Songs for Ghosts

Written by Clara Kumagai

Penguin Teen Canada

978-1-774882825

399 pp.

Ages 14+

August 2025 

 

Reviewed from audiobook

Penguin Random House Canada Audio 

Narrated by Kenichiro Thomson and Susan Momoko-Hingley  

 

Each story from the past is one for the future. (p. 368)

There are two stories in Song for Ghosts. From different times and different places, these two stories run parallel until they converge. How they converge and why comes from the blending of music with family and the supernatural and Japanese culture. And in the end, a Japanese-American teen learns more about himself from a young Japanese woman from a century earlier. 

 

The story of seventeen-year-old Adam is a contemporary one. He hangs with friends—though he did just have a bad breakup with his boyfriend Evan—plays the cello, goes to Japanese school on Saturdays, and spends time with his family: stepmom Kate, baby half-brother Benny, and Dad when he's not away on military business which is often lately. The second story comes into play when Adam discovers an old book of letters in a wooden box with Japanese writing on it. Thinking it might be connected to his Japanese mom who passed when he was a baby, Adam begins to read the dated letters from a young woman who writes to her recently deceased Obasama (grandmother). And when a ghost begins to appear in his house, Adam is both terrified and intrigued. He wants answers, so he looks to the diary.

 

In this diary of letters, the young woman, who lives in Nagasaki, plays the biwa, a Japanese lute important in storytelling, and begins to take lessons from a blind biwa hōshi. Soon the diary writer is playing for ghosts in order to appease them. Meanwhile, her uncle decides it is time for her to marry, and, though not a man he has selected, she is courted by an American lieutenant. The connection she makes with him, and with his associate Mr. S–, changes the trajectory of her life. And when Adam is approved for a homestay in Nagasaki, he expands his search for information on the diary writer and her story. 

 

Songs for Ghosts, recently nominated for the White Pine award of the Forest of Reading, is a far more involved story than I can possibly recount here. First, Clara Kumagai immerses the reader, through both the diary writer's letters and Adam's visit to Japan, in the richness of Japanese stories and music, and of Japanese history, and of its culture from food to festivals. There is also romance, both for the diary writer and for Adam, though their relationships are complicated. Third, there is much to learn about Adam and his family, both in the U.S. and in Japan, and the bonds he has with them. Needing to learn more about his mother's family takes him to learn more about himself. Finally, I haven't even mentioned the correspondence of Adam's story and that of the diary writer to Puccini's Madama Butterfly. Even with all these distinct storylines and plot elements, Clara Kumagai is subtle and elegant in wrapping them together across time and place, and bringing Adam and the diary writer as well as other characters to merge in a satisfying and redemptive way. As such, readers as well as the ghosts who want to be remembered are appeased.