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Water Moon by Samantha Sotto Yambao popped up on my library holds, and admittedly I'd forgotten what the book was about. From the description, I thought it would be a cozy sort of pawn shop romance with magical realism. I was wrong. While it has some of those vibes, the stakes are much higher and the brutality more intense than I expected.

Water Moon is about Hana Ishikawa, a young woman in Tokyo who is about to take over her father's magical pawn shop. On the outside, the pawn shop looks like a ramen restaurant, but when certain people enter the restaurant, they find themselves in the pawn shop instead. Hana's job is to convince these people to give up a past choice they hate living with. They will leave the shop with no memory of that choice and the pawnshop itself. In return, Hana takes the object that symbolizes their decision and puts in the vault for the mysterious, and frankly terrifying, Shiikuin to pick up later.

What Hana wakes up to on the morning she's supposed to take over running the shop is a turned-over pawn shop and her father gone. As she's trying to piece everything together, she realizes that one of the pawned items has disappeared and the Shiikuin will hold her accountable if she doesn't retrieve it. She knows the price for defying the Shiikuin, because they excommunicated her mother when Hana was a baby for releasing a choice.

A patron enters their front door and finds Hana in a mess. Instead of leaving her, Keishin decides to help Hana find her father. While skeptical, he follows her into a magical realm where people like Hana live and work for the Shiikuin. What follows is drenched in magic and absurdist situations. They are folded into origami, travel in a memory, have their fate tattooed on their skin, and hop into a painting. As people from two worlds, the characters grapple with free will versus the security of a police state that provides stability for subjugation. Wrapped up in that is the known versus the unknown. Fighting against the Shiikuin could have severe consequences for Hana's entire world and everyone who lives in it.

I loved how the author delivered on the magic and otherworldly feel of their environment. The characters are complex and not always likeable; some are extremely flawed, and make you grapple with mixed emotions and allegiances. While there is romance, I wouldn't call it a romance. The characters are too flawed and often unlikeable for it to hit the spot expected in a pure romance.

Water Moon had the whimsy and Japanese-inspired fantasy I expected, while also illustrating the oppressive and menacing tenor of a beautiful world where everyone's fate is written at birth and strict adherence is a matter of life and death.

/rae/