🥰 Who Would Like It?

"What is the value of a life?" That's the question this book starts with. It will make you reflect heavily on your regrets, morality, and how you plan to lead the rest of your days. If you've ever thought of yourself as special, afraid to look like an idiot, or like you're just waiting for something to happen, this book will challenge every single one of those notions. Watching Mr. Kusunoki live out the last of his days is one of the most impactful things I've ever read in a single sitting, I couldn't look away until the very last page.

🔍 How I Discovered It

Saw it while scrolling through GoodReads and looking for light novels. What attracted me was primarily that it was a novel and not a series like most light novels I've found. The concept of selling away years of your life was also a big part of why I added it to my "want to read" category. I bought this in a rush right before takeoff on a long flight, intending to read it for the next few days, but finished it before landing.

⚠️ Spoilers Below ⚠️

📦 Compressed Summary

Kusunoki always felt he was special and destined for greatness but in his 20s he found himself a dropout, with a terrible job, and no money. In his desperation, he went to a store that quoted 30 years of his life as only being worth $3k. The shock from how little the rest of his life was worth and his need for money led him to sell everything but 3 months.
Miyagi, the young lady he talked to at the store, was assigned to watch him by the company as many people tend to go crazy only have less than 1 year left. She tags along as Kusunoki thinks about what he wants to spend his remaining time doing, also helping him approach his biggest regrets in life one by one.
Though they have a rough start, Kusunoki and Miyagi slowly fall for each other. We learn that Miyagi had to sell 30 years of her time, which is why she's stuck working for the company. She also lied to Kusunoki a few times, starting with his life being worth $3k, it was instead worth $0.26. The money he got was money she donated.
Kusunoki spends the rest of his days trying to make Miyagi happy by going on dates. From the outside though, it looks like he is talking to nobody because she is invisible to everyone but him, so he gets an odd reputation around his neighborhood. This reputation grows to be overwhelmingly positive and due to the change in his life, Kusunoki can sell his remaining month to pay off most of Miyagi's debt.
The last 3 days of life are not monitored, so Kusunoki breaks down in public when asked about his invisible girlfriend as she's not there anymore. Everyone tries to comfort him until he hears Miyagi's voice and causes a commotion as people realize she is real. After selling her life behind his back, all she wanted was to spend her final 3 days with him.

🧠 Thoughts

- What I Liked About It

It's the first book in a long time that has resonated so strongly with me that I can't stop thinking about it. The whole idea of putting a value on life is interesting, but what seals this story is how we go through Kusunoki's regrets and what-ifs little by little. I love how Miyagi knows what direction his life would have gone in and can tell him what other people's perspectives of him are, no matter how morbid. The romance in the second half between them also caught me slightly off-guard, but almost completely changed the book for me. It went from a depressingly morbid tale of regrets and failure to a bittersweet love story that makes you sweat from your eyes.

- What I Didn't Like About It

My only complaint is that some things in the story are not super clear and so I had to go back and forth a few times to double check if I understood something right. This could potentially be an issue with the translation, but I didn't mind doing this too much as I was so invested in understanding what was going on.

🤓 Memorable Quotes:

When I expected to live to eighty, I always had that unconscious arrogance of knowing I had sixty more years in me. Now that sixty years had become just three months, I was plagued by an insistence that I always had to do something. - Kusunoki, page 9

When you only see other people as tools to ease your own loneliness, they often pick up on that. - Miyagi, page 34

Why did I care about what other people were looking at, when I had so little time left to live? - Kusunoki, page 43

Clawing out of your hole doesn't mean success. You're just in the gray again, where you left. - Old Book Keeper, page 136

When misery is part of your identity, then not being miserable means not being yourself. - Sugaru Miaki, page 169