Days at the Morisaki Bookshop

A broken heart, and a little room above a second-hand bookshop in Tokyo.

Days at the Morisaki Bookshop by Satoshi Yagisawa begins on the day Takako's boyfriend tells her he is marrying someone else. Twenty-five, job quit, no plan: then her uncle Satoru offers her the spare room above his shop. The shop is in Jinbocho, the Tokyo neighbourhood where one antiquarian bookshop follows another, and it is packed from floor to ceiling with second-hand novels. Takako never really read anything, but among the piles something slowly begins to shift, in herself and in her bond with the uncle she barely knew.

A short, gentle Japanese novel about grief, starting over and what books can do for a person. Lovely for anyone who enjoyed Before the Coffee Gets Cold or What You Are Looking For Is in the Library, and for readers who prefer a story at room temperature to big drama. This is the first book in the Morisaki series, here as an English-language edition of around one hundred and sixty pages: exactly one rainy afternoon long.