You can visit the actual heartbeat library in Japan

Despite the standard disclaimer that "any similarity to . . . places . . . is purely coincidental" Les Archives du Coeur ("The Heart Archives") actually exists on Teshima, a small island in the Seto Inland Sea. Created by French artist Christian Boltanski, visitors can make recordings of their heartbeat and listen to the recorded heartbeats of other people from around the world.

Laura Imai Messina—or her translator Lucy Rand—calls it and her novel The Heartbeat Library. When at the end of the book her characters visit Teshima, it reads like a TripAdvisor entry, except that what has happened earlier makes the writing far more powerful, more moving than any such entry.

Shuichi is a successful children’s books illustrator. He was married with a young son who dies in a freak swimming pool accident. The marriage cannot survive the stress of the death (his wife blames herself) and they divorce. His mother dies and Shuichi moves from Tokyo to Kamakura to clean out the family home. He wants to "turn the house into something so unfamiliar that he could let it go." He discovers an eight year old boy, Kenta, is visiting the house when he is absent. He sets up a camera to see what he is doing and discovers Kenta is unsealing boxes and taking virtually worthless objects away.

Shuichi manages to connect with Kenta through his illustrations and helps the boy with his Japanese studies. Kenta begins spending time with Shuichi the way he had studied wit his mother. He liked to visit because his own parents fought constantly

Shuichi met Sayaka when the young woman prepared his mother’s body for her funeral and he mixes up "the emotions of saying goodbye to his mother with the hazy memory of this woman." As Shuichi gains the Kenta's friendship and Sayaka's affection (or love), a lightness returns to his life. He has survived.

According to the book, Laura Imai Messina was born in Rome, moved to Japan when she was twenty-three and has lived in Japan for fifteen years. She is the author of an earlier novel The Phone Box at the End of the Word.  The Heartbeat Library, written in Italian, is interesting if only because all the characters are Japanese, and with one insignificant exception the perceptions and feelings and words of the characters all ring true. I regret only that I myself will never been able to visit the Heartbeat Library, and the publisher should be ashamed of itself for not including the translator's name on the book's cover.