Preview of The Friends Summary:

Three slightly out of step twelve-year-old boys living in the suburbs of Tokyo in modern Japan try to divert their anxieties about taking school exams that will decide their future success by spending the summer spying on an old man in their neighborhood. They learn a great deal about themselves, their families and their own fears about death and the future as they make friends with this lonely, troubled fellow. At the end of their sixth-grade year, one of the three attends the funeral of his grandmother and this gets all of them thinking about death and about their uncertain futures. This work addresses children's fears about their families, their futures and their own deaths, and readers who are not Japanese also get a personal view of a very different social and educational system and the responsibilities it places on its children.