What do you think?
好き好き大好き超愛してる。
愛は祈りだ。僕は祈る。僕の好きな人たちに皆そろって幸せになってほしい。それぞれの願いを叶えてほしい。温かい場所で、あるいは涼しい場所で、とにかく心地よい場所で、それぞれの好きな人たちに囲まれて楽しく暮らしてほしい。最大の幸福が空から皆に降り注ぐといい。「恋愛」と「小説」をめぐる恋愛小説。
- GenresJapanese Literature
194 pages, Paperback Bunko
First published August 7, 2004
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Displaying 1 - 9 of 9 reviews
January 13, 2024
I always feel conflicted with Maijo's novels because the overt focus on the interiority of their narrators are the best thing about it, and it allows him to convey some really interesting feelings, but at the same time it makes it so that none of the other characters feel like real people, but only objects that serve the narrator (and I guess you could point out that there's something a little iffy about making the female love interest simply be an object to serve the male narrator). And yet it's that same thing that made this book work so well, and I don't know that expanding on the other characters would actually improve it or only take away from the point it's trying to serve. So in conclusion, I have no idea how to critique a Maijo experience, but he always brings something that I've never seen or felt before anywhere else with his works, and for that I'll always be thankful.
I’m okay with being stupid. I’m okay with piling up mistakes.
That’s what loving too much is about. And that’s about the right intensity for one’s love to be.
September 6, 2026
Love Love I Love You (好き好き大好き超愛してる) constructs storytelling as a form of past-directed, performative prayer, using the alternation between the grieving novelist Osamu’s frame narrative (Kakio 1–3) and three surreal interpolated stories (Chieko, Sasaki Taeko, and Niomo) to examine the relationship between grief, narrative creation, and love. These stories function as extensions of Osamu’s attempt to process Kakio’s illness and death. Through them, Maijo contrasts bodily decay with emotional persistence while exposing the limits and ethical hazards of fiction as a means of overcoming loss. Narrative becomes both an act of resistance against nonexistence and a potentially solipsistic attempt to impose meaning on another person’s suffering. The novel ultimately suggests that love and storytelling are not merely analogous human behaviors, but structurally and essentially identical acts of prayer capable of preserving emotional truth against biological destruction.
The novel’s alternating structure establishes the relationship between its frame narrative and interpolated stories as a metafictional mirror. Osamu’s realistic world is defined by terminal cancer, death, cremation, and regret, while Chieko, Sasaki Taeko, and Niomo transform these experiences into increasingly surreal forms. In Chieko, terminal illness becomes parasitic bodily invasion; in Sasaki Taeko, violent loss is displaced into fragmented dream worlds; and in Niomo, mortality is transformed into mechanized warfare and aestheticized death. Osamu explicitly recognizes fiction as his own form of prayer: "I might have my own way of praying. That might be writing novels" (Kakio 1).
The relationship between fiction and unconscious grief becomes particularly explicit in Osamu’s short story Light, discussed in Kakio 1. The story depicts surgeons pursuing a flashlight moving inside a dying woman’s body until "the insides of his girlfriend’s body was mimicrying into a flashlight," ultimately resulting in "a bizarre suicide". Shouta interprets the story as an implication that Kakio chose death, reacting with violent anger by kicking a fax machine off a shelf. Osamu, however, recognizes that his fiction may have transformed Kakio’s helplessness into an imagined act of agency: "Kakio had no agency. She was at the mercy of her cancer. So maybe, seeing that, I felt a need to recontextualize it as something Kakio was in control of" (Kakio 1). Fiction therefore becomes a psychological defense against the passivity imposed by terminal illness: where reality offers no control, narrative supplies it.
This process is mirrored by Yoshinobu’s concept of being "metafied". His tendency to analyze relationships as constructed roles parallels Osamu’s tendency to mediate grief through narrative. Osamu observes, "The process of metafying creates room for critique—actually, metafying might be the act of critiquing in itself" (Kakio 1). The same principle governs his Lariat Point novels, in which he deliberately interrogates the conventions of genre fiction. In Lariat Point 9: Goodbye, Dr. Imazato the Science, he concludes that "having spent even just a moment together before getting imprisoned was enough to make her love a fulfilled one" (Kakio 2).
In Kakio 3, this narrative meddling escalates into artistic exploitation. Osamu publishes Kakinoki Kyouka’s Farewell New World, borrowing Kakio’s name and her family structure to depict three siblings (Kyouka, Kisaku, and Jasuke) cursed to engage in fratricide. Three days after publication, Shouta calls demanding the book be pulled from shelves, enraged that Osamu transformed their family tragedy into pulp entertainment. Osamu defends his work by arguing that "novels are just novels," insisting that elements like "aliens and magic" function as abstract metaphors for fate rather than real-world depictions. Unmoved by Osamu's talk of stylistic verisimilitude, both Shouta and Yoshinobu permanently cut all communication. The frame narrative demonstrates that translating real-world trauma into hyper-stylized fiction violates the sacredness of shared grief, destroying Osamu's remaining real-world relationships.
This conflict originates in the Prologue’s central proposition: "Love is a prayer. I pray. I wish for the people I love to all be happy". Prayer is defined as an expression of desire without transactional expectation: "The act of praying is fundamentally about asking for whatever you want, but is also devoid of avarice" (Kakio 1). Whereas traditional prayer originates in the present to project a wish into an uncertain future (moving from the present to a future wish), Maijo radically alters this temporal vector. He directs prayer backward from the site of writing to rewrite or sanctify an irrecoverable past (moving from stories and words back to a past event or loss):
"Prayers and wishes and hopes are ways of expressing through words how you want things to be—or, in other words, your wishes for the future—meaning they are diametrically opposite to regrets, remorse, or the like in the direction being faced; despite that, I choose to pray towards the past too... When praying towards the past, words become stories." (Prologue)
This reversal defines fiction as the formal realization of retroactive prayer, granting language a quasi-divine status: "Words are what make everything. Words are undoubtedly gods, and provoke miracles" (Prologue). Yet the distance between this ideal of prayer and Osamu’s actual behavior exposes the central contradiction of his caregiving. During Kakio’s illness, he avoids expressing genuine fear, offering reassuring platitudes ("There's no way you'll die") that he later dismisses as "dumb, smoke-bomb words" (Kakio 1). Genuine prayer instead appears in Shouta’s uncontrolled reaction at the crematory: "No no no, don't do it, don't burn my sister, don't burn her, don't burn her, please don't" (Kakio 1). Osamu suppresses this direct emotional truth out of social propriety, later attempting to compensate through fiction for what he could not say directly.
In Kakio 3, Shouta directly attacks Osamu's artistic output, accusing him of being an opportunistic parasite who stayed in Kakio's hospital room not out of devotion, but to "mine ideas" from her terminal decline. Osamu's hyper-productivity is highlighted, writing roughly 1,500 paperback pages (Lariat Point 6, 8, 9, and various short stories) in a single year while Kakio suffered through osteosarcoma, leg amputation, and spinal metastases. While Osamu fiercely counters by condemning the brothers' emotional cowardice for fleeing the hospital while he held Kakio's hand through excruciating pain, drug-induced vomiting, and panic, he admits that or rather questions whether writing in her hospital room functioned as an internal sanctuary, "so I cloistered myself in that hospital room with nowhere to hide except from inside my head, in my fiction, in my books?", to hide from the horrific reality of her physical decay (Kakio 3). His fiction served as emotional armor: unable to halt her bodily degradation, he retreated into formulaic, structured narrative worlds where death and resurrection could be controlled (Kakio 3).
The novel repeatedly translates this conflict between bodily mortality and emotional persistence into surreal imagery across all four narrative levels. In the frame narrative, physical decay (lymphoma, osteosarcoma, dry-ice-preserved corpses) is paired with an informational void (Kakio 1–3). In Chieko, physical mutilation via bronze plates contrasts with the surreal asma infestation. Parasitic insects described as "close(r) to weevils", and a girl defying the laws of physics. In Sasaki Taeko, physical strangulation and murdered corpses mirror dream vandals and a hairy classroom snake In Niomo, surgical rib extraction is converted into a purple gradient jewel.
In Chieko, the parasite transforms illness into a visible invasion of the body, culminating when Takuya sees "A bulge is moving under the skin... about halfway between the elbows’s inside and the base of the palm of the hand" . He subsequently ceases to perceive Chieko primarily as a person and instead sees her as "the nest for the tiny bugs known as asma and at these insects’ large foodstock". Takuya’s desperation to preserve Chieko’s life becomes a demand that she surrender her bodily integrity:
"I don't want her to opt for death over losing a few limbs."
His devotion consequently becomes indistinguishable from control. By prioritizing continued biological existence over Chieko’s experience of suffering, he turns the beloved into an object whose survival satisfies his own fear of loss.
This spatial and physical inversion is highlighted beneath an abandoned public toilet in Chieko, where "flowers like tulips, roses, lilies, margarets, hibiscus... are growing downward from [the ceiling]; the floor was painted blue and has some clouds drawn on it". This spatial inversion placing the flower-bearing soil on the ceiling and the sky beneath their feet, functions as a precise physical manifestation of the Prologue’s theological temporal inversion. Just as retroactive prayer reverses the vector of desire from future to past, Chieko’s upside-down sanctuary inverts spatial reality to construct an insulated refuge against somatic decay. When a fugitive girl breaches Chieko’s hospital room "walking on the ceiling" while "warping the world," she physically embodies the chaotic, defiant agency of retroactive prayer that defies physical law to protest terminal suffering.
Maijo's style combining colloquial speech, repetition, onomatopoeia, genre conventions, and pulp absurdity, prevents the prose from settling into solemn sentimentality. Sounds like a broken nose making a "wild tskwaaan" (Chieko)l, a doorbell sounding "Nish-nyooom" (Kakio 1), or a floating camel vocalizing "mhunghhh-blbrrbluuu" (Sasaki Taeko) form a protective structural counterweight to the existential gravity of cancer and mourning. The same effect appears in Osamu’s Lariat Point series, whose plots incorporate alien abductions, clones, and lesbian conversions (Kakio 2). The three interpolated protagonists further map Osamu’s psychological surrogates: Takuya externalizes helplessness as violence (Chieko); Tsutomu responds to loss by constructing dream architectures to repair trauma (Sasaki Taeko); and Ishihara in Niomo mechanizes his body through "Rib Fusion" after watching six successive partners die in combat (Niomo).
Kakio’s posthumous letters in Kakio 2 intensify this struggle for preservation. Delivered via "Greene's Mail Delivery," her hundred-year posthumous arrangement preserves her voice ("Happy twenty-seventh birthday! I really, really love you from the bottom of my heart") while emphasizing her permanent absence, as the letter containing her "first reason" for loving him is lost forever (Kakio 2). Osamu's subsequent vow never to love another woman transforms survival into guilt, deliberately painting future love as a sin to chastise his own continuation in life:
"I paint the next love that will visit me into a sin. I punish my future self ahead of time [...] Living on without doing that is, however, correct. And yet, I purposely make a mistake and exchange this promise to chastise that correctness." (Kakio 2)
The ultimate metaphysical thesis of the novel emerges during a pivotal hospital conversation in Kakio 3. Reassuring Osamu of their bond, Kakio states, "I also loved you, Osamu" slipping into the past tense ("loved" instead of "love") that strikes both of them like lightning. Neither corrects the phrasing, recognizing that their love already belongs to history because Kakio herself has begun belonging to the past. This epiphany redefines the nature of mortality: death does not begin when the heart stops or the brain ceases functioning. Rather, death begins gently and gradually when a living person enters the realm of the past prior to their physical expiration.
This linguistic slip in Kakio 3 brings the overarching themes of prayer, love, and narrative into total alignment. When Kakio enters the past tense before her physical death, love can no longer operate as an active, present-tense physical exchange. Because love has been retroactively relocated into memory and history, its continuation requires a medium that thrives in the past tense: story. Osamu explicitly synthesizes this epiphany in Kakio 3:
"Still, love and stories might actually be one and the same. Right. Love is a prayer, and so are stories. Maybe that doesn’t stop at the essence, and they have more similarities in their structures. If so, then love and stories might truly be the same thing. Sometimes we call that thing love, and other times we call it a story."
This realization resolves the apparent tension between Osamu's caregiving and his writing. Story and love are not separate activities where one parasitizes the other; rather, both are structural iterations of prayer. A prayer is an unselfish assertion of desire in the face of helplessness; love is that same desire felt toward another person; and a story is that same desire organized into language to reach into the past (Prologue, Kakio 3). When Osamu wrote 1,500 pages beside Kakio’s hospital bed, his writing was not an abandonment of love, but the structural incarnation of love itself—an attempt to construct a linguistic refuge capable of holding an emotional truth that physical reality was destroying.
The Prologue declares that "Words are undoubtedly gods, and provoke miracles", yet immediately limits their power to "At least inside stories and novels". Language cannot cure cancer, reverse murder, or restore Kakio’s body. The same limitation appears in the distinction between unconditional love and possessive attachment when Chieko rejects Takuya: "Takuya, you’re not thinking about me [...] In the end, that’s just your feelings". Fiction can preserve the beloved only by risking the distortion of the beloved, as seen in Light (Kakio 1) and Farewell New World (Kakio 3).
The novel’s resolution lies in accepting that love and stories do not require permanence or physical intervention to achieve validity. Osamu’s reflection that love can be fulfilled "even for just a millisecond" (Kakio 2) rejects the assumption that love or narrative must conquer death to be meaningful. Love Love I Love You redefines romance, metafiction, and grief by proving that when mortality retroactively forces love into the past, storytelling becomes the only structure capable of sustaining prayer. Storytelling becomes a human approximation of divine agency precisely because it allows the writer to construct, however temporarily, the reality that the physical world refused to provide—naming that fragile, linguistic miracle interchangeably as love, prayer, and story.
The novel’s alternating structure establishes the relationship between its frame narrative and interpolated stories as a metafictional mirror. Osamu’s realistic world is defined by terminal cancer, death, cremation, and regret, while Chieko, Sasaki Taeko, and Niomo transform these experiences into increasingly surreal forms. In Chieko, terminal illness becomes parasitic bodily invasion; in Sasaki Taeko, violent loss is displaced into fragmented dream worlds; and in Niomo, mortality is transformed into mechanized warfare and aestheticized death. Osamu explicitly recognizes fiction as his own form of prayer: "I might have my own way of praying. That might be writing novels" (Kakio 1).
The relationship between fiction and unconscious grief becomes particularly explicit in Osamu’s short story Light, discussed in Kakio 1. The story depicts surgeons pursuing a flashlight moving inside a dying woman’s body until "the insides of his girlfriend’s body was mimicrying into a flashlight," ultimately resulting in "a bizarre suicide". Shouta interprets the story as an implication that Kakio chose death, reacting with violent anger by kicking a fax machine off a shelf. Osamu, however, recognizes that his fiction may have transformed Kakio’s helplessness into an imagined act of agency: "Kakio had no agency. She was at the mercy of her cancer. So maybe, seeing that, I felt a need to recontextualize it as something Kakio was in control of" (Kakio 1). Fiction therefore becomes a psychological defense against the passivity imposed by terminal illness: where reality offers no control, narrative supplies it.
This process is mirrored by Yoshinobu’s concept of being "metafied". His tendency to analyze relationships as constructed roles parallels Osamu’s tendency to mediate grief through narrative. Osamu observes, "The process of metafying creates room for critique—actually, metafying might be the act of critiquing in itself" (Kakio 1). The same principle governs his Lariat Point novels, in which he deliberately interrogates the conventions of genre fiction. In Lariat Point 9: Goodbye, Dr. Imazato the Science, he concludes that "having spent even just a moment together before getting imprisoned was enough to make her love a fulfilled one" (Kakio 2).
In Kakio 3, this narrative meddling escalates into artistic exploitation. Osamu publishes Kakinoki Kyouka’s Farewell New World, borrowing Kakio’s name and her family structure to depict three siblings (Kyouka, Kisaku, and Jasuke) cursed to engage in fratricide. Three days after publication, Shouta calls demanding the book be pulled from shelves, enraged that Osamu transformed their family tragedy into pulp entertainment. Osamu defends his work by arguing that "novels are just novels," insisting that elements like "aliens and magic" function as abstract metaphors for fate rather than real-world depictions. Unmoved by Osamu's talk of stylistic verisimilitude, both Shouta and Yoshinobu permanently cut all communication. The frame narrative demonstrates that translating real-world trauma into hyper-stylized fiction violates the sacredness of shared grief, destroying Osamu's remaining real-world relationships.
This conflict originates in the Prologue’s central proposition: "Love is a prayer. I pray. I wish for the people I love to all be happy". Prayer is defined as an expression of desire without transactional expectation: "The act of praying is fundamentally about asking for whatever you want, but is also devoid of avarice" (Kakio 1). Whereas traditional prayer originates in the present to project a wish into an uncertain future (moving from the present to a future wish), Maijo radically alters this temporal vector. He directs prayer backward from the site of writing to rewrite or sanctify an irrecoverable past (moving from stories and words back to a past event or loss):
"Prayers and wishes and hopes are ways of expressing through words how you want things to be—or, in other words, your wishes for the future—meaning they are diametrically opposite to regrets, remorse, or the like in the direction being faced; despite that, I choose to pray towards the past too... When praying towards the past, words become stories." (Prologue)
This reversal defines fiction as the formal realization of retroactive prayer, granting language a quasi-divine status: "Words are what make everything. Words are undoubtedly gods, and provoke miracles" (Prologue). Yet the distance between this ideal of prayer and Osamu’s actual behavior exposes the central contradiction of his caregiving. During Kakio’s illness, he avoids expressing genuine fear, offering reassuring platitudes ("There's no way you'll die") that he later dismisses as "dumb, smoke-bomb words" (Kakio 1). Genuine prayer instead appears in Shouta’s uncontrolled reaction at the crematory: "No no no, don't do it, don't burn my sister, don't burn her, don't burn her, please don't" (Kakio 1). Osamu suppresses this direct emotional truth out of social propriety, later attempting to compensate through fiction for what he could not say directly.
In Kakio 3, Shouta directly attacks Osamu's artistic output, accusing him of being an opportunistic parasite who stayed in Kakio's hospital room not out of devotion, but to "mine ideas" from her terminal decline. Osamu's hyper-productivity is highlighted, writing roughly 1,500 paperback pages (Lariat Point 6, 8, 9, and various short stories) in a single year while Kakio suffered through osteosarcoma, leg amputation, and spinal metastases. While Osamu fiercely counters by condemning the brothers' emotional cowardice for fleeing the hospital while he held Kakio's hand through excruciating pain, drug-induced vomiting, and panic, he admits that or rather questions whether writing in her hospital room functioned as an internal sanctuary, "so I cloistered myself in that hospital room with nowhere to hide except from inside my head, in my fiction, in my books?", to hide from the horrific reality of her physical decay (Kakio 3). His fiction served as emotional armor: unable to halt her bodily degradation, he retreated into formulaic, structured narrative worlds where death and resurrection could be controlled (Kakio 3).
The novel repeatedly translates this conflict between bodily mortality and emotional persistence into surreal imagery across all four narrative levels. In the frame narrative, physical decay (lymphoma, osteosarcoma, dry-ice-preserved corpses) is paired with an informational void (Kakio 1–3). In Chieko, physical mutilation via bronze plates contrasts with the surreal asma infestation. Parasitic insects described as "close(r) to weevils", and a girl defying the laws of physics. In Sasaki Taeko, physical strangulation and murdered corpses mirror dream vandals and a hairy classroom snake In Niomo, surgical rib extraction is converted into a purple gradient jewel.
In Chieko, the parasite transforms illness into a visible invasion of the body, culminating when Takuya sees "A bulge is moving under the skin... about halfway between the elbows’s inside and the base of the palm of the hand" . He subsequently ceases to perceive Chieko primarily as a person and instead sees her as "the nest for the tiny bugs known as asma and at these insects’ large foodstock". Takuya’s desperation to preserve Chieko’s life becomes a demand that she surrender her bodily integrity:
"I don't want her to opt for death over losing a few limbs."
His devotion consequently becomes indistinguishable from control. By prioritizing continued biological existence over Chieko’s experience of suffering, he turns the beloved into an object whose survival satisfies his own fear of loss.
This spatial and physical inversion is highlighted beneath an abandoned public toilet in Chieko, where "flowers like tulips, roses, lilies, margarets, hibiscus... are growing downward from [the ceiling]; the floor was painted blue and has some clouds drawn on it". This spatial inversion placing the flower-bearing soil on the ceiling and the sky beneath their feet, functions as a precise physical manifestation of the Prologue’s theological temporal inversion. Just as retroactive prayer reverses the vector of desire from future to past, Chieko’s upside-down sanctuary inverts spatial reality to construct an insulated refuge against somatic decay. When a fugitive girl breaches Chieko’s hospital room "walking on the ceiling" while "warping the world," she physically embodies the chaotic, defiant agency of retroactive prayer that defies physical law to protest terminal suffering.
Maijo's style combining colloquial speech, repetition, onomatopoeia, genre conventions, and pulp absurdity, prevents the prose from settling into solemn sentimentality. Sounds like a broken nose making a "wild tskwaaan" (Chieko)l, a doorbell sounding "Nish-nyooom" (Kakio 1), or a floating camel vocalizing "mhunghhh-blbrrbluuu" (Sasaki Taeko) form a protective structural counterweight to the existential gravity of cancer and mourning. The same effect appears in Osamu’s Lariat Point series, whose plots incorporate alien abductions, clones, and lesbian conversions (Kakio 2). The three interpolated protagonists further map Osamu’s psychological surrogates: Takuya externalizes helplessness as violence (Chieko); Tsutomu responds to loss by constructing dream architectures to repair trauma (Sasaki Taeko); and Ishihara in Niomo mechanizes his body through "Rib Fusion" after watching six successive partners die in combat (Niomo).
Kakio’s posthumous letters in Kakio 2 intensify this struggle for preservation. Delivered via "Greene's Mail Delivery," her hundred-year posthumous arrangement preserves her voice ("Happy twenty-seventh birthday! I really, really love you from the bottom of my heart") while emphasizing her permanent absence, as the letter containing her "first reason" for loving him is lost forever (Kakio 2). Osamu's subsequent vow never to love another woman transforms survival into guilt, deliberately painting future love as a sin to chastise his own continuation in life:
"I paint the next love that will visit me into a sin. I punish my future self ahead of time [...] Living on without doing that is, however, correct. And yet, I purposely make a mistake and exchange this promise to chastise that correctness." (Kakio 2)
The ultimate metaphysical thesis of the novel emerges during a pivotal hospital conversation in Kakio 3. Reassuring Osamu of their bond, Kakio states, "I also loved you, Osamu" slipping into the past tense ("loved" instead of "love") that strikes both of them like lightning. Neither corrects the phrasing, recognizing that their love already belongs to history because Kakio herself has begun belonging to the past. This epiphany redefines the nature of mortality: death does not begin when the heart stops or the brain ceases functioning. Rather, death begins gently and gradually when a living person enters the realm of the past prior to their physical expiration.
This linguistic slip in Kakio 3 brings the overarching themes of prayer, love, and narrative into total alignment. When Kakio enters the past tense before her physical death, love can no longer operate as an active, present-tense physical exchange. Because love has been retroactively relocated into memory and history, its continuation requires a medium that thrives in the past tense: story. Osamu explicitly synthesizes this epiphany in Kakio 3:
"Still, love and stories might actually be one and the same. Right. Love is a prayer, and so are stories. Maybe that doesn’t stop at the essence, and they have more similarities in their structures. If so, then love and stories might truly be the same thing. Sometimes we call that thing love, and other times we call it a story."
This realization resolves the apparent tension between Osamu's caregiving and his writing. Story and love are not separate activities where one parasitizes the other; rather, both are structural iterations of prayer. A prayer is an unselfish assertion of desire in the face of helplessness; love is that same desire felt toward another person; and a story is that same desire organized into language to reach into the past (Prologue, Kakio 3). When Osamu wrote 1,500 pages beside Kakio’s hospital bed, his writing was not an abandonment of love, but the structural incarnation of love itself—an attempt to construct a linguistic refuge capable of holding an emotional truth that physical reality was destroying.
The Prologue declares that "Words are undoubtedly gods, and provoke miracles", yet immediately limits their power to "At least inside stories and novels". Language cannot cure cancer, reverse murder, or restore Kakio’s body. The same limitation appears in the distinction between unconditional love and possessive attachment when Chieko rejects Takuya: "Takuya, you’re not thinking about me [...] In the end, that’s just your feelings". Fiction can preserve the beloved only by risking the distortion of the beloved, as seen in Light (Kakio 1) and Farewell New World (Kakio 3).
The novel’s resolution lies in accepting that love and stories do not require permanence or physical intervention to achieve validity. Osamu’s reflection that love can be fulfilled "even for just a millisecond" (Kakio 2) rejects the assumption that love or narrative must conquer death to be meaningful. Love Love I Love You redefines romance, metafiction, and grief by proving that when mortality retroactively forces love into the past, storytelling becomes the only structure capable of sustaining prayer. Storytelling becomes a human approximation of divine agency precisely because it allows the writer to construct, however temporarily, the reality that the physical world refused to provide—naming that fragile, linguistic miracle interchangeably as love, prayer, and story.
May 10, 2026
Otaro Maijo subverts the male gaze of both the mystery and romance genres by fully embracing said issues. This book was quite the surprise for me! I am so excited to check out his other works.
February 17, 2024
Love is a prayer, and so are stories.
Love, Love, Love You, I Love You! , with stress on the "I": the narrators in Maijo's short stories are selfish lovers, and aware of it. Their love interests - most of them dead or dying - barely have personality, barely exist as characters, but it's the narrators who constantly call attention to this.
Are these stories good? Of course they are. The Kakio ones were my favorites, for one because they're the most meta, the most concerned with writing and stories, and because I like the way they deal with grief, including its ugly sites. Kakio II almost made me cry on public transport, and then Kakio III almost made me cry at home. So thanks for that, I guess.
Love, Love, Love You, I Love You! , with stress on the "I": the narrators in Maijo's short stories are selfish lovers, and aware of it. Their love interests - most of them dead or dying - barely have personality, barely exist as characters, but it's the narrators who constantly call attention to this.
Are these stories good? Of course they are. The Kakio ones were my favorites, for one because they're the most meta, the most concerned with writing and stories, and because I like the way they deal with grief, including its ugly sites. Kakio II almost made me cry on public transport, and then Kakio III almost made me cry at home. So thanks for that, I guess.
February 19, 2024
“Love is a prayer, and so are stories”
This might be my favourite thing Otaro Maijo has written, several times it almost sent me to tears, welled emotions into me that I couldn’t fight the feeling of, every second forced me to look no matter what. This is a beautiful piece of work I urge everyone to read.
This is a masterpiece, I love love love Love Love Love, I Love You.
This might be my favourite thing Otaro Maijo has written, several times it almost sent me to tears, welled emotions into me that I couldn’t fight the feeling of, every second forced me to look no matter what. This is a beautiful piece of work I urge everyone to read.
This is a masterpiece, I love love love Love Love Love, I Love You.
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May 3, 2025Read History:\n- 2009/11/04\n- 2012/06/27\n
ギャボーンだとかふざけたような雰囲気もあるけれど、透き通った愛情を書いている。文字の量が主人公の感情絶対値を表しているようになっていて、苦悩とか喜びだとか見えるようだった。気に入ったのは柿生２の百通手紙だ。普通はあんな事をされたら束縛のような感じになる。確かにここのシーンだけで終わっていたら私もそう感じただろう、が「〜、それがあるといい」となる、つまり悲しみ、なおかつ柿生を忘れないこと、少なくとも今は思い出を大事にすることにした。主人公は束縛されずに百通の思いに期待して生きる。そこに愛があるように思えた。
ギャボーンだとかふざけたような雰囲気もあるけれど、透き通った愛情を書いている。文字の量が主人公の感情絶対値を表しているようになっていて、苦悩とか喜びだとか見えるようだった。気に入ったのは柿生２の百通手紙だ。普通はあんな事をされたら束縛のような感じになる。確かにここのシーンだけで終わっていたら私もそう感じただろう、が「〜、それがあるといい」となる、つまり悲しみ、なおかつ柿生を忘れないこと、少なくとも今は思い出を大事にすることにした。主人公は束縛されずに百通の思いに期待して生きる。そこに愛があるように思えた。
Read
May 3, 2025ドリルホールインマイブレインのために読んだ。文庫で好き好きは読了済み。ドリルの印象は「夢」と「フリクリ」だった。風邪を引いたときに見るような悪夢のような非現実感、そして狂った世界。半端でない気持ち悪さだった
January 28, 2024
When does too much love become too much?
And when does that love devolve into egoism?
How much is too much?
How can we live after love?
And what happens when that love we talk about is towards none other than life itself?
With those feelings in mind, I shall continue looking for answers until the end of my days.
Thank you Maijo, I needed this.
Full review on my blog https://natsukawacottage.wordpress.co...
And when does that love devolve into egoism?
How much is too much?
How can we live after love?
And what happens when that love we talk about is towards none other than life itself?
With those feelings in mind, I shall continue looking for answers until the end of my days.
Thank you Maijo, I needed this.
Full review on my blog https://natsukawacottage.wordpress.co...
January 4, 2015
愛というタイトルがついて、死のことを書く。ということが、もうちょっと疲れた。
メルヘンチックな所が多くて、たまに「なじゃこりゃ」と思うときも。体の中の虫や夢の中のおじさんを殴り殺しや小説の中の小説の訳の分からない内容など… 額に皺を寄せながら読んで、「気持ちいい」とは思わない小説です。
だが、考えとしてはいいこともたまには出てくるのが確かだ。前書きや人を思うところをだけを残しておいたら、いい本です。
メルヘンチックな所が多くて、たまに「なじゃこりゃ」と思うときも。体の中の虫や夢の中のおじさんを殴り殺しや小説の中の小説の訳の分からない内容など… 額に皺を寄せながら読んで、「気持ちいい」とは思わない小説です。
だが、考えとしてはいいこともたまには出てくるのが確かだ。前書きや人を思うところをだけを残しておいたら、いい本です。
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