Lonely Castle in the Mirror is a novel written by Mizuki Tsujimura and published in 2017. It received a manga adaptation that ran from 2019 to 2022, and an anime film adaptation in 2023.
Kokoro Anzai is a middle school girl who has stopped attending school due to the horrible bullying she faces. She's invited to attend a specialized school for children who can't attend a mainstream school for one reason or another, but even the thought of going there gives her debilitating stomachaches.
One day, while home alone, Kokoro sees her bedroom mirror shining. The mirror pulls her in, and she finds herself in a magnificent castle with six other middle schoolers, run by the Wolf Queen.
Wolf Queen says they have all been gathered to look for a key. Whoever finds the key will have a single wish granted, however, there are rules:
1. The castle will be open for a full calendar year.
2. Only one person can find the key and make a wish.
3. Once someone makes a wish, everyone's memories of the castle will disappear. However, if a year passes and nobody makes a wish, everyone will keep their memories.
4. You must go home before 5 o'clock PM, Japan time. If someone breaks this rule, they will be eaten by a wolf, and so will everyone else who visited the castle that day, regardless of if they already left or not.
Lonely Castle In The Mirror contains:
- Adaptation Distillation: The movie is a streamlined version of the book, cutting several chapters and shortening the flashbacks of the other kids’ past to brief, dialogue-less montages.
- Adults Are Useless: Zigzagged; the adults in the book range from competent but lacking the full details needed to help (Kokoro's mother), well-meaning but completely ineffective (Kokoro's homeroom teacher, who thinks the bullying is just a simple misunderstanding), or full-on abusive.
- Fully averted with Kitajima, who provides a listening ear and a shoulder to cry on for most of the children (and is Aki's adult self) and a friend of Aki's grandmother, who stops by Aki's house soon after her grandma's funeral to invite Aki to stay with her, having been aware of her mother's husband's abuse and having promised her grandma she would protect Aki when she was gone.
- Age-Gap Romance: Aki, a ninth-grader, is dating a college student she met on a dating site. He doesn't actually care about her at all, and was just playing around with her. Aki encounters him and his actual (same-aged) girlfriend in town shortly after her grandmother's funeral.
- All of the Other Reindeer:
- Kokoro is bullied by her entire class, with Sanada as the ringleader. The one friend she did make, Moe, began ignoring her in favor of staying in Sanada's good graces.
- Masamune is bullied by the boys in his class for his habitual lying.
- Fuuka is ostracized and mocked at school due to her piano-playing; to be more exact, the fact that she doesn’t participate in gym because she can’t risk hurting her fingers, and due to how seriously she takes it.
- An Aesop: No matter how bad life can be, there is always hope and people who will love you and understand.
- Big Damn Heroes: Of a sort. Wolf Queen activates a hand mirror to pull Aki out of her house and into the castle when her mother's husband tries to rape her, saying it seemed that she needed to step in.
- Book Ends: The first and the final chapter open with Kokoro talking about a nice dream she has, in which a new transfer student joins her class and she's so cool and pretty that everyone wants to be her friend, but she only has eyes for Kokoro herself.
- Chain of People: How Aki is rescued and returned to life; Kokoro takes her hand first, and the other (revived) children take hold of each other to help her pull.
- Christmas Episode: The kids celebrate Christmas in the castle, decorating a small tree and bringing decorations, gifts, and snacks from home. Kokoro and her mother even go shopping together.
- Crocodile Tears: Sanada weaponizes these when she leads the other girls to Kokoro's house, demanding that she come out and face them, and when that fails beginning to sob and call her a coward. Several girls take the time to console her.
- Dark and Troubled Past: All seven of the children were chosen to enter the castle due to traumas and troubles they suffered in their pasts and continue to suffer in the present.
- Defiant to the End: While hiding from the wolf in the bathroom, Subaru decided he wasn't going to just hide, and if he was going to die he'd die fighting. He manages to rip the shower head from the tub and swings it at the wolf just before being eaten.
- Delinquent Hair: Aki and Subaru both dye their hair lighter colors later in the book, adding to their cool image. Subaru dyes his hair blond, Aki a lighter brown. The latter mentions having to wash the dye out before she can return to school.
- Despair Event Horizon: Aki's grandmother dies; Aki had been staying with in order to keep away from her mother's new husband, and with her gone she's lost both the last relative who loved her and her safe space. Then at the funeral Aki's boyfriend never showed to pay his respects, and her mother's husband assaulted her when she was at home. It's enough to drive Aki to hide in the castle past five o'clock, breaking the rules and leading to everyone but Kokoro to be eaten by the wolf. A brief glimpse at Aki's memories show she was aware she'd be eaten, but considered it a better alternative than going home.
- Disney Death: Everyone but Kokoro is eaten by the wolf in the climax of the book. Kokoro uses her wish to make it so that Aki didn’t break the five o’clock rule, which brings them all back.
- Earn Your Happy Ending: Kokoro has become a stronger person from her year at the castle, and begins going back to school. But his time, she's accompanied by her friend Rion, who won't leave her to face the world alone.
- Eaten Alive: The Wolf Queen promises this fate to anyone who stays in the castle past five o'clock and everyone who was in the castle at all that day, regardless of if they went home already or not. In the climax, everyone but Kokoro suffers this fate.
- Embarrassing First Name: Ureshino goes by his surname because he finds his given name embarrassing. The ending reveals his name is Haruka.
- Fairy Tale Motifs: The Wolf Queen is a girl in a red dress with a wolf mask, who calls the seven children "Little Red Riding Hoods." Some of the cover variants even depict the children in red hoods, particularly the manga adaptation. However, it turns out this is only one motif, and the secondary one at that. By the time the climax rolls around, it's clear the real motif is The Wolf and the Seven Kids.
- Fair-Weather Friend: Ureshino’s friend group only hung out with him because he treated them to lunch and paid for things they wanted. When his father forbade him from doing it anymore, they left him… and then beat him up when he tried to reach out again.
- Father, I Want to Marry My Brother: When he was young, Rion announced that he wanted to marry Mio, his older sister.
- The Film of the Book: The novel received an anime film adaptation in 2023.
- Foreshadowing:
- Subaru is highly impressed by the games Masamune brings to the castle, particularly calling attention to the graphics, which Masamune shrugs off. The children are from various points in time, and Subaru is from 1997 while Masamune is from 2013. Of course Subaru would be impressed by the most realistic graphics, which Masamune considers standard.
- There are several hints dropped regarding Kitajima's identity as Aki, one of the girls in the castle.
- When the kids are comparing their towns, everyone mentions there being a special school for children who can't attend a mainstream school, except for Aki. That's because the school is established after she grows up, with her being one of the first teachers.
- Everyone but Aki and Subaru mention a kind teacher named Kitajima, and Kokoro comments that she's beautiful, to which Ureshino is confused. Aki is Kitajima as a teenager, so Kitajima doesn't technically exist for her yet. And Ureshino is confused by everyone else calling her beautiful, because he's in 2027, when she's nearing middle age and looks less cool and more motherly.
- I Will Find You: Ureshino tells Fuuka, who he's developed a crush on, that he'll find her in his own time. Fuuka responds that by then she'll be seven years older and an adult.
- Imagine Spot: While out shopping with her mother for Christmas, Kokoro imagines meeting the other six children in the shopping center and cheerfully introducing them to her mother as her friends.
- Littlest Cancer Patient: Mio, Rion's older sister, was sick with what is hinted to be cancer, since she was six and had to skip a lot of school and never got to attend junior high school.
- Magic Mirror: All the kids’ bedroom mirrors become this, serving as portals to the castle. The castle itself also has seven mirrors the kids can use to go back home, glowing to indicate when its owner is present.
- Mama Bear: Kokoro's mother finds out what happened with her daughter and Sanada, namely that Sanada led all the girls to their house to threaten Kokoro for hours, and the teacher has been under the belief it was just a simple schoolgirl spat. She summons him to her house and proceeds to tear him a new one for believing Sanada over her daughter, saying the fact she refused to come to school should have tipped him off that there was more to the story.
- Narcissist: Discussed; Kokoro and Kitajima on two occasions say that the bully Sanada seems to exist in her own world, and Kokoro thinks that she can't seem to comprehend people would have lives or make decisions that don't revolve around her.
- Never My Fault: Sanada is told to write a letter of apology to Kokoro for when she returns to school. Kokoro reads said letter and it's essentially a backhanded apology ("I'm sorry you were upset") while guilt-slinging and putting all the blame on Kokoro ("I shouldn't have said such things to you when I knew you hated me. I deserve to be hated"). Kokoro is upset by this, thinking to herself that it's not an apology at all, and Kitajima-sensei agrees it's unacceptable.
- Older Than They Look: Wolf Queen looks and sounds like a little girl around nine years old. Her real world counterpart, Rion's sister, is a teenager in her own relative time, her Wolf Queen form being a time before her illness got worse.
- Parental Favoritism: A tragic case; Rion believes his mother greatly favors his deceased older sister, who died when he was seven, as any and all of his accomplishments are met with lamentations that his sister is no longer here to do the same things. Eventually, his mother sent him to a boarding school overseas, and Rion believed she was sending him away so she wouldn't have to look at him anymore.
- Reunion Vow: The kids all promise to find one another in the real world someday. Aki, Rion, and Kokoro are the only ones we know for sure succeeded; as Aki becomes the kind teacher who talks to most of them as her future students, and Kokoro and Rion attend the same class when they go back to Yukishima No 5.
- Right for the Wrong Reasons: After a failed attempt at meeting in the real world, Masamune posits a theory that they’re simply not able to meet… because they’re all from alternate dimensions. He’s right in that they cannot all meet at school but the real reason is because they all come from different points in time, seven years apart.
- Rule of Seven: There are seven children invited to the castle and seven years between the time period that each child came from. Only exception is Rion and Kokoro who are from the same time period and while it looks like there is a fourteen year age gap between Aki and Kokoro, it is revealed that Mio, the Wolf Queen, filled that gap.
- The Scapegoat: Sanada turns the class against Kokoro because Kokoro is "weird" and later because she thinks Kokoro likes the same boy as her. And when Kokoro stops coming to school, she makes Moe the new scapegoat, claiming Moe looks down on her.
- Shout-Out:
- Kokoro notes that Subaru looks a bit like Ron Weasley.
- Multiple times Kokoro compares the castle to "a castle from a Disney movie," particularly Cinderella.
- Shrinking Violet: Kokoro is a quiet, shy person by nature even before she got bullied, and it takes her a long time to really warm up to the other kids who come to the castle.
- Skipping School: All seven of the kids are refusing to go to school for one reason or another, except Rion, who turns out to be attending school overseas in Hawaii. He still attends class, and then comes to the castle after he's done.
- Wistful Amnesia: While they all forget the events of the castle at the end of the story, it is implied that Kokoro, Rion and Aki still retained a sense of familiarity with each other.
- Y2K: Subaru says that the world is supposed to end in the near future, so it doesn't matter if he goes to school or not. After the reveal that they're from different years, Subaru reveals he's from the 1997 and everyone thinks the world will end in 1999. The fact that some of the kids are from beyond that assures him it's not true.
- You Are Not Alone: One of the core themes of the book, with bullied, isolated, and abused children coming together in the magical castle and finding solidarity in others who have similar experiences.
- Younger Than They Look: Aki and Subaru are both taller than average kids their age, and Aki enjoys wearing clothes that make her look more grown-up. This leads to them initially being mistaken for high schoolers until they introduce themselves.
