NABC Store Manager's Diary — July 18, 2026 (Sat)

It was hot again today. There were few customers today too, but a young woman spent a long time looking at the shelves, so when she came near the register I called out to her and she talked with me a lot. She was a girl with big, round eyes and said she had come to Nagoya for work from another prefecture. She said there are many things she dislikes about her appearance and other aspects of herself. I wonder if many young women say “I hate myself.” As we talked, she told me she had broken up with her boyfriend a little while ago, and now she might be starting to date a man from Tokyo. She’s quite popular, isn’t she? She really talked a lot. She said she had been good at drawing since childhood, had placed in book-report-drawing contests many times, and is good at reading a story and turning the image into a picture. So I gave her a ZINE of a short story collection and asked her to draw something from a story she likes and come show me. I hope she brings me one of her drawings someday. In the evening there was a tanka gathering hosted by our regular, Chiharu. It was the first meeting, with senior poet Suzuki assisting as support. Including me, five people participated. Four of them I met for the first time! I was happy to have new encounters. One of the participants was a man who might be older than me. He’s a fan of Chiharu and attends various tanka gatherings and seems to be improving rapidly. I couldn’t finish my work at the shop, so I joined partway through. It was a bit disappointing that the critiques of my tanka had already finished by the time I arrived, but afterwards Chiharu told me, “There were expressions not normally used in tanka, and everyone found them interesting,” so I felt a bit relieved. My revising is insufficient, or rather lately my ability to compose tanka has weakened, and I can’t quite get them into a good shape, but I think it’s important to keep going without stopping. The reason I started composing tanka was that, at this shop, I began stocking and selling poetry collections and ZINEs by Nagoya poets — I never imagined I would come to write tanka myself. The tanka everyone composed at the gathering are written on tanzaku strips and posted at the first-floor coffee shop “River.” We have a notebook where you can write your impressions, so please take a look. The second meeting has been decided. I’ll register it with Zindies events soon.