“It is a gift,” the last person Ayumi helps in this sequel to Lost Souls Meet Under a Full Moon tells him, “to live in the world at the same time as the person you have in your heart.” These words are a distillation of Mizuki Tsujimura's duology. Although everyone has a different reason for reaching the go-between, for wanting to see someone who has passed on for one last time, the sad truth is that all of them are no longer living in the same world as the people in their hearts. Whether it's romantic love, maternal love, historical adoration, or something else, every character in this book and the first one is walking around with a hole in their hearts…and even the go-between can't fill them. All he can do is facilitate a temporary patch job.

Seven years have passed since the first novel. Ayumi is no longer in high school; he's now a working adult. He works as a toy designer, and the woodworking workshop his company uses forms a throughline for this novel. Ayumi entered this profession because his father was a furniture designer who used the same workshop, and this allows Ayumi to feel connected to both sides of his family as he continues his grandmother's legacy of being the go-between. Like in the first book, Ayumi – and by extension, we readers – learns something new with each encounter he brokers, about the different shapes of love and how they impact people.

Two tales this time deal with parent/child relationships, which ably support the overarching storyline about the woodworking studio. The most emotionally fraught is the chapter exploring mother/daughter relationships. In an unusual case for Ayumi, two different mothers seek to connect with their lost daughters on the same night: one who lost her six-year-old child in a drowning accident and another whose twentysomething daughter died of breast cancer. The more visceral one is, unsurprisingly, about the drowned little girl. Not only is it heartbreaking how her parents are still punishing themselves, blaming themselves, for her death, but the little girl in question also doesn't even fully understand that she's dead. There's no real sense of closure here, just a brief twelve hours of pain-tinged comfort that doesn't really supply any answers. But what's important, and why these two mothers are in the same chapter, is that both of them blame themselves. Both of them feel like unworthy parents, like they failed a mission they were given. The mother of the cancer patient says that she wishes she could have given her child a stronger body; the mother of the little girl wishes she'd paid closer attention to her daughter. Neither feels absolved after their meetings, but when they meet, they find a measure of comfort. No one who has not lost a child can truly understand that pain and the recriminations. But two mothers with lost daughters can offer each other a little understanding.

Ayumi barely recognizes that he's learning small lessons from each client he helps. He doesn't really want to; his role is simply that of a facilitator, and it isn't until the final chapter that he realizes he's actually been observing love in its many forms. The first story, about a young man who initially wants to help Misa from the last book to meet her dead best friend (this was the final case of the first novel, so we know that's already happened) but decides to speak with his deadbeat dad instead, shows the conflicted relationship parents and children can have. The chapter about a historian who wants to speak with a feudal figure from his hometown's history illustrates that sometimes love is born of curiosity, and understanding comes from talking things out. And the final tale, where the line quoted above originates, is about what the living owe the dead.

This, along with the mother/daughter chapter, is the strongest piece in the book. Its protagonist is an old man who has been trying to speak to the same girl for fifty years, only to have her deny him each time. Ayumi has met him before, lending a more personal air to the job, something he's not entirely comfortable with. His assumption has always been that the old man was in love with the girl, who died at age sixteen, but that turns out to be far too simplistic an answer. The truth lies somewhere between romantic and platonic love, rooted in not just the man's feelings, but in what he knows of what she loved. As the one who lived on and learned about the go-between, he feels he owes his lost companion something that only he can give her. Is that selfish of him? Maybe; Tsujimura certainly allows for that interpretation. But perhaps all love is selfish. Maybe that's part of its beauty. Maybe that's why the go-between exists at all.

Between this duology and Lonely Castle in the Mirror, Mizuki Tsujimura has proven herself to be one of the great emotional authors of our time. She writes without turning emotions into gooey sentimentality, capturing humans' inner lives in all of their bruised beauty. While this isn't quite as strong as the first book, it's still a haunting tale that reminds us that no matter how or why, we should always hold someone in our hearts.