"This Darkness and Light" Mayumi Hattori

Emma Donoghue's "Room".
Mitsuyo Kakuta's "The Eighth Day".
Both are wonderful works, including their film and drama adaptations (I personally prefer the NHK drama version of "The Eighth Day"). The subject of a kidnapped child who returns seems to stimulate the imagination of authors.
However, the story the author has created in this book is quite unique even within that genre.
Without overthinking it, there is a pleasure here in being toyed with by a skillfully woven tale.

*****

Leia is a blind princess.
Though she cannot see, she is cared for kindly by her father, the King, and lives her life listening to him read books aloud, listening to music, and having picnics in the garden.
It is a world like a fairy tale. But there is always a vague sense of something suspicious, an atmosphere as if something is being hidden.

Leia is told that her mother has died. That she has passed away and they can never meet again.
And she is told that her kingdom is under foreign rule, and that she and her father are confined to a detached palace.
The King often goes out to the "town below the castle." Sometimes he even travels to the "edge of the country" and does not return for a long time.

Besides Leia and the King, the only others in this detached palace are a woman named Daphne who takes care of Leia's personal needs, and the soldiers downstairs.
When the King is away, Daphne is violent toward Leia and says terrifying things like, "Do you want to die?" or "I wish you would just die."
Leia is told never to go downstairs, where the soldiers who speak a foreign language are.

Leia celebrates many birthdays and grows up within the closed world of her room and small garden.
But eventually, she begins to sense that her father is troubled, the frequency of his trips to the edge of the country increases, and finally...

She cannot see.
Her life is very restricted.
Daphne is also terrifying.
But Leia has her "Father."
A father who teaches her to read and reads stories to her. A beloved father who always speaks in a kind, gentle voice.
Princess Leia's calm, beautiful days in her small world.
While reading, I knew on some level that this was a lie, a life that could not and should not continue as it was, yet there is a magic in Leia's life that makes a corner of my heart feel that this world is charming.

How will Princess Leia, whose aesthetic world created by her "Father" has suddenly come to an end, reconcile herself with the reality she must now live in?
The ending, which is neither clearly reality nor fiction, is chilling and frightening, but for a reader who has inadvertently come to admire Princess Leia's world, it might be called an ideal conclusion in a sense.

I felt that the years in Leia's closed world, depicted slowly and carefully, the events in the real world that followed, and the goosebump-inducing final development were all arranged with good pacing and content.
If I had to mention one thing, perhaps it is that the description of a certain profession—which the author likely wanted to include as herself—felt slightly out of place and disconnected from the world of this story.

Nevertheless, it remains a fact that I found it very interesting from beginning to end.
This is a book I would recommend to those who like the novels of Mari Mori, or those drawn to the aesthetic worlds of the Pre-Raphaelites or Errol Le Cain.