The Lost Souls of Benzaiten by Kelly Murashige: Review by Colleen Mondor
The Lost Souls of Benzaiten, Kelly Murashige (Soho Teen 978-1-641-29574-1, $19.99, 304pp, hc) July 2024.
Debut author Kelly Murashige mixes a tender coming-of-age story with the unexpected antics of a bored Japanese goddess to give readers the highly original fantasy The Lost Souls of Benzaiten. The author’s clever plot and thoroughly engaging characters manage to make all too relatable the protagonist’s wish early on to “become one of those round vacuum cleaner robots.” Right now you might be laughing, but consider for a moment that you are 17 and your two best friends, basically your only friends in the world, recently cut you off. For those who have experienced that sort of brutal rupture, the dream of giving up on humans and embracing a robot’s unfeeling existence can be quite appealing. Machi is not suicidal, she is just…spent. Wishing to be a robot is the sort of thing you say in passing, a thought she considers while listening to her neighbor’s machine through the apartment walls. What she doesn’t expect is that Benzaiten, the goddess of love, will hear her and decide that Machi must be her new project, with a goal that the teen will be restored and rediscover “the beauty of humanity.”
For Machi, Angel, and Sunny were the fearless girls, the ones who made bold choices, who captured attention, who always seemed to know what to do before anyone else. Angel was the leader, with Machi and Sunny happy to follow along. The problem began when Angel kept reaching further and further in her efforts to shock and impress, and while Sunny was game for anything, Machi was the more careful one, the one more likely to consider what their actions might mean. When the two other girls turned on her in that eternal way of mean girls everywhere, Machi was left bereft. She stopped talking to everyone, including her parents. As the book opens, she attends school online, texts when necessary, and has been through a long line of therapists (following a long line of doctors to make sure her loss of speech was not physical). On top of everything else, the first therapist she bonded with has left her practice, and now Machi must start again with someone new, the unknown Dr. Tsui. The confluence of capturing Benzaiten’s attention, the quiet patience of Dr. Tsui, and her parents’ sudden need to go out of town for a family tragedy, means that Machi has an unexpected opportunity to deeply explore the changes in her life. She and Benzaiten have some adventures, Dr. Tsui gently pushes her out of her comfort zone (and into a local animal shelter), and her exchanges with her parents, (them talking, her texting), become more meaningful. Machi encounters some lost souls in Benzaiten’s company and discovers a degree of humanity that is wholly unexpected. It puts in stark relief all of her experiences with Angel and Sunny and, combined with Dr. Tsui’s writing prompts, forces her to consider what it means to be alive and part of the larger world. Machi finds herself, and along the way she also finds a lot more of what she has been missing.
It would be so easy to say that The Lost Souls of Benzaiten is a good read because it is thoughtful and intelligent and also, on more than one occasion, quite funny. (You have to laugh as Machi recites all the issues with her various other therapists.) But this book, and Machi’s story, is SO MUCH MORE! There is a line early on, where she thinks about herself and explains, “I always tell myself I don’t need much.” She is the kid who is happy to be included, happy to be mentioned, willing to do all that is expected and ask for little more. This makes her the perfect target for the belligerent Angel and also, unfortunately, a bit too easy to overlook for her loving but busy parents. Benzaiten demands that Machi not be so easily satisfied and then, along the way of pushing her to consider more, the lost souls who come to Benzaiten, and the goddess herself, expose Machi to a part of the world that she has been missing. She begins to consider how to be the person she wants to be and engage with those around her (especially at the animal shelter) and finds connections that she did not realize she was missing. The Lost Souls of Benzaiten is a surprise; a truly lovely reading experience that I recommend most strongly to anyone who has ever been lost in a whirlwind and needs a gentle hand to lead you back.
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This review and more like it in the November 2024 issue of Locus.
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