I humbly present…
ガイコツ書店員本田さん (Skull-face Bookseller Honda-san)
Summary
Japanese
（業務と）戦うガイコツ書店員、本田さん!! コミック売り場がこんなに笑える職場だなんて聞いてない!? 爆笑必至の本屋さん実録お仕事マンガ☆ (from Amazon)
English
Skull-face Bookseller Honda-san is based on a real life experience of the author Honda during her days as a bookstore employee. The story follows the life of the staff while explaining how a bookstore works. (from Wikipedia)
Availability
Paperback: CDJapan Amazon
eBook: Kindle Bookwalker Kobo
Personal Opinion
This is a comedy/slice of life manga about working in a bookstore, specifically the comics department. You can tell that the author has worked in that job herself, because some of the foreign customers’ behaviours just seem incredibly spot on. Early chapters focus on customer interactions, but later on it gets more into some of the behind the scenes parts of the job, which I thought was really interesting. Oh, and of course the main character is a skeleton.
Pros and Cons for the Book Club
Pros
- Finished series with only 4 volumes in total
- Some foreign characters speaking Japanese at various levels of fluency - good for figuring out why certain expressions sound off to a native speaker
- Learning more book-related vocabulary
Cons
- Early chapters feature discussions of yaoi, though nothing explicit as far as I can tell, and there are no graphic depictions
- There doesn’t seem to be much plot
Pictures
Difficulty Poll
How much effort would you need to read this book?
- No effort at all
- Minimal effort
- Moderate effort
- Significant effort
- So much effort my head might explode
- I don’t know
0 voters