The book follows her everyday life at the thrift shop, with the people she works with to the people that buys and visits the shop. The book is the story of Hitomi Suganuma, a young Japanese woman who’s working at a second-hand shop owned by an old man named Haruo Nakano. It set up the tone for the book’s theme of unconventional love and offbeat relationships. Designed by Natsumi Hayashi, the cover is a peek as to how fascinating the book is. The cover immediately sets up the atmosphere of the book. And after finishing it, I realized that I wanted a second season, I wanted to know more.īefore going any further, can we first stop and try to adore the cover of this book. “The hourly wage wasn’t much,” Hitomi muses, “but it was consistent with the amount of effort required.There’s something with this book that made me feel like I was reading a script of a TV series wherein I followed the main protagonist in a part of her life. Her relationship with Takeo remains forever “out of sync,” leaving her to conclude that “love is idiotic, anyway.” Rather than describing an awakening, Kawakami is interested in the experience of working an incidental job, and that allows each moment to stand on its own without having to shoulder greater meaning.

The progression of events is hardly dynamic, and those quotidian rhythms are reflected in Hitomi’s emotional life.

Nakano asks Hitomi to read the “totally pornographic” novel his mistress has written to help answer his question: “Are all women really so damned erotic?” Even at their strangest, these interactions are rendered calmly by Kawakami in pleasant, leisurely prose. One customer brings in photographs of “a man and a woman, naked and intertwined,” and Mr. Hope you are too.” Despite this struggle to navigate their shared inexperience, frank sexuality is inescapable at the shop. Soon after she’s hired, Hitomi begins dating Takeo, a coworker who proudly describes himself as “just simple.” Hitomi wonders how to have a carefree conversation with him to overcome the awkwardness that leads him to respond to her messages with: “I’m fine. In this gentle novel, Kawakami uses a series of vignettes to chronicle a girl’s time working at Mr.

The nakano thrift shop review