The wordless time a kidnapped princess and her fingerless caretaker spend together. The ten minutes an ordinary woman spends with her stalker. The six months a man learns is all he has left to spend with his beloved, terminally ill wife. These are some of the moments we have to share with the people featured in this collection of seven of Touryuumon Takeda’s manga one-shots, including his highly acclaimed The Wife I Loved Dearly.
I read this one first digitally, having read The Wife Whom I Loved Dearly some time ago, and lost my mind over this collection. During my birthday haul, I ended up dumping everything on Karen describing all the stories so… I also have it physical now! That’s just how much I like it.
Aside from The Wife Whom I Loved Dearly, I ended up being absolutely taken by two stories in particular: When the Time Comes and Paradise.
The first hits me in the heart, a tragic romance that can’t ever see fruition. A princess, blindfolded and kidnapped, becomes attached to the tenderness of her caretaker. He is silent, and she knows nothing except the way he approaches softly and treats her kindly. In the end, she declares her love for him, but gets no reply.
Feeling rejected, she vows to resume her path if she ever gets away.
And then she finds that after she is rescued… he is deaf. Still, she declares her feelings loudly, brazenly, and then is resigned to her future as a princess.
The two were in contact briefly, but it left such an impact on her. For a short period, he was her entire world, and that was the closest she managed to be to someone else without expectation of herself. But her inability to see, and his inability to hear… their hearts touched and then parted just as quickly.
Paradise was the other. I found it amusing to see colonizers get completely fucked over because they couldn’t understand local practices. I read it twice: the first half is told from the explorers’ perspective, and the second half is from the local perspective. I couldn’t help but laugh at the misunderstanding that ended up ultimately killing the pair.
Most of the stories are short and funny, and the others are heart-wrenching in just the right amounts. I do love this book quite a lot. I’ve read it… three times now.
