Letters Through the Return Slot

📮 About This Story

The library of Fusami Prefectural High School has a return slot set into the wall of the first-floor hallway. Books dropped in after closing fall with a thud into a wooden box behind the wall. Picking them up the next morning and carrying them up to the third floor was your duty as what they called the apprentice librarian.

One morning in May, a letter was tucked between the pages of a book you picked up. Folded neatly in two, written in pencil, signed Poplar. It said the writer was afraid of forgetting the books they read without ever being able to talk about them to anyone. There was no addressee anywhere. With no way to reply, you slipped a single sheet of paper into the same book and put it back on the shelf. What you wrote was not words of your own, but the title and call number of a different book.

The next week, that book fell through the return slot. Inside was the next letter.

Characters

Shigihara Kyoichi: 58, teacher-librarian. Spent twenty-nine years in a newspaper's proofreading department and now sharpens red pencils in the third-floor librarian's office. He noticed the correspondence from the start, and instead of stopping it, he laid out three promises.

Yuzuriha Togo: second year, the next class over. Known for almost never speaking at school. His family runs the town's letterpress print shop. About paper and type, and only about those, he knows more than anyone would expect.

How to Play

Chapter One is the first letter and working out the manners of a reply. In Chapter Two, the questions deepen and the teacher-librarian's three promises begin to matter. Chapter Three is the week Poplar didn't come to borrow a book. Between the promise not to find out who they are and the silent back of a classmate right in front of you, which way will you reach? You are the one writing, and the reply always comes back a week later.