My #JanuaryinJapan tbr! 🇯🇵📚
(..or the book I promised to read last year).
I’m currently reading “The Dilemmas of Working Women” and I’m still halfway through “The Convenience Store by the Sea”. Trying my best to keep reading while having a mild symptoms of reading slump!
My 2025 favourite books 📚
In no particular order:
— Strange Pictures
— The Lantern of Lost Memories
— The Travelling Cat Chronicles
— Bookstore Girls
— We’ll Prescribe You Another Cat
— The Ex-Boyfriend’s Favourite Recipe Funeral Committee
btw in your 20's and 30’s you’ll start rediscovering the niche interests and hobbies you had as a kid. it’s very important you revisit them. your younger self was actually on to something.
some books you are meant to buy and have sit on your shelf until the version of you who is meant to read it is born. i’ll always support buying an insane amount of books.
slowly learned to work together, but of course, with the help of their amazing team.
If you love books set in bookstores or stories about books, this one is worth picking up!
Bookstore Girls by Kei Aono
Riko, the new manager of Pegasus Books, and Aki, a younger employee, clash over different tastes and work styles. Until news about the store's closing down came. This is a story about their struggle to fight for the store.
I bought Bookstore Girls impulsively just because it’s about a bookstore. I barely read the blurb, but I knew it would be my kind of comfort read. And it turns out right.
I think the drama feels a bit unnecessary and a bit too much, but I really enjoyed watching Riko and Aki—
Days at the Torunka Café by Satoshi Yagisawa
Reading this novel feels like stepping into the Torunka café itself on a narrow street in Tokyo where time slows down just enough for us to escape from our busy lives. Yagisawa gives us another gentle story about ordinary people—
they can put things down for a moment. I love how Yagisawa doesn’t force anything, he just lets the calmness settle, and you end up feeling soothed without even realizing it. It’s the kind of book you read slowly, like sipping something warm on a rainy afternoon.
finding small comforts in routine, good coffee, and unexpected connections. It has that familiar warmth just like his other books, that are the Morisaki Bookshop series.
The characters who pass through Torunka each carry their own worries, but the café becomes a place where—