Mata, Onaji Yume wo Miteita is the story of an elementary school girl, "Koyanagi Nanoka", finding the meaning of "happinness". Right at the beginning, she is assigned by her teacher to find the answer to that. While thinking about it, she visits 3 friends, a teenager, an adult and a granny, named "Minami", "Skank" and "Granny", and discusses with them about what happinness means. Each one of them has different views on life and what happinnes is, as it is expected from their age gap and they also face different struggles. There are many sensitive themes, which makes the story seems dark sometimes, contrasting withthe main character's innocent and optimistic perspective. The story has an interesting premise, good pace, variety of deep themes and good characters, as well as a twist to the three characters' connection with Nanoka and the name of the novel, which really surprised me. Regarding the main character's relationships, I think Nodoka and Kiriyuu's relationship was similar to Sakura and Haruki's one from Kimi no Suizou wo Tabetai, so you may like that part of the story if you liked the author's previous work, despite the romance not being a major theme here, since the characters are just children.

Unfortunately, despite the gripping and sensitive themes, the way the story deals with them is rather simplistic and it never really goes deep into them. That has much to do with the main character being a kid and the story being narrated by her. The way she thinks, acts and even her humour is extremely childish and it gets boring quickly. There's nothing deep about her catchphrases "like is like..." and even her conclusions on "happiness" are obvious and ordinary. Another problem is that all the story becomes predictable due to a scene that makes everything crystal clear, which was a good moment but happened too early in the story.

It was a good read overall, the storyline was engaging and solid, but I think it's slightly overrated, as there's nothing groundbreaking, the plot is simple and has some problems like I said. I would recommend it, especially if you like other works by Sumino Yoru, but you should read it without high expectations. I also think I would get a lot more from this book if I read it as a kid, maybe it wouldn't be so redundant for me.