A series of short ghost stories framed by a meeting of friends at a town festival 10 years after their classmate's disappearance during that same event. All of the stories are thematically related to the long-lasting impact of losing someone and being reminded of them by unexpected sights and places during their travels years later, and narratively linked by a series of engravings by a mysterious author in which a woman who looks like their missing friend beckons to them, titled Night Train.
I liked it, the paranormal aspect never outweighs the feeling of melancholia and loss, and the stories are all suitably creepy. Due to its premise (most of the friends are male, and the missing friend was a female student they all seemingly were in love with) as well as part of the ending I feel like it only narrowly escapes the reading of having its morale be "get yourself a wife, that will fix you", but in the end I think it has more interesting things to say than that, even if I can see the gravity of his previous works pull Morimi towards romance. I'm also fairly impressed with his range now, even if there were shades of this book in Yoiyama kaleidoscope (Shueisha Bunko) (2012) ISBN: 4087468453 Japanese Import .