Water Moon
Water Moon
By: Samantha Sotto Yambao
[On my list of Most Anticipated Books of 2025]
“Losing your way is oftentimes the only way to find something you did not know you were looking for.”
“His father had once told him that there was only one measure of how well a person spent his day. It depended on how much of the day you spent pining for the future or regretting your past.”
“We look at our hands and wonder what we could hold if they were empty.”
Somehow this book was both dark and whimsical!
I really enjoyed this story. It has deep themes, imaginative world building, suspense, tragedy, and even a glimmer of hope. It’s not a complete happily ever after for everyone; it holds some tension with the idea that our choices have consequences and we can’t just write them all better by the end.
I think this book would make a good book club book and I’ve included some of my own book club discussion questions at the end of the review for anyone to make use of.
I’ll share some of the premise of the book and then reflect on some of the bigger themes the book explores like sacrifice, contentment, freedom, choice, desire, and regret.
The Brief Summary
The story revolves around a magical pawnshop in Tokyo. Clients might think they are about to enter a restaurant to eat ramen, but instead find themselves in a pawnshop where Hana and her father are there to help them pawn off a choice they’ve hated living with.
“Whenever anyone finds their way to our pawnshop, there is always a good reason for it. Our clients have choices that have become too burdensome to carry. We take these choices off their hands so that they may return to their world lighter. Content.”
The main conflict in this story is the disappearance of Hana’s father the morning after he retires from the shop and Hana takes it over. She wakes up to find the shop ransacked, her father missing, and even more importantly, one of their client’s choices missing.
The main antagonist/s are the Shiikuin. I picture them like monkish dementors. They seem to be in charge of Hana’s world. They are also in charge of the choices the pawnshop acquires. When they come to collect and a choice is missing, the hell she could have to pay is being forced to leave their world.
“To go into the other world is to be erased, exiled.”
How does she know? Because her mother took a choice from their vault and hasn’t been seen since Hana was born.
Hana will go to the ends of her world to find her father and the missing choice and set all things right. But she won’t go alone. She will go with Keishin, the unsuspecting and accommodating client that enters the shop that fateful morning, unknowingly entwining his life with hers, his destiny with hers, as he nobly helps Hana find her father.
In Water Moon’s fantasy land Hana & Keishin travel by puddle portals (reminds me of The Magician’s Nephew), being folded into a paper door, on the wings of a song, down the streets of a dream, and through the minds of those sharing a rumor.
It was such a creative and imaginative story! A story where someone ‘folds time’ is not a new concept— even Matthew McConaughey can fold a piece of paper in half and stick a pencil through it— but I haven’t seen anyone do it with an origami crane made from minutes from another world under a night sky lit up with kites made from people’s hopes.
Reflections on Themes
This book scratches the itch of a fantastical story with imaginative world-building. But this one has many layers and explores a lot of deep or interesting themes.
The first interesting theme I want to pull out is only briefly mentioned but I think they should have spent more time incorporating it into the story, especially because the author sought to weave the Japanese culture throughout the story.
Not even a dozen pages into the story and we are introduced to a Japanese art form called Kintsugi. I literally JUST read about this technique in the book Art + Faith by Makoto Fujimura. (I love how books I read, even in completely different genres, overlap and inform one another.)
Kintsugi is a technique where one takes shattered pieces of pottery and then using gold dust and lacquer as connectors, fashions the pieces into a new vessel.
Fujimura utilizes this art form to explore how God takes us, broken people, and creates a new and more beautiful masterpiece. We are a new creation.
Sotto Yambao, too recognizes the beauty. Hana’s father, serving a client tea in cups made using Kintsugi, notes:
“Broken things have a unique kind of beauty, don’t you think?… Especially people. They shatter in the most fascinating ways. Every dent, scratch, and crack tells a story. Invisible scars hide the deepest wounds and are the most interesting.”
The pawnshop seeks to extract the choice that shattered their client. They advertise this as making the other person whole— content— without their regret haunting them and stealing their joy. They will have no memory of what cracked open their wound because they won’t even remember the wound.
But what if we need to remember our brokenness?
“‘When clients leave their choice at the pawnshop, they give up a chance to make their own peace with the life that they did choose. It will be a journey they will never be able to complete, a lesson they will never be able to learn. How can you be at peace if a part of you is missing? It will be a hole that you will try to fill all your life without ever knowing why that hole exists in the first place.’”
Paul, follower of Christ, writes in his letter to the Romans, “We rejoice in our sufferings, knowing that suffering produces endurance, and endurance produces character, and character produces hope.”
What if there is purpose in what shatters us?
Another theme I found interesting surrounds the phrase the author used as the title ‘Water Moon.’
“she liked painting reflections because the most desirable things were the ones that you could see, but never touch… his reflection stared back at him from the water, looking more trapped than content.”
The water moon is the reflection of the moon in the water. You can see the moon, but you can’t touch it. A water moon is an unattainable desire.
“Thieves understood thieves. They all desired the water moon.”
There are two themes wrapped up in this one phrase. The idea of contentment and the concept of freedom.
We find out that Hana’s mom took the choice because she wasn’t happy with the way things were. She wanted to know what else there was.
We find that in this world, babies are ‘inked’ with the story of their lives. Their destinies are decided and they can see their futures whenever water touches their skin. To Hana, this is a stealing of her freedom. She wishes to be like Keishin where his future is unknown, where dreaming is something with multiple possible, reachable outcomes.
“Knowing your future would have stripped you of every choice, every chance you could have turned left instead of right. You would lose the ability to dream and hope, to wish for an outcome other than what is written.”
I don’t believe in fate as the secular world defines it. I believe in a sovereign Lord who reigns over every choice and roll of the die. (Proverbs 16:33) I don’t find the idea of God determining my future as a trap but as a comfort. If things were solely up to me, I’d find a way to mess it up or fall short. But knowing that God, who loves me more than I can imagine, has good plans for me, I can live in confidence and trust that the best is yet to come.
I do think that it is a mercy and a protection that even though he knows my future, it is still a mystery to me. I think it’s a mercy that we still have the ability to wonder and to dream. That we still get to make choices of our own volition. We have the free agency to feel like we are making free choices even if God has determined my path. It’s one of the mysteries of the Christian faith: the interaction of human responsibility (free choice) and the sovereignty of God. Someday God will explain it to me, but for now, this book reminds me that I have security and contentment in his sovereignty even as I take responsibility for my choices.
The idea of freedom is very important to us humans. And it should be. But what does absolute freedom actually mean? What is freedom?
A lot of people see the ultimate path to happiness as unrestrained freedom.
To think through this concept biblically, I have to acknowledge the sinful nature of humanity. A biblical view of freedom is to see that ultimate freedom is not just the ability to ‘do whatever I want’. Sam Storms calls this idea of doing what we want as ‘free agency’ in his book Chosen for Life.
He then contrasts that with ‘free will’:
“A person’s will is the extension and invariable expression of his nature. As he is, so he wills. A person is no more free to act or to will or to choose contrary to his nature than an apple tree is free to produce acorns.” (Storms)
So if the will humanity is born with is evil, we need something more than freedom to what we want (free agency); we need the freedom to choose what is good.
So often we make choices that we think mean freedom but really enslave us to our desires. Our idea of freedom is deceptive and leaves us chasing down contentment we will never find because the passions of the flesh are all-consuming and lead to destruction.
How do we obtain this freedom to choose good? Only through Christ.
In Water Moon, the choices manifest as birds. They are caged in the pawnshop until the Shiikuin come for them. As a descriptor of how evil the Shiikuin are, Hana says, “Who else would collect and keep the birds?” The caged birds/choices are another symbol of stolen freedom.
I recently read the book The Language of Rivers and Stars and Lewis comments on how birds are often the sign of unrestrained freedom. The sky is the limit.
But then he shares how Jesus points us to birds to show that even they can’t reap or sow or store up food for themselves but rely on God to feed them. (Mattthew 6:25-27)
Lewis concludes- “So nature’s greatest picture of freedom does not live in independence but in the greater freedom of worry-free dependence on God… The birds are free like no other creature, but they don’t decide individually which way they would like to go for the winter. They know instinctively that God’s order is right for them, and they freely follow it… Nature’s embodiment of freedom not only lives in dependence on God but also in obedience to him.”
Perhaps the average reader of this book might roll their eyes that I would spend this space talking about my faith. But Water Moon seems like a book intentionally written to challenge the readers’ thoughts regarding contentment, destiny, choices, and freedom. How could I not look at them in light of my faith in which all of those things are so intricately intertwined?
We see the weight of choices when we read Water Moon and we can identify with that burden ourselves. It underlines my thankfulness that I don’t have to bear that weight, but that in Christ my burden is light, my future secure. I can have both contentment and freedom.
A couple more things I thought were interesting that I’ll just briefly mention:
Hana’s mother planned to just look at the bright choice but she had never tasted regret and wondered what it tasted like. It was depicted as sake. She ended up drinking the whole bottle. I kept wondering- why did she keep drinking regret? Was it because regret tasted good or because regret consumes us just like she consumed the bottle? It was interesting to think about the association of regret and alcohol and how that plays out in real life and what we can learn from that.
“‘That baby in Masako’s arms was no different from you, and yet we believed that it did not… could not have a soul… Our world buries babies like Haruto alive because we are afraid that we cannot control them. We bury them because they are different… our fears—grow up…’ ‘They come back to control us’”
I’m very curious if there were any real life concepts or situations that influenced the author’s decision to depict the darkest part of the story in this way. I cannot read about babies being buried alive without thinking about the current world we live in where millions of babies are aborted every year. Because people choose to believe they have no souls or because they believe they won’t know how to care for them or because they are just afraid. And we read about it in a book like Water Moon and we are horrified. Where is that reaction when we consider the real life horrific tragedy of abortion?
“‘I thought that finding happiness was what life in your world was all about. That is why it has always been so easy to convince our clients to give up their choices. All any of them wanted was to smile.’”
I think one of the biggest lies that people believe and encourage others to believe is that ‘happiness’ is our ultimate goal in life. Think about all the choices you make just because you think it will make you ‘happy.’ I’m intentionally putting happy in quotes because we would benefit from a reflection on what happiness is and why we seek it so much. What we give up for the pursuit of it. Is ‘happiness’ really all we want for ourselves and our loved ones?
Insta-Love?
A lot of the negative reviews mention that they really didn’t like the romance between Hana and Keishin. The term frequently used to describe it was ‘insta-love.’ I guess because Kei shows up and is all of a sudden willing to follow Hana anywhere.
I mean, yeah. I guess it would be insta-love. But to counter— I feel like most romance in books is like that. Because you’re reading a 300-page book, not a 600 day long journal of a real relationship developing into something worthy of being called love. That’s what makes these books fiction.
I think the romance made sense in the context of the story because of the way Hana and Kei are connected across worlds. I would have been fine if Kei’s character had been a girl and they just became the best of friends (because a guy and girl cannot just be the best of friends like this, let’s be real) but at the same time I think this story called for something deeper and more sacrificial and so we get romance.
Could Hana have been on a solo journey? Sure, but in a book about choices, I think she had to have a story intertwined with someone else where her choices would have a big impact on someone else that the reader might care about, a relationship with deeper impacts. That relationship could have been Haruto but that still would have played out like a romance.
Also, speaking of Haruto… he must end up with The Paper Magician, right?!
To be fair, I do wish that there were more fantasy novels written without romance— like the adventurous quest of Frodo and Samwise— but I read such a variety of books that a romantasy here and there doesn’t get my goblet. Grab by giblet. You know.
My Own Critiques
I think there should have been a bigger showdown at the end when the Shiikuin and they have to face off. We never really get a very satisfying ‘meet your doom’ kinda deal. It’s a few paragraphs, dust-your-hands-off-and-get-to-the-epilogue kinda deal.
Also, Hana’s final choice didn’t feel like an act of heroism as much as a reach for identity- an ‘it’s finally my turn to get what I want’ kind of choice- which is a bit funny considering she’s only 21 but does kinda fit with the anti-delayed-gratification generation. It wasn’t truly a sacrifice.
If we wanted an actual hero, we should be looking at Haruto who made a true sacrifice for another with nothing in return.
The characters aren’t really that likeable. A lot of people make a lot of bad choices that affect other people in really negative ways. I’m looking at you, Hana’s mom. I’m in the camp of other reviewers who liked Haruto the best.
I wish she would have tied the kintsugi in better to the whole plot of the book where gold fuses shattered pieces into something more beautiful than before. I’m not sure we really saw the redemption that that kind of artwork represents and there were missed opportunities to showcase this more.
Book Club Discussion Questions:
Icebreaker: Give your best description of what neutrinos are and why we do or do not need them.
What was your first impression of the pawnshop? At what point, if any did it change?
If you aren’t familiar with Kintsugi, do a little research about it. What strikes you most about this art form and how do you see it connect with Hana and Keishin’s stories?
What role does regret play in shaping a person? Is there a regret or a mistake you’d be willing to give up any memory of? What implications would forgetting that memory have on your present? Your future?
Hana thinks the pawn shop should be called ikigai which means ‘a reason for being, for getting up in the morning; meaning and purpose for living.’ Having read the story, would that be a good name for the pawn shop or an ironic name?
What is each character’s regret? What positive aspect of their character could be a result of that regret?
Why do you think Kei’s job with working with neutrinos is significant to his character or his role in this story?
Do you think knowing your own future would make you feel discontent?
What is your faith system’s view on freedom and choice? Does it adequately explain what you experience in reality?
What animal or creature would you most associate with ultimate freedom? In what ways are they still limited?
“I may never get where I want to go, but I can look back on my life and say that I did not waste a second of it being bitter that I was not someplace else. Happiness does not exist in a place. It lives in every breath we take. You need to choose to take it in, over and over again.” How does this quote impact where you are in life right now?
Why do you think both Hana and Keishin are followed by rain?
Now, knowing the whole story, what do you think about Keishin’s mother abandoning him?
Why do you think the author included the scene of Keishin helping a woman give birth in the elevator?
Knowing that ‘brightness’ indicates a choice that would change the world, can you think back to a choice in your life that is ‘brighter’ than another?
Analyze Hana’s mother’s decision to take the choice. Why do you think the author depicted the ‘consumption’ of this choice as sake? Drinking regret? Not realizing how much she had really drunk? Do you think she really only intended to look at the choice? What does this scene tell us about temptation?
What is a choice you’ve made that has cost someone else something?
Have you ever discovered you’ve believed a lie? What did your journey for truth look like?
What was each character’s ‘water moon’? What is your ‘water moon’?
Thoughts Surrounding SPOILERS
Scroll to the Recommendation if you don’t want spoilers!!!
Keishin was the choice at the beginning of the book. The client who didn’t go back to the restaurant but instead decided not to have a baby so that she could have a floral shop. But Hana’s father let the bird/choice back out into their world and so it was as if she didn’t give up that choice. Kei was born. But we know that his mom still abandoned him. We aren’t told why. Perhaps it speaks to the fickleness of humanity. We think we know exactly what we want but we are easily discontented. Even with getting to ‘correct’ her choice, she still apparently felt regret.
The two choices that resulted in Kei and Hana both being born were both described as being very noticeably bright. Choices that would change the world. We see Kei changing the world through science and Hana changing her world by ending the Shiikuin cycle of stealing choices. I’m not sure if this is where the significance of rain following them around connects, but seems like it must be here somewhere.
Now that we know that the Shiikuin are the grown up buried babies… how did the pawnshop begin? I feel like there’s a chicken or egg scenario here— pawnshop or Shiikuin— that I can’t comprehend. If the pawnshop exists to collect choices that eventually become souls for babies, but they actually did have souls to begin with, at what point did the Shiikuin first appear and what was the world like before them? And now that Hana has stopped the cycle, if the Shiikuin disappear because babies aren’t buried anymore, then what is the economy going to be? Who will be in charge? There is some unknowns we are left with at the end of the story. I’m largely okay with not knowing all the answers, but it is a little trippy to really wrap my mind around the pawnshop system and Shiikuin.
One last thing that I pondered— why did Hana’s father release that particular choice? Did he choose the brightest choices because he wanted to allow something to change the world— one last act of ‘heroism’? DId he choose the brightest choice because as he was looking for his wife, he was following in her footsteps? He couldn’t have known the choice would come back in the form of Kei and that he would meet his daughter and fall in love, right? Or was it symbolic— because Hana was a result of a stealing of a bright choice, he was letting a bright choice go, letting Hana go. Freeing Hana. Maybe?
Recommendation
I don’t think the value of this book resides in the characters themselves. I think this book’s value is in the escapism nature of fantasy and magic, the creativity in the world building, and in the pondering of its themes.
That’s what’s going to stick with me about this book— what it communicates about regret, choice, freedom, contentment, the value of life, and how the things we do impact others.
I do recommend the book for that reason. To invite you to explore an imaginative world that actually speaks about the real one.
I could see myself reading another book by this author. I really only discovered this one because earlier this year I was researching what books were coming out in 2025 specifically in this genre to broaden my reading list. I think it was a good find and enjoyable to read, even though it was dark at times.
[Content Advisory: 3 s-word; one hot springs encounter that would count as sexual content; chapter 37 speaks of a kind of torture that may be hard to read about]
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