She Likes To Read

I have very mixed feelings about this novel. I love the visuals it evokes, but the story and characters are severely lacking for me.

Water Moon begins with Hana inheriting a pawnshop from her father. This pawnshop is unlike the ones that exist in our world though. The customers pawn a choice they regret making in exchange for a box of green tea and a promise they will no longer be haunted by their choice. The only way to access the pawnshop is by being transported there accidentally through the door of a popular ramen shop in Tokyo.

On the day Hana is set to begin her first day as owner, she finds the pawnshop has been ransacked, her father missing, and a choice stolen. The Shiikuin–the rulers of this alternate world– give Hana until the new moon to return the stolen choice.

A customer named Keishin (Kei) walks through the door of the pawnshop and instead of being convinced to pawn one of his choices, he offers to help Hana find her father and solve the mystery of what happened. Hana reluctantly accepts this offer and together they set out on an adventure through Hana’s whimsical world.

The world Yambao creates is wonderful and imaginative and evokes images of Miyazaki’s Spirited Away or Howl’s Moving Castle. Hana and Kei teleport to different settings through puddles, visit a market in the clouds, travel across an ocean in a song, transport through people’s minds in a rumor, and much more. The worldbuilding is truly original, but that can’t make a story great on its own.

While these settings are interesting, it often feels like we’re visiting them just for the sake of going somewhere cool. The story whips us through these places at a breakneck pace, giving you no time to sit and enjoy the creativity behind them. The characters are given a sliver of information about where to go, then go to the next setting via an interesting mode of transportation to receive another sliver of information and this repeats the entire length of the story.

I hate the romance plot in this book. It feels incredibly out of place in the Studio Ghibli-esque setting. Hana and Kei fall in love immediately upon seeing each other. I’m not inherently opposed to love at first sight, but it feels very bizarre given the circumstances of how they meet.

Hana and Kei have no chemistry. Their conversations are them therapy speaking and trauma dumping at each other and vaguely philosophizing about nothing. Hana also lies to Keishin constantly and he just doesn’t seem to care.

Keishin’s initial motivations seem incredibly creepy. Hana repeatedly tells him to leave, but he insists on staying and lies about the kind of doctor he is to get Hana to relent since she’s injured. He does this because he finds her attractive and wants to talk to her. He’s also incredibly accepting he’s in an alternate world despite being a physicist who is self-admittedly very reliant on rules and order.

Hana immediately recognizes that Keishin is the choice that was stolen from the pawnshop and wants to use him as a bargaining chip with the Shiikuin. She repeatedly tells him to leave throughout the length of the story which doesn’t make much sense. Why would she want him to leave? She wants to use him. Clearly, the only actual reason this happens is to obscure who and what Kei really is with no regard to logic.

There’s no real stakes or tension and nothing ever feels dangerous despite the characters being on the run for 90% of the story. Every time the protagonists encounter a setback, they immediately overcome it a few pages later. The Shiikuin, despite being described as faceless soulless beings of darkness that wear ever-shifting Noh masks, speak in a harmony of tortured voices, and do not experience death or time in ways people normally do, are essentially powerless and easily thwarted.

Hana’s entire goal, the entire reason she sets off on this journey, is to find where her father (and mother who we find out is alive) went and when she finally does, she immediately chooses Keishin over her family and leaves them to die. It makes no sense.

Water Moon seems like a perfect embodiment of the phrase “all style and no substance”. The concept is wildly fantastical and interesting. The execution is not.