Kakeru Mizushima has spent thirty-five years perfecting the art of not feeling. A clinical psychologist in Tokyo, he has built his life with the precision of a man designing his own prison - same routes, same coffee, same measured distance from every human being who might disturb the quiet. Then, on a rainy Tuesday in October, he finds a battered teal notebook on a park bench. He reads it. He picks up his red pen. He writes in it. He puts it back and pretends he is fine.The notebook belongs to Shiho Amari - loud, orange-coated, and running out of time. Her Countdown Catalog is a handwritten list of everything she refuses to leave undone: eating a violently colored parfait at 2 AM, finding the stray cat behind the Lawson's, making someone remember her. Shiho is dying, and she has chosen, rather unreasonably, to find this funny.What begins as a chance encounter in the rain becomes something neither of them has a name for - a friendship conducted in margin notes, a love story built from crossed-off entries, a reckoning with what it means to be truly present with another person when presence is the one thing both of them have been avoiding. Kakeru must confront the walls he has built. Shiho must decide how much of herself she is willing to let be seen before the catalog runs out.Rendered in prose of extraordinary precision and emotional depth, I Was You is a novel about grief as the price of love, about the courage required to let oneself be known, and about the radical, transformative act of staying. It asks what we owe each other when the time is short - and what we carry forward when the person is gone.For readers of A Little Life, Before I Go to Sleep, and The Remains of the Day - a quietly devastating novel that insists, on every page, that the love was enough.
