What do the living owe the dead? What do the dead do for the living? There's no answer to these questions here. Still, Mizuki Tsujimura, author of Lonely Castle in the Mirror and A School Frozen in Time, encourages readers to think about them in this bittersweet, beautiful story about a family that serves as the go-between for the living and the dead. Each living person who manages to contact the go-between may ask to spend a night with one person they lost, and each deceased may answer one request, giving everyone two chances to connect through the go-between.

The book chronicles four different people's requests, while the fifth chapter follows the go-between himself. Everyone has a different reason – a young woman wants to connect with the dead celebrity who changed her life, a man needs information from his late mother, a man searches for answers about his missing fiancée, and a high school girl struggles with the death of her best friend. Nothing is quite what you expect, and all four stories lead organically up to the fifth about the go-between himself in an exquisite mix of melancholy, mundane, and magical.

The tone is a bit different for each of the four cases, and if the narrative voices aren't always distinct, that feels like a deliberate choice. Tsujimura is drawing parallels between grief and loss as experienced by different people for different reasons, and the one constant is emotional pain. Not everyone expresses or feels that in the same way, but it is universal nonetheless. The most “traditional” depiction of grief comes in the fourth story, where a salaryman is looking for answers and closure about his fiancée, who went missing seven years ago. A piece of him knows that she must be dead, even as his friend suggests that she was a scammer who merely left after she got what she wanted. But he's grieving, and he needs an answer if he's ever going to be able to tuck that pain away. He doesn't want the answer he receives, even though he knew it was coming on some level. But the knowing is a relief, a reason to finally break down and express his feelings, and to find closure for both the living and the dead. It's not a story that makes you sob, but rather the kind that makes you cry quietly before you even realize the tears are falling.

It also provides a good bookend to the first tale. In that story, a young woman who feels lost in the world requests to meet with a recently (and suddenly) deceased celebrity. She'd been a fan and sent gifts, but really, it was the memory of a time when the famous woman stopped and helped her on the street that gave her a new lease on life, so learning that her reason for living was dead affected her greatly. The theme for this story is understanding that life has value, that one death does not kill the world, even if it feels like it's destroying your world. Both this story and the fourth show how the memories of the dead can be a catalyst for living.

That is tested in the third tale, about a high school girl who feels guilt over the death of her best friend. Thematically, this story is the closest to Tsujimura's previously translated novel, Lonely Castle in the Mirror. It explores the emotional turmoil of adolescence and how destructive it can be, the cruelty of being a teenager. There's no real catharsis to be found in this story, and that's striking – especially given the fact that the characters interact with the go-between on a peer-to-peer level before they engage with him as the go-between. The lack of closure here is deliberate, as the preview of the book's sequel shows that this story will be returned to, and unlike the rest of the stories, it seems to warn against bad actions and tampering in realms where you oughtn't.

Lost Souls Meet Under a Full Moon is a magic realism exploration of grief and the intersection of life and death. With mythological touches from multiple belief systems, the story asks readers to ponder how they process grief and what purposes ghosts and memories serve. In his novel Johnny and the Dead, Terry Pratchett noted that “the town you just passed through is still there in the rearview mirror,” a reference to how the past is always with us if we care to glance behind. But how we handle that past is up to us – the go-between, Tsujimura suggests, can only give us the means.

Who would you meet if you could? Whose request would you answer? And how would it change you for the rest of your life?