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[snowwater]

Super no Ura de Yani Suu Futari (A Story About Smoking At The Back Of The Supermarket)

Natively: Level 24

Summary

The sole thing that gets the middle-aged Sasaki through his soul-sucking job is a cheerful smile from Yamada—the young woman who works at a nearby 24-hour supermarket he frequents. After every tiring day of getting berated by his boss, Sasaki stops by the store to have his spirit healed by his favorite cashier.

After a particularly grueling day, Sasaki shows up at the supermarket, only to find that Yamada’s shift has already ended. Disappointed, he searches for a place to smoke when a woman from behind the store calls him over to join her. The bold and dangerously playful Tayama is quick to call out Sasaki’s peculiar habit of always seeking out her coworker—even going as far as telling Yamada about Sasaki’s vested interest in her.

Now, in addition to seeing his adored cashier Yamada, Sasaki also visits the store to see if his new smoking partner Tayama is around. But there is more to Tayama’s mischievousness than she initially lets on. With every cigarette, an unlikely friendship begins to blossom.

Availability

Physical: Amazon JP and CD Japan.
Digital: Kobo and BookWalker.
For those who use Kindle JP: you can download the free sample which includes the whole chapter 1

Personal Opinion

This is my first actual book club nomination! I’ve seen some great nominations thus far, but thought I’d nominate some books that are more of what I usually read. This is a fairly recent, perhaps more mature manga which has really grown on me. It’s a down to earth story about two people with the setting of a supermarket, and I just love the interaction between the characters and the glimpses of day-to-day life in Japan.

Pros and Cons

Pros

• Slice of life story, with plenty of day-to-day conversations between characters
• A couple of harder dialogues here and there, but mostly easy to follow conversations from what I’ve seen so far (chapter 1)
• Fairly short chapters (10-15 pages)

Cons

• No furigana
• Some themes might not be for everybody (smoking, fairly large age gap (~15 years) between main characters with hints of romance)
• It’s a slice-of-life mainly set at the same setting (supermarket), which some readers might find boring/repetitive

Pictures

First Three Pages of Chapter One

Additional Pages

Difficulty Poll

How much effort would you need to read this book?

• 1 - No effort at all
• 2 - Minimal effort
• 3 - Moderate effort
• 4 - Substantial effort
• 5 - So much effort my head might explode
• I don’t know