Kazumi Yumoto's Friends is a brilliant young adult novel about friendship, learning, and intergenerational connections. Beginning as a story about klutz schoolchildren, it becomes both a funny and sad tale of a child's interest in exploration, and then shocks with its expected, but no less poignant ending, when simple curiosity develops into something much more important. One day, one of the three sidekicks friends have to go to their grandmother's funeral. This sad experience arouses the keen interest of his comrades: what happens to the deceased person, does he turn into a ghost? The mixture of fantasy and reality fascinates them so much that they decide to see everything with their own eyes: they find a lonely old man who seems to have outlived his days, and they set up surveillance to catch him on the verge of death. But a seemingly simple task turns out to be difficult to complete: it seems that the old man has noticed the boys and is not at all going to do them a favor and calmly depart to another world. On the contrary, he seems to be gaining strength from the attention given to him... Kazumi Yumoto's book has been translated into a dozen languages, recommended by the Japanese Association of School Libraries, became a book of the month in Germany, was nominated for the German Children's Literature Prize and was shortlisted for the Catholic Children's and Youth Literature Prize , in the USA received the Mildred Batchelder, Boston Globe-Horn and Rookie (“Rookie”) awards from the Association of Children's Writers.