私の恋人
By: Ueda Takahiro
Publisher: Shinchōsha
Published: 2015
Place of publication: Tōkyō, Japan
Language: jpn
Number of pages: 126
ISBN-13: 9784103367321
Other titles: Watakushi no koibito; Watashi no koibito
Description: The first-person narrator addresses both other characters and the reader as "you humans," creating the impression of a being that transcends humankind. He is repeatedly reborn over the ages, appearing first as a Cro-Magnon of the Upper Paleolithic period, next as a Jew named Heinrich Kepler who dies in a Nazi death camp, and then as a Japanese man named Yūsuke Inoue who works for an IT company in Tokyo and turns 35 in 2014. Fully aware of the cycle of reincarnation, he knows human events of the past as well as what is destined to take place in the future, and across the millennia he has been picturing in his heart his one true love. His chance to be united with that person finally arrives when he is Yūsuke Inoue: he meets a beautiful Australian woman named Caroline Hopkins, 32, and believes she is the one he has been dreaming of for so long. Caroline has come to Japan to visit Nagasaki and Hiroshima and thus finish a journey begun by Yōhei Takahashi, a terminally ill doctor who had embarked on a trip around the world to trace the history of the human race. Takahashi had declared that humanity has entered its "third circuit." The "first circuit" was the period when early modern humans spread across the globe, the second was the subsequent reunification of all peoples in a highly efficient world order of trade and intercourse during the Age of Discovery, and the third began with the IT revolution of the late twentieth century.
Notes: Previously appeared in "Shinchō," April 2015.

Winner of the 28th Mishima Yukio Prize, 2015