Love Gets A Second Chance in Be With You

Stories of lost love can tug at heartstrings like no others. Likewise, stories of love found again can play with emotions like there’s no tomorrow. In Takuji Ichikawa’s world wide best seller Be With You these two plot devices come together and mix, creating a tender story of love that transcends time.

Takumi is a single father, struggling to raise his son after the death of his wife. Mio was his anchor, supporting him through all of his mental and health issues. With her death Takumi has found it hard to continue living normally. The laundry is rarely done, the dishes are piling up, and he’s forgetting more and more things. A year after her death and still nothing has changed. In order to keep her memory alive Takumi decides to write out the story of how they met and fell in love. This is his way of reliving some of the happiest moments of his lifes, moments of which few others could compare.

 Then, one day while out on a walk, Takumi discovers something that shakes him to his core. Somehow, Mio has returned to Earth. She’s not a ghost–she can’t remember who or what she is. But he can touch her, smell her, and hear her, and so can his son. Heart filled with an anxious joy, Takumi tells Mio that she’s been ill and suffering memory problems in order to have her return home with him.

Be With You tells a story within a story. Readers will get to experience not only Takumi and Mio’s first love, but their second as well. This book will leave you feeling all mushy inside and make you appreciate the time you get with your loved ones more than ever.

For only 258 pages this book manages to make readers go through a variety of emotions. One of which could possibly be confusion, both at the ending and at how the book is written. If you hadn’t guessed by now Be With You is an English translation of Ima, Ai Ni Yukimasu, originally written in Japanese. For this reason the phrasing and formatting of sentences and paragraphs can get a little weird at times. Sometimes quotation marks won’t be used when a character is speaking and others paragraphs will be broken up when they don’t need to be. These problems, in my opinion, don’t hinder the loveliness of the story. For the readers that feel they do however don’t fret, because wait, there’s more!

Ima, Ai Ni Yukimasu has been translated into multiple languages from Thai to Spanish, and if you’re unable to read those, then why not read the comic based off the story? Or watch the movie? The drama? This successful story has been redone in nearly every form of media available.

It’s unfortunate that Be With You’s quirky translation can ruin the story for some. If you’re looking for a story that will warm your heart, a story that makes you want to go spend time with your family, or a story to read while listening to the rain beat against your window, then this is it.

Mio and Takumi get their second chance, and the book should as well. It’s the perfect bittersweet treat for Valentine’s Day.