’

I only half-believed the rumour about the ‘go-between’. Supposedly, these were people who could help reunite you with a loved one who had died. But you only had one chance. The first time I heard the story was at a cast party for a play that had just ended its run.

‘Hey, has anyone close to you died?’ a cast-mate had asked me after a few too many drinks, not expecting a serious response. ‘If you were given a chance to see that person again . . . would you want to?’

How to Hold Someone in Your Heart

Assuming his go-between story was nothing more than an urban myth, I started bringing it up casually with people. Have you heard of the go-between? Most reacted with amusement, as I had, but there were some who didn’t seem to find it funny.

One cast-mate I knew only vaguely came up to me at a different party. ‘I don’t know if you should joke about it. Some people might not be into that kind of thing, but more than that, I wonder if you want people thinking you are.’

Her tone wasn’t rude or forceful, which is why I actually considered what she’d said. In this industry, it was true that being viewed as super religious or dependent on ‘unseen powers’ could raise some eyebrows. I stopped bringing up the go-between.

Who knew that a few years later, I’d be running around trying to track down the go-between myself?

The young girl scowled at my question. ‘If you’re not going to believe me, I can just leave now.’ She regarded me suspiciously. ‘How did you find out about the go-between anyway?’

‘Uh, I’m an actor, and uh, an actor friend told me about it.’ I waited for her reaction, but the word ‘actor’ didn’t seem to stir up any emotion. Part of me scoffed, Don’t you know who I am? while another part of me laughed at my easily bruised

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ego. ‘At first I thought it was an urban myth, but then I started to look into it . . . and well . . . I finally decided to call.’

When I dialled the number, a guy who sounded about my age picked up, or so I’d thought. And the posts and comments I came across online had said the go-between was an elderly person, all of which made me wonder if the go-between was really a large-scale organization that ran psychic scams. Perhaps the phone number I’d found was some kind of trap. I came to today’s meeting vowing to leave as soon as I sensed something even slightly fishy. But now that I was sitting face-to-face with a small girl, I had no idea what to think.

‘Hmm,’ she murmured, looking as though she wasn’t listening, or couldn’t care less even if she was. She pointed at the laminated menu. ‘I’ll have a cream soda. You?’

‘Uh, sure, I’ll take one too.’

At that moment, a man who appeared to be the owner set two glasses of water in front of us. We ordered two cream sodas. ‘Sure thing,’ he said with an unhurried languor that made me think, now this is more like the go-between I was imagining.

‘What do you know about the rules?’ the girl asked once the owner was out of earshot.

‘I have a general idea. But it’d be great if you could give me a rundown. Is it true that you can, uh, talk to dead people?’

How to Hold Someone in Your Heart

‘I don’t talk to dead people. I set up meetings,’ she stated. ‘If you’re thinking of channelling, like the mediums on Mount Osore do, you’re wrong.’

‘Channelling?’

‘I don’t let dead spirits possess my body and I don’t pass messages on to the living. I set up a meeting between you and the deceased person you wish to see. I’m strictly the go-between.’

She sounded as though she were reciting from a script again. I had to focus all my energy just to keep up with her.

‘Um, OK. So you people put us in touch with whoever we want.’

‘You people?’ She cocked her head.

‘Uh, I figured there were a few of you. Aren’t you an organization?’

‘No. There aren’t a few of us. I told you, I’m the gobetween,’ she grimaced. ‘Let me finish explaining. The go-between receives a request from a living person, someone like you. You tell me about the person in your life who has passed away. I take your request back with me and present it to the departed. I confirm whether they would like to see you too. If they say yes, I set up the meeting.’

‘OK.’

The go-between. When I first heard about them, I

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remember thinking that they sounded a lot like the Mount Osore mediums the girl mentioned.

I’d heard rumours about big-name politicians getting advice from notable historical figures, and celebrities having teary encounters with friends who’d died too young. They were basically fairy tales for adults. But in some circles, the go-between was a known and regular presence, as common a rumour as business moguls and stars paying large sums for a psychic or an astrologer. Whether someone can find their way to a gobetween depended on three factors. One, that you know they exist, two, that you believe they exist, and three, luck.

‘When you say you arrange for us to meet, do you mean . . . um, what do you mean?’

The girl eyed me as though I were a mystical creature. You came here without knowing that?

‘I mean, what about their bodies? Dead people are cremated and don’t have bodies. Right?’

‘They will appear looking just as they did in life.’

The cream sodas appeared before us. ‘Here you go,’ the owner said. The girl stopped talking long enough for him to set a coaster and drink in front of her, along with a long spoon. She unwrapped the spoon curled in a thin paper napkin and made a prayer gesture before starting in on her soda. I joined her, and the two of us sipped wordlessly from our artificially coloured lime-green drinks.

How

to Hold Someone in Your Heart

The girl turned her eyes up at me and continued, her mouth still on the straw. ‘The spirit of the deceased is permitted to take on a physical form when at the location designated by the go-between. The living person can see them, of course, and also reach out to touch them.’

‘I don’t believe it,’ I heard myself say. The girl ignored me and poked at the vanilla ice cream floating in her drink. ‘How is that even possible?’

She let out a long sigh. ‘Isn’t that why you came to see me? If you don’t like it, you can always go somewhere else. Yes, you get to see the person, actually talk to them. What more do you want?’

‘I don’t know, it’s just so unreal. Our world connecting with . . . the other one.’

‘You make your request, and I relay it. Whether the deceased accepts or not isn’t up to me, but I will negotiate to the best of my ability,’ she continued in her clerical tone. The gap between her crisp, articulated sentences and the knitted ribbon dress and fluffy mouton boots was widening every second.

‘First, I need to know their name and the date they passed away.’

‘Oh, I’m not the one who needs a meeting,’ I said as her eyes bore into mine. ‘I came today because, well, I have this friend. I was hoping you could help reunite her with someone she really needs to see.’

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Hadn’t I already explained this in my phone call?

Ever since I first heard about the go-between, I’d been thinking . . . This didn’t apply to me, of course, but maybe some people in the world did need for them to exist. That was why they’d continued for so long, wasn’t it?

And I had someone like that in my life. Somebody for whom time seemed to have stopped because of some incident in the past.

‘I’m here to ask for a meeting on her behalf,’ I said, hoping to sound serious. ‘Can you set up a meeting between my friend and her best friend who died?’

misa and i met two years ago when we were cast in the same play.

We were both just starting out, and although we weren’t the leads, we’d played a couple, which meant we spent a lot of time together rehearsing. We kept in touch after the show closed.

My start in show business was nothing remarkable. Ever since I was a kid, I’d always loved being the centre of attention, and after being told I had the looks and the magnetism, I got it into my head that I was born to be a star. I auditioned for all the top entertainment agencies and got rejected from

How to Hold Someone in Your Heart

every single one, until I somehow made it to the final round with my now-agency. The guy who’d actually been selected had to drop out at the last minute, which was how I was chosen.

Even though it wasn’t the sensational star-making debut I’d dreamed of, I started to play tiny parts and found the acting work to be more invigorating and fulfilling than anything I could learn at school. I’d always been a terrible student, but as I threw myself into the craft, people started to see me as dedicated and hard-working. I felt I’d finally found something that might give my life meaning.

I said yes to every job offer that came my way, mainly in theatre, and if I heard there was a new movie or play with a character that resembled a role I was playing, I was first in line to see it. I usually walked out of the theatre feeling humbled and overwhelmed, but knowing I wasn’t half as good as the actors I’d just seen, I felt I had nothing to lose. Let the other actors run circles around me. My ambition was insatiable, and I wanted to learn from the best.

Gradually, I started landing TV roles that were more than walk-on parts, and when I was offered the role of a superhero in a TV show for kids this past spring, I was so overjoyed I called my mother in tears.

I’d flung myself into the industry without much thought or research, and I knew I was fortunate to have made it this

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far at all. In fact, people often commented on my ‘incredible luck’, both as a compliment and not.

Misa was my opposite. She was the type of actor people might call ‘serious’. She had enrolled in acting school as a teenager and studied the craft for years, then gained theatre experience working backstage for a famous theatre group before signing with her current agency. When we first met, she wasn’t widely known, and even today, her occasional appearances were for small, unmemorable roles. She had complete command of her facial expressions and body – I didn’t even come close – and yet she was offered so few onscreen roles. I wasn’t sure if it was something about her acting style as a trained theatre actor, but it was a shame, nevertheless.

Misa and I could talk all night. Time flew by when I was with her. I’d never been much of a book reader, aside from manga, but she shared a few titles that I actually found engaging. The first time I read a novel from cover to cover, I was so proud of myself that I called her in the middle of the night. I couldn’t help it.

‘This is huge! You don’t understand, I always thought I was an idiot. But I did it, I read a book!’

‘You called to tell me that?’ Misa sounded exasperated, but I thought I detected a bounce in her voice. ‘OK, let me try to think of some other books you might like,’ she said, and in that moment I knew I was into this girl.

How to Hold Someone in Your Heart

The next time we hung out, I told her how I felt and asked if she would go out with me. I knew what people thought of me – shallow, dumb, a player, whatever – but I was serious about Misa and had genuinely worked up my courage to ask. But she laughed me off and said, ‘You’re kidding, right?’

It was around the time I’d got the superhero role on TV.

‘This is an important time for you, and there’s still so much I need to learn about acting. Now’s not a good time for either of us, don’t you think?’

She was right, of course. But I thought she enjoyed being with me as much as I did her. The possibility of her turning me down had never crossed my mind.

‘Is there someone else?’

I pictured Misa with some other guy and felt myself grow hot with jealousy.

‘It’s nothing like that.’

Then what? My chest filled with anxiety. I’d never been flat-out turned down by a girl before.

‘Do you want me to wait? Until we’re older, my career’s on track, and you’re happy with the work you’re doing. You’re not going to date until then, is that what you’re saying?’

She looked surprised that I hadn’t simply replied ‘OK’ and walked away. I realized how shallow I must have appeared in her eyes and felt deflated.

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‘The answer will probably always be no, no matter how long you wait. I’m not allowed to be happy.’

It sounded as though she’d let that slip.

‘Huh?’

‘What I mean is, I have to be grateful to be doing what I’m doing. I can’t expect to have an amazing personal life too. Can’t have everything, right?’ She turned her mouth up into a vague smile. ‘You’re a good person, Yuzuru, and you can do better.’

If she’d told me she just wasn’t interested, that she couldn’t see us as more than friends, I might have had an easier time accepting it.

And then one day—

I went to see Misa in a play, and when I visited her green room after the performance, I ran into some of her classmates from high school. ‘Oh my god, is that Yuzuru Kamiya?’ one of them whispered when she saw me.

While Misa caught up with other guests, I introduced myself and started talking to her friends, searching for the opportunity to casually ask, ‘Did Misa go out with anyone back in school?’ Maybe she was reluctant to date because of something that had happened in a past relationship.

‘Hm, I don’t know,’ one of her friends said. ‘She was always so focused on acting.’

‘There was a time, a long time ago, when she was more

How to Hold Someone in Your Heart

easygoing and boy-crazy, but all of that changed,’ another friend said. ‘Now she’s like, obsessively driven.’

Misa didn’t seem to hear us. Her friends then lowered their voices to tell me about Misa’s best friend, who had died during high school. And how, since the accident, Misa had stopped smiling and laughing, squealing over boys.

‘They were inseparable. Practically twins. When I look at her now . . . she looks like she lost her other half.’

If only there was a way for them to see each other again.

‘the best friend died on the scene, apparently. There was no time to say goodbye. I found the newspaper article. Would you like to see it?’

As I was explaining, I noticed the girl hadn’t said a word. She blinked her large, round eyes and slowly exhaled.

‘I hate to have to stop you,’ she said. ‘But the go-between can only take requests from the person who wants the meeting. You are not permitted to make requests on their behalf.’

‘Huh?’

‘Can you tell your friend to contact me directly?’

‘No, you don’t get it.’

Sensing that the girl was about to get up and leave, I

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half-rose from my seat. ‘She’s not the type to believe in stuff like this. She’s super realistic, and like, rational and smart.’

‘Sounds like you’re saying people who come to the gobetween are irrational and dumb.’ The girl narrowed her eyes.

‘But . . .’ I rasped, needing to keep the conversation going. ‘I tried to bring it up with her once, and she didn’t look at all interested. I mean, I don’t blame her. That’s why I’m here. I figured the best I could do was to bring her friend back and sit them down together.’

‘Even so, if your friend has no desire to meet, then I can’t negotiate with the deceased. That’s just how it is.’

‘But they do have a chance to meet, right?’ I didn’t mean to yell. The girl flinched, and I felt the stares of the other customers, but I didn’t care. ‘If there’s even the smallest chance she might reunite with this person, I want to help. Please. Can’t you do something?’

‘OK, calm down.’ The girl furrowed her brows, looking all grown-up again. I wondered what kind of household she was raised in. ‘So let me get this straight,’ she said, leaning forward and looking me in the eyes. ‘You want to help her.’

‘Yes.’

‘So she’ll be grateful, and she’ll owe you, and hopefully, she’ll go out with you. Is that right?’

‘Uh—’

How to Hold Someone in Your Heart

‘Right?’

‘Wrong!’

That was my best comeback. As I sat there stupidly, the girl took out a notepad with a cartoon bear on the cover.

‘I just want to help her work out her regrets.’

‘There’s no guarantee that a meeting with the deceased will help someone work out their regrets. Anyway, rules are rules. If your friend wants a meeting, she needs to meet me herself. Unfortunately, even if you pass her my details, I can’t promise we’ll be able to connect. Some people call countless times and can’t get through, while others who were meant to connect often do so without trying. Whether or not a meeting is in the cards for your friend has nothing to do with you.’

‘I don’t get it.’ I didn’t mean to sound bitter, but none of this made sense. ‘Then how come I got through so easily? Especially if you’re just going to turn me down.’

‘That’s the weird thing,’ she said, tilting her head quizzically. ‘Requests like yours generally don’t get through. It’s a mystery to me too, which is why I came to see you.’

‘Aw man, I wish you could have just told me all this over the phone. I’m busy too, you know.’

This is my first afternoon off in forever, I thought, covering my face with my hands. The girl slurped her cream soda wordlessly. My own glass was now a sloppy blend of soda

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and melted ice cream, but she’d been expertly making her way through and was about to polish off her drink.

‘Talk to your friend again. She can then decide what she wants to do. Remember, this is about her, not you. Why don’t you stop thinking about how you’re going to get her to go out with you?’

‘I told her about the go-between!’ I retorted. ‘But not only did she not believe me, she started to look at me like I couldn’t be trusted. Fine. What if I met up with the best friend?’

The idea had just come to me, but it wasn’t half-bad. I’ll meet with the friend, in Misa’s place. She would probably know why Misa had become such a different person after the accident.

‘You can if you want,’ the girl said with a sigh and put her chin in her hands. ‘But what makes you think she’ll want to see you too?’

‘What?’

‘Let me finish explaining the rules.’

She flipped a page in her notepad and scanned it.

‘You can request a meeting, but the deceased has the right to decline. I will take your request and pass it on to the deceased, after which they will decide yes or no. If they say no, that’s the end, unfortunately.’

‘But the girls were best friends. If I say I’m a close friend of Misa’s, I might have a chance.’

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‘Both the living and the dead have one opportunity for a meeting. The departed can meet with one living person only.’

‘What? So if they’ve already met with a family member or something . . .’

‘They can’t take any more requests.’

‘Oh . . .’ I felt as though the rug had been pulled out from under me. ‘So, say I do meet with this person . . .’

‘Then she won’t be able to see anyone else. If your crush decides somewhere down the line that she wants to make a request, you’ll have used up the opportunity.’ The girl didn’t mince words. ‘The deceased must be careful about who they say yes to, because it’s their only chance too.’ She lifted her gaze. ‘Also, we . . . the go-between is not able to take requests from the dead. Which means the deceased can only wait, hoping the living person they want to see will request them.’

‘OK.’

‘So, if the deceased is hoping to be summoned by someone specific . . . are you ready to barge in and take that chance away?’

‘. . . No.’

‘Same goes for you.’

‘Me?’

‘If you meet with the best friend now, you won’t be able to make another request.’

‘We have one chance here, and one chance there.’