Is there an ebook available? yes
Is there an audiobook available? Only a 30-minute abridged version. Read by Enoki Junya! But still, abridged. (Also, Amazon pretends it’s Audible-only, but there is a CD of it, just gotta find it elsewhere)
Is there a full-furigana version available? no
Is this book available in Korean? no clue, sorry
Summary - Japanese
高２の藍原美月は親友の彼氏に片想いし、悩む日々を送っていた。ある日、美月は図書室で「こころ」に挟まった自分宛てのラブレターを見つける。差出人の名前は「佐藤」、でも心当たりはゼロ。不審に思いながらも返事を本に挟むと、翌日また手紙！ 不思議な文通を繰り返すうち、「佐藤くん」は美月にとって大切な存在になるがーー。「藍原さんに、会いたい。」手紙にこめられた想いがわかるとき、涙が零れる。切なさに包まれる感動作！
Summary - English (my translation)
High school second-year Aihara Midzuki spends her days troubled, one-sidedly in love with her best friend’s boyfriend. One day, she finds a love letter addressed to her sandwiched between the pages of the school library’s copy of Kokoro. The sender calls himself “Satou,” but Midzuki has zero clue who he is. Though suspicious, she leaves a reply in the book, and the next day she finds another letter! Over the course of this mysterious correspondence, “Satou-kun” becomes a person important to Midzuki. “I want to meet you, Aihara-san.” Tears overflow when the feelings behind the letters are understood. A moving, heart-wrenching work.
Summary - English (mine)
Aihara Midzuki-san,
I’ve always been interested in you, and just once, I wanted to talk to you.
ー Satou
After finding a love letter addressed to her sandwiched between the pages of the school library’s copy of Natsume Souseki’s Kokoro, high school second-year Midzuki sets out to find out just who this mysterious boy who only lets himself be known as “Satou” is, and discovers to her surprise just how many guys named Satou there are in her life. No longer merely drifting through high school, Midzuki’s life and her relationships to the people in it slowly but surely begin to change.
Content warnings
There’s one Satou who gets stalkery, but that doesn’t progress very far.
Major spoiler: character death
I don’t remember there being anything else.
Why are you nominating this book?
I enjoyed it a lot (I dunno if anyone here participated in the Read Every Day challenges over on WaniKani last year, but if you did, you may have seen me talk about it there—at length sometimes, lol). I thought it well-written, and I don’t remember anything that came up that didn’t eventually have a payoff, although I read this in spurts over the course of several months and don’t have the best memory besides, so that may not be 100% true.
I usually don’t like love triangles at all (or quadrangles in this case, I guess), but this one isn’t the annoying “Ooh, who will A choose~?” kind. I hesitate to say that it’s not a big part of the story, since Midzuki’s feelings do influence her, but it’s not really part of the romance aspect, I guess. A character might like another character, but it’s not always treated as a possibility. Anyway, I was fine with it. Thankfully, because I read it specifically because Enoki Junya lol
(And if you’re looking for a book to fill the “won an award” spot in next year’s reading bingo, this won a youth novel award in 2020! - 魔法のｉらんど大賞２０２０小説大賞〈青春小説部門賞〉)
This is technically not a light novel I’m pretty sure, but it’s still a YA/shoujo romance, and in my head YA equals LN (even if LN doesn’t always equal YA), though I’m happy to remove this nomination if there are objections. It’s also somewhat on the shorter side at about 270 pages, but since the margins for the letters are about half the margins for the rest of the text, they artificially inflate the page count a bit, making it closer to 250 pages.
