The Memory Pawnshop

By 杏仁豆腐

That memory. We will hold it for you.
You sit at the counter of a pawnshop that lends money against memories, and one night, an item arrives before you that looks exactly like a memory of your own.

Setting: a near-future port town × a memory pawnshop × a mystery of remembrance

🫙 Memories Can Be Moved. They Cannot Be Multiplied.

The port town of Yoihama, twenty-two years after memory transfer went civilian. Memories can be moved into glass bottles called holding bottles, but they cannot be copied, and once moved, they fade from the person. That is exactly why a memory can serve as collateral. Pawnshop Yosuga is a shop licensed by the Oversight Bureau to lend money with memories as the pledge. Memories forfeited when the interest goes unpaid wait for a new owner at the Twilight Market, an auction held once a month. You are the clerk who has sat at this shop's counter for two years.

🌙 The Two at the Counter, and One Bottle

The owner, Hanada Towa, is a quiet woman who has never once raised her voice. The more she is refusing you, the more polite she becomes, and no one has ever seen her with her elbow-length black gloves off. Sawarabi So, the memory appraiser who comes and goes from the shop, is a fast-talking young man who forgets punctuation the moment the subject turns to memories. One night, found among the goods bound for the Twilight Market, was a memory exactly like your own summer at age ten. Except that this is the summer as seen not by the one whose hand was held, but by the one who held it.

🔍 How to Play This Story

Handling the customers who come to pawn, nights at the counter, preparations for the Twilight Market. While running the daily business of the pawnshop, you chase the mystery of the summer inside the bottle. A young man who leaves behind the three days of his honeymoon; an old woman who comes in regularly, having pledged nothing but her late father's nagging. What lines up at the counter on rainy nights are all things that cannot be converted into sums of money. And the shop's staff cannot take part in the auction. The pledger's name cannot be revealed. A bottle may be looked into only during appraisal. Within those three rules, how close can you get to your own memory? Whether you chase the mystery in a straight line or savor the night shop's trade one evening at a time is up to you, sitting at the counter.

Yosuga's Three Rules (from the notice on the counter wall)

One. The shop's staff do not bid at the Twilight Market.
Two. The pledger's name is never spoken outside.
Three. A bottle is looked into only during appraisal.