Ever since I was young, romantic novels and stories have always resonated with me: whenever I encountered romance in any medium, it produced a particular feeling in me, a hard-to-explain intangible. Nowadays, few novels achieve that mix of emotions; I believe it's because few works dare to delve into their characters at their most intimate level and in relation to other, equally deeply written individuals. Few stories make a character feel relatable to my own situation; after all, most are made for a specific type of reader and not for the diversity of human experiences that exist around desire and sexuality. Few narratives operateon both levels: an intimate romance that, at the same time, takes human complexity seriously. And even fewer stories dare not to camouflage, cover up, or hide the parts of ourselves we wouldn't want others to see: our violence, our jealousy, our intrusive thoughts, our fantasies, our traumas, what we would like to be and what holds us back. Fewer still are capable of narrating all this coherently, without anything feeling out of place. Almost no work shows how people explore their desires without fear, without sweetening them to make them acceptable. But what stands out the most is that there's only one recent story that manages to speak with such a youthful and honest air, a work that makes you so invested in its characters that you sometimes forget they are imaginary, even though what they embody is absolutely real.

Sendai Hazuki and Miyagi Shiori build a home where they have no choice but to confront each other and confront themselves. At first, I found Miyagi difficult to fully understand; their actions seemed evasive, even contradictory. But, over time—and as the novel allows us to read their cracks, their defensive mechanisms, their family history, and their fears—I began to understand why they did what they did. And, at the same time, I took Sendai down from the pedestal of "perfection" on which I had placed them. Today I understand that they are, in essence, two people who recognize a shared loneliness in each other, a loneliness that manifested in very different ways in each, but which ran through them with the same intensity.

What they find in love is not an epiphany nor an immediate transformative revelation, but a slow process, clumsy at times, deeply human. A process where wounds don't magically disappear, but become livable because the other is there: caring, yielding, confronting, listening, failing, and trying again. The novel never conceals that emotional work; it shows how both individuals strain, negotiate, retreat, and advance. And that is where the story becomes truly beautiful: not in perfection, but in the possibility of building, step by step, a way of life that allows them to live better with each other.

It's a vision of romance that touches the soul because it doesn't idealize love: it frames it as a space where two vulnerable, complex, sometimes contradictory individuals find a way to exist together without renouncing what makes them human. And that, today, is exceptional.