Hello everyone!!
I'm happy that I'm able to share another book review here in the community. The one I want to share today is one of my most favorite books of all the time. The title called "Omoide no Toki Shuuri Shimasu" (思い出のとき修理します) which I translated as "Repairing the Time of Memories" in English.
This book was my first bought Japanese novel, and at the time I bought this book my Japanese language ability was still at the lowest level. I'm just an Indonesian who is learning Japanese up till now, and reading the kanji of a novel is actually harder than reading a comic with the help of basic characters in Japanese. I gave up on reading this for several years and decided to level up my Japanese language first, and finally finished all the series about three years after I bought the first two volumes of the novel.
About the Book
This book was written by Mizue Tani, a writer who won Shueisha's Romance Award in 1997 for her book "Paradise Renaissance -Rakuen Saisei-.
Omoide no Toki Shuuri Shimasu was her 5th series book. The first volume of this book was published by Shueisha in 2012, and the last published in 2016. The series has 4 books in total.
The story of this novel is about the heroine Nishina Akari, a hair stylist who is tired of her job and love life and decides to move to a local shopping district where she spent a summer when she was in elementary school. There, he meets Iida Shuji, who runs a watch shop.
The watch shop has a metal plaque with "omoide no toki shuuri shimasu" on it. The plaque itself oftenly made people who read think that memories are something that can be repaired. And Akari is also one of them
Review
The story really warms my heart. I can see how Akari tried to heal herself from her past. And meeting Shuuji changed her life so much. He helped her to face reality and sometimes told her about unusual things that happened related to watches.
Shuji was a watchmaker who initially worked in Switzerland, but after his grandfather passed away he decided to continue the shop by himself, abandoning his dreams as a watchmaker. Shuji's love for watches also made Akari change her way of thinking. I love their relationship in many ways.
For additional information, the metal plate of "omoide no toki shuuri shimasu" was initially written as "omoide no tokei shuuri shimasu" that means "repairing your memorial watch". Tokei (時計)in Japanese means watch, but without 'kei' (計), it read by 'toki'(時）that means "time". The 'kei' letter was lost when the shop was still run by Shuji's father, but he did not repair it because he thought that the sentence of "omoide no toki shuuri shimasu" gave him a mysterious impression.
What I love the most about this novel is the strong Shinto elements inside.
I love learning about religion. Shinto itself is a unique indigenous belief in Japan, so from this novel I learn many things about it. I even used this novel as a research object in my graduation thesis.
The novel truly has a big impact on me. I thanked Tani Mizue-sensei for wrote this beautiful story.
I hope there's a publisher here in Indonesia who wants to translate the novel because I really wish that more people will read this beautiful story.
That was all for today. Thank you for dropping by.
