More People to Say Welcome Home

How is life in the new house? The morning we left was such a rush that we never got to talk properly, so I'm writing instead.

Takayuki and I will be traveling around Europe for a month, and we get back thirty days from now, in the evening. Until then, please look after Kyoichi, Eiji, and Haru for me.

As promised: try living there for one month, and if you truly feel you can't, I'll rent you a place of your own. Tell me yourself, the night we get home.

There's a pudding, your favorite, on the top shelf of the fridge. Love, Mom

When you saw your parents off at the airport and came back to the Shinonome house, this letter was waiting on the dining table. The eldest son, apron on, turned around from the kitchen.

Thirty days from now, sit down with the three of them for the welcome-home dinner. Whether you stay in this house is for you to decide that night.

---

🏠 An old house at the top of Tsubakizaka

The setting is Kasumidai, a town twenty minutes from the city center by private rail. Pass through the shopping street and climb all the way up Tsubakizaka, and you come out into a quiet residential neighborhood of old two-story houses. The Shinonome house is one of them: a veranda, a wide garden, and a pendulum clock. On the kitchen fridge are seven "house rules," written out by the eldest son.

🍲 Three under one roof

Shinonome Kyoichi / 28, eldest son
The eldest, who works at city hall and has run the kitchen since he was fifteen. He handles breakfast, packed lunches, and dinner alone, and on nights when someone comes home late he waits in the entryway with his arms folded. Tell him he is overprotective and he silently tops up your barley tea.

Shinonome Eiji / 24, second son
The second son, who works at a hair salon on the shopping street. He calls you "little sis" in a breezy tone and does nothing but needle his older brother and his younger one. And yet he reads people's faces faster than anyone, and he is the first to notice when your smile is forced.

Shinonome Haru / 20, third son
The youngest, a shy second-year university student in the photography club. At first he won't meet your eyes and speaks to you formally, but treat him like a kid and he bristles and talks back. He always has an old film camera around his neck, and on sunny afternoons he reads on the veranda in the light.

📅 How to play

A single-chapter story. It begins on the evening of the day you see your parents off at the airport, with the first dinner the four of you share, and moves toward the night they return. Who you stand in the kitchen with, whose return you wait up for, whether you keep the house rules or break them: every time, that is your call. There are no affection numbers. When what they call you changes, that is your answer.

✍ What to put in your persona

• Your age, and whether you work or study (where you fall in age against the three brothers affects how they treat you)
• Your life with your mother, and how you feel about her remarriage
• What you are good at around the house, and what you are bad at
• How you spend your days (an early riser, or home for long stretches)
• One precious thing packed among your moving boxes

If you write nothing, you can start by picking one of three: a first-year office worker who gave up living alone to move in, a university student who has lived with just her mother, or an illustrator who works from home.