“Casting Shadows” is about a girl named Itami Aganie, who wakes up in a hospital bed. She is soon approached by a man named Kain, who instructs his apprentice Kage Hikari to train Itami. Kage tells her she’s now a Shinigami, meaning she is dead, and he soon takes her to Purgatory. She overhears a conversation between Kain and another man, in which she finds out that she is a Cultivated, meaning that Kain intentionally killed her because he knew she had a strong soul that he could use after death. Plagued by the idea that she has no choice, Itami decides she must run from everything, from Kain and even from Kage. As she watches Kage fall injured to her own sword, Itami makes the one decision that she thinks is truly her own: she stabs herself to a second death.
This is an exciting, fast-paced, action-oriented story with fascinating locations. Itami seems to be quite a complex character, because on the one hand, she is scared and angry at the events that have transpired that are out of her control; yet, on the other hand, she is falling in love with Kage, a boy instructed to lord over her until she is a trained Shinigami. Surprisingly, Kage is loyal to his master Kain even when he finds out the detestable ways Kain has brought the Cultivated into Purgatory. I really loved the melodramatic ending, with Itami killing herself to gain control in a world that seems to give her no choice. I also liked the complicated relationship between Itami and Kage, and the suspense we are left with at the end, wondering if they will meet again and, if so, whether they’ll be free agents.
The difficulty of this story is that a lot of action and characterization must be condensed into fifteen pages. All the events seem to flash by like bursts of light that quickly pass. It could be this factor or the Japanese names that make the story seem like genre fiction rather than literature.
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