NABC Store Manager Diary — October 6, 2026 (Tue)

Before coming to work today I stopped by Fubaisha, a publisher in Osu, and picked up some new releases. I got to the store a little after 2 p.m. Oh — I realized I hadn’t set up the cash register for tonight’s reading-group event, so I arranged that. Since a photo exhibition by the 'irogai' (red-light district) photographer Beniko will open in the second-floor gallery this weekend, I decided to rearrange the books on the display tables. I moved the books about yūkaku (former licensed pleasure districts), which had been on the small table in front of the register, to what you might call the main display table and the face-out display stand, and I moved the Nagoya tanka poetry collections that had been on the main display and face-out stand to the table in front of the register. I think both areas are much easier to browse now. I also moved some ZINEs that had been on the face-out stand a little to the face-out stand by the window (like the magazine racks near the store front) and placed another set inserted into a regular bookshelf. The downside of inserting them spine-in is that many ZINEs don’t have titles on the spines, so it can be hard to tell what’s where. With the number of ZINEs we carry increasing, it’s unavoidable for now, but I’d like to figure something out eventually. After I changed the shelves and registered the books that arrived today, a customer came in right away. She’s a woman who’s been coming in often lately and is interested in yūkaku topics. She’d bought a book about the yūkaku the other day — and today she bought another one. Thank you! In the evening a young woman who looked like a high school student came in. She was looking at the tanka display I’d moved and bought Perspective by Shuta Fujii. When I asked if she was a high school student, she was — it turns out she lives in Chiba and has taken a year off from high school. This summer she worked for a month at a mountain hut in the Central Alps, and she was on her way back; returning to Chiba would cost money, and since she had a holiday coming up she was stopping by Nagoya and taking a night bus to her next destination. I noticed a large backpack in the corner of the store. She was very cheerful and seemed adventurous. She likes writing poetry and has recently become a fan of artists who perform poetry as rap. I thought she was a serious book lover, and since she still had time before her night bus I invited her to join the casual reading group that starts at 7 p.m. Just then the reading-group organizer Tete came in, so I introduced the student. It was a walk-in, but it looked like it would be a fun session. Picture-book author Yukako also joined the reading group. For the theme “a book that changed your life,” of course everyone assumed it would be a book by Noran Nijino. I was on the lower floor and couldn’t participate in everything, but I could hear everyone’s cheerful voices from the second floor from time to time. When I went up to the second floor midway through, the high-school student was introducing a book — Ray Bradbury’s Fahrenheit 451. She’s into SF! I introduced a recent SF short-story collection I enjoyed, In the Town Where the Sunlight Disappeared. This was Tete’s second reading group, and it was another enjoyable meeting, so I asked Tete to run the next one as well. It looks like we can hold it in January.