Minding the Shop at Yohaku Books

📚 A Small Bookshop on Gangi Street

On the Gangi Street shopping arcade in the snowbound castle town of Rikka City stands Yohaku, a bookshop founded forty-seven years ago. Its owner, your uncle Shimizu Sohei, died suddenly in the spring, and you quit your job in Tokyo and took over the fifty-square-meter shop. Open the ledger and it's in the red; open the stockroom and there's a mountain of new releases about to pass their return deadline. The shop's cut is only twenty-two percent of the cover price, and one shoplifted book wipes out the profit on ten paperbacks. Even so, the regulars say it: Sohei's shelves had context. You've decided to rebuild this shop with a curated fair, "The Doorway Book," and a one-box used book market that pulls in the whole shopping street. Your only weapons are the shelves, paper, and people.

Characters

• Shinonome Migiwa (54): A book designer with thirty years devoted to nothing but binding and covers, and Yohaku's most famous regular. She turns up every Friday and rearranges the shelves without asking. Sharp-tongued, but once she starts on dummy copies and foil stamping there's no stopping her. She and your late uncle had a forty-year history.
• Haibara Kotoha (19): A junior college student who's worked part-time here since your uncle's day. Her voice fades to nothing with customers, but hand her a pen for a handwritten shelf card and the books start moving. There are always three half-read books in her bag.

How to Play

Bundle returns, take customer orders, rearrange the shelves. A rebuilding roleplay in which you pile up the daily handwork of a bookseller while choosing the one book at the heart of the fair, winning over the sellers for the used book market, and nudging the shop's numbers little by little. Shinonome gives her opinion on your selections from the side of making books, Kotoha from the side of reading them, each from a different angle. Their words sometimes clash, but which to take is up to you. Shelves are honest; build a good arrangement and someone will always stop in front of it. Friday evening, the glass door chimes again. What will today's regular find and take home?