Songs for Ghosts fulfills the “culture” square on CBR17 Bingo.
Songs for Ghosts is a beautiful, tragic story of the power of stories and love, as well as the way past choices can create cycles throughout time. I’m unfamiliar with it, but in the afterword the author talks about Songs for Ghosts being a retelling of Madama Butterfly opera by Puccini where Cio-Cio-San has more agency than just the reductive submissive wife trope.
Adam is a seventeen year old whose boyfriend just broke up with him because he was bored, essentially, and this devastates Adam. When his stepmom asks him to check the attic for some of his baby clothes for his half brother Benny, he also finds a box containing a diary from a hundred years ago where a nameless author recounts her life, marriage, loves, and becoming a mother. Over the course of reading the diary, he has an opportunity to go to Nagasaki as part of a home stay through his Japanese classes, which is the part of Japan the unnamed author came from, and he takes this as a chance to learn who she is and was and what happened to her.
This story does a lot with layered stories and how several elements of the diary’s story echo the story of Adam’s parents and learning how he’s connected to the diary’s story. I loved how there were so many stories within the story because the diarist also recounts the stories of the ghosts she puts to rest with her biwa and folktales that have shaped her understanding of the world. I’m a sucker for stories within a story, and I think Kumagai did a great job balancing them as well as creating a mystery for Adam to follow. The discussion of how biwa has a spiritual element and the stories the diarist tells are parts of Japanese culture and how this book fulfills the square. There’s also the culture of Japan versus America while Adam is in Nagasaki. Actually, I’m assuming Adam is from America because American reader, but given the author resides in Ireland and the book was originally published in UK, that probably isn’t actually the case, but there’s never any discussion of locale that I recall outside Japanese locations.
I also really liked that Adam is a messy teenager figuring himself out. He hurts those around him because his feelings are big, but he also recognizes when he’s hurt someone and works to be better. There is some romantic elements, and honestly one of my favorite things is how it ends, with both Adam and Jo recognizing they have more growing to do but planning to stay in touch and see what happens in the future.
I really enjoyed this book, especially as we learned more about the diarist’s life and her haunting picked up pace. I didn’t find this book particularly scary, but there is definitely some well-executed tension that ramps up as the story progresses and the ghost becomes a hungry ghost. If you’re a fan of ghost stories, history and the present colliding and cycles of choices, and teenagers figuring themselves out, I highly encourage picking this book up when it releases August 12 in the U.S.