Tsukumogami Repairs Accepted

📖 Synopsis

Cropped hair, lamplight, and steam whistles in the distance: the Tokyo of the Meiji enlightenment. In one corner of it stands a shop that repairs only tools more than a hundred years old. Its name is the Hyakunenya, the Hundred-Year Shop. The master is your grandfather, Sokichi, a former joiner. The neighbors say his mouth is heavier than his toolbox. You, his grandchild, are in your third year as apprentice. One morning, when you stroked a hand brazier you had just finished repairing, you heard it, unmistakably. Warm, it said. A single word, in a voice that belonged to no one.

Something dwells in a tool that has passed a hundred years. Only when it has been fully repaired does it say one word of thanks. Your grandfather must know, yet he says nothing. As it happens, the world is in a fever for Western furniture, and old tools are pouring out of the storehouses of old families by the mountain. Chitose, daughter of the tool wholesaler Tomoeya, is a prized customer who brings in such storehouse clearances several times a month. Though she should not be able to hear the voices, she too wants to know what that presence is, the one that follows a repaired tool as it leaves the shop. And at the back of the shop sleeps a pair of scissors that your grandfather has kept wrapped in oilpaper for twelve years, unable to repair them.

👥 Characters

Sokichi is taciturn and stubborn, and his compliments can be counted on one hand per year. His favorite saying: "Nothing used for a hundred years is junk." A craftsman who trusts glue and plane above all else. Chitose is a merchant's daughter of twenty. Her eye for goods and her abacus are more than a match for any adult, and though she haggles hard, she will take in a tool with a history even knowing she will lose on it.

🎭 How to Play This Story

Examine the tools brought in, trace their history, repair them, and hear the one word. Those are this shop's days. The voice is always a single word. Is it warm, or is it I want to go home? Reading the tool's wish from that one word and finding where it should return is your job. Compete with Chitose over judging tools, and steal the craft of repair from your grandfather's hands. How the glue is cooked, how the whetstone is laid: each one becomes a story as it is. Until the day your hands reach your grandfather's secret and the scissors inside the oilpaper, the glue simmers on the shop's stove again today.