Now available in an English translation by Jesse Kirkwood, Sanaka Hiiragi’s The Lantern of Lost Memories, a story set in a photography studio that belongs in a space between the world of the living and the afterworld, is the most recent example of Japanese “comfort fiction”. These books have found great success in Japan; they’re also some of the most popular titles available in English translation—not just from Japanese, but from any language. It has been estimated that comfort novels have comprised about a fifth of Japanese prose fiction translated into English this year, double that of 2022 and 2023.*
These novels are short and light-hearted, sometimes integrating elements of magical realism. They often center around cozy places like cafes (Toshikazu Kawaguchi’s Before the Coffee Gets Cold and its sequels), libraries (Michiko Aoyama’s What You Are Looking for Is in the Library) or bookshops (Satoshi Yagisawa’s Days at the Morisaki Bookshop). Many include cats, such as Hiro Arikawa’s The Travelling Cat Chronicles or cozy places and cats, like Sosuke Natsukawa’s The Cat Who Saved Books. (This is not an exclusively Japanese phenomenon, with translations from Korean—for example Hwang Bo-Reum’s Welcome to the Hyunam-Dong Bookshop—and, increasingly, other languages also appearing recently.)
While it’s a little graver than your average comfort novels and addresses issues like bullying, child abuse, and standing up for what’s right, The Lantern of Lost Memories still includes a typical feel-good story and magical realism. The story is divided into three related chapters that span sixty to seventy years. Hirasaka, no longer alive himself, runs a photography studio through which people pass between dying and entering the afterworld. Hirasaka’s background is something of a mystery: he lives in this in-between world and doesn’t remember his name or anything about his family, profession, or how he died. He takes his new name from Japanese lore.
Yomotsu Hirasaka was the name of the slope that separated the world of the living from that of the dead, down which the deity Izanagi was said to have ventured in search of his wife.
The photographer Hirasaka is not searching for his wife, but rather details from his life. He hopes that by meeting people passing from the living world to the afterlife, he will eventually come across someone who knew him when he was alive. At his studio, Hirasaka gives the recently deceased the gift of viewing their favorite memories from each year of their lives, which he presents in the form of photos that he places on a spinning lantern. Hirasaka’s first patron in the book is a ninety-two year old woman named Hatsue. Unlike most of Hirasaka’s visitors, Hatsue figures out that she has died. Still, the afterlife isn’t what she expected.
She had thought that being dead would feel a lot more like, well, being dead. She’d have one of those traditional triangular cloths placed on her head, or her body would have turned transparent. But no, there was nothing remotely ghostly about her. The feeling of the teacup in her hands, the flavour of the tea…everything seemed exactly as it had when she was alive.
Hirasaka presents Hatsue with multitudes of photos taken over the span of her ninety-two years and asks her to choose one from each year of her life. Each of the chosen photos will then be attached to a lantern with her favorite memories going back to her earliest days. These will become her lasting memories as she moves into the afterworld. Hatsue appreciates the cozy–and normal–atmosphere of the photo studio.
Hatsue glanced around. It was true that the place resembled nothing more than a quiet photo studio. If she had been hauled in front of the King of the Underworld all of a sudden, she’d probably have been shaking too much to even say a word.
Hirasaka warns Hatsue that sometimes our most cherished memories become distorted from recalling the memory so often. When Hatsue comes across a photo of an old Tokyo bus and is disappointed by the damage to the well-loved memory, Hirasaka explains that he will take her back to that time in the photo so he can capture that memory for her to include in the lantern.
The two travel back in time to late-1940s Japan when the country is in the process of rebuilding. Hatsue is a young woman about to start a job teaching in a nursery school. She believes in play-based learning and finds opposition from the community members who for the most part believe in academic instruction for their toddlers. When she waits for the school to acquire a bus as a temporary campus, Hatsue has time to cherish her memories of beginning her illustrious career as a teacher.
The next two stories involve a yakuza named Waniguchi and a young girl named Mitsuru who had, until she died, lived with her neglectful mother and an abusive stepfather. While each of these stories involve heavy issues, Hiiragi shows the characters’ humanity in her thoughtful narrative. By the end of the book, the reader comes to a better understanding of Hirasaka, too. He is a quiet hero typical of many Japanese comfort novels. And his perspective drives home the main idea of the book, the kind of reassuring lesson for which people might choose to read a comfort novel:
You see, once you get here, it doesn’t matter how wealthy or important you were in life. All you’re left with are your memories.
* Estimates from Alison Fincher.