BOOKSTORE GIRLS

Aki Kitamura is 27 and a full-time staff member at Pegasus Books. Recently married, she’s beautiful, hotheaded, stubborn, and unwilling to back down from her opinions. She landed the coveted job because of her grandfather’s ties to Pegasus Books, which doesn’t win her any friends at work. And she doesn’t get along with one of her superiors, Riko Nishioka, the 40-year-old assistant manager. Riko has spent her entire adult life focused on her job and doing it successfully, and while she isn’t opposed to change, her focus on meeting what she sees as the needs of the bookstore’s core customers means that she is inflexible in ways that younger employees dislike. She also simply doesn’t like Aki. As two of the few full-time staffers at the bookstore, Riko and Aki make an unlikely pair when it comes to trying to save the place from closure when the building is faced with renovations and a potential rent hike. Japanese workplace norms around schedules, hierarchy, gender, age, and the status of staff versus contract employees are front and center in this novel, which offers a lot of commentary on the behind-the-scenes processes involved in running a bookstore and trying to keep it afloat. A confusingly large cast of characters settles into place as the story progresses, but the dry recitations about the mechanics of bookselling are unexpectedly lengthy, and the story lacks the vibrancy or gentle coziness of a number of other recent translated works from Japan, such as The Heartbeat Library by Laura Imai Messina (2024) or The Passengers on the Hankyu Line by Hiro Arikawa (2025).