Leaves and Literature - Story Preview
Inheritance - Kaiyou
Kaiyou, Age 25, the Post-Meiji Era
Sugimori Kaiyou’s shoulder ached from the weight of her travel trunk. It was packed with the heavy, steel-nibbed pens, specialized dictionaries, and tools of a technical editor—items that felt increasingly useless the deeper she walked into the cedar forest. Here, the moss-covered trail had turned the cobblestone path into a living maze. Tiny flowers, with blooms no larger than the eye of a needle, swayed in the breeze. She followed the soft glow of pin lights toward the deep eaves of the bookshop, its architecture—complete with a wraparound engawa—echoed the design of old samurai residences.
As she approached the tall windows, the scent of old paper drifted from the building, mixing with the grounding fragrance of cedar trees. She peered through the glass to see a living tapestry inside: the spines of books served as bark for climbing ivy and pothos, while towering shelves stretched toward the rafters. Rays of afternoon light turned the floating dust into shimmering silver ink. Even through the thick glass, the scent of aged paper pulled her toward the hand-carved sign which hung from the eaves with iron fittings.
She studied the leaves accenting the text Leaves and Literature, and the decorative trailing flowers made of wood that bordered the sign before she reached her hand out, laying her fingers on the blackened boards of the bookshop.
The walls were made from the cedar trees her grandmother had loved so dearly. Each plank had been treated with fire—charred to become water and flame resistant through the process of Shou Sugi Ban. Her grandmother had told the story of its creation often, explaining how the great tree had fallen during a thunderstorm, struck by lightning, shaking the earth for miles. Her grandparents had carefully reshaped the tree, cutting boards and slats and fitting the wood together, giving the tree a new life and creating this bookshop many years ago.
With a shaky breath, Kaiyou reached for the bronze door handle, hesitating. It had been six months since her mother, Sugimori Yui, had stood here, the guardian of the bookshop after Yukimura Mariko and Yukimura Jura—her grandparents—had both passed away.
Kaiyou pressed her palm flat against the cedar, feeling the phantom weight of the keys in her pocket. She was the third generation to cross this threshold, and the first to do so having lived in the city for an extended time, away from the quiet of the village. Her mother had pushed her toward university so that she could create an easier life, where the changes brought by modnernization and the West were embraced. To be here now, after losing it all, felt like a betrayal of the future her mother had traded her own peace to give her.
How could she step back into a world she no longer understood?
Drawing in a deep breath, she stepped onto the mat of moss at the entrance, her foot sinking slightly into the greenery. The weariness of her travels eased from her shoulders as soon as she crossed the threshold. Kaiyou paused, her breath hitching at the sight. The transition from architecture to nature was nearly invisible. Timber beams and living branches were so deeply entwined that it was impossible to tell where the craftsmanship ended and the forest began. Shelves were tucked into the hollows between trunks, their wood appearing to grow directly from the bark. Freestanding cedars rose between the aisles like ancient pillars, while wooden boardwalks curved in a gentle path around their exposed, gnarled roots.
It reminded Kaiyou of the trails she had walked with her grandmother before she died, where giant cedars rose like mountains and the air was filled with the lush scent of foliage and damp earth.
She walked over the wooden floor toward an alder tree that reached toward the open sky under a central skylight. Its leaves had turned a vibrant yellow, like a canary’s feather. As Kaiyou walked under the branches, a few leaves fell, creating a cascade of yellow rain. She raised her hand, catching one in her palm, lifting her eyes to the trunk coated in green and orange lichen.
The lighting was soft and indirect in this part of the bookshop, creating an inviting atmosphere around the main interior where large armchairs waited.
Peace and serenity—those were the words that came to mind. She had not been here for many years, not since she was a young girl. After university, life had pulled her away, to the noise of the city... and now, after her mother’s death and the loss of her job, this shop was hers. It had been almost six months since her mother had—Kaiyou closed her eyes, her throat tightening. The sting of her mother’s passing came over her.
With a shaky hand, she removed her travel trunk, lowering it to the ground. She reached inside for a wooden hairpin and gathered her hair, securing it tightly. Then she lit the paper lanterns resting on the walls, and the tables around the shop
The warm amber was comforting.
She was no stranger to the way grief could steal the joy from the world, having felt its weight after her grandparents had died years ago. She knew healing would be a slow process, much like the growth of the moss beneath her feet. Her father had kept the shop's bones intact and its ledgers in perfect order, but he had only been maintaining it while it was closed. With her return, the story of Leaves and Literature had passed to her—it was hers to edit, to tend, and to renew.
Looking at the vast, silent shelves, the task felt enormous. It was something she knew she could do but it was hard to know where to start.
Kaiyou drifted over the the desk near the entrance, her eyes scanning the books on the shelves. Which of these authors was the store’s staples? Who were the local suppliers her grandmother had trusted? She reached for a blank sheet of paper from the drawer and brush and ink. But the text seemed to swim before her eyes, and the weight of a brush in her hand felt useless. She had grown so used to the straight and distinct type from the printing press and the metal blocks used to fill it that created something fluid and organic felt beyond her. She took a breath. She might not know the store’s secrets on how it was run, but she did know a clean shop was an inviting one.
Heading toward the storeroom at the back of the shop, her fingers trailed over the bookshelves. There was no dust. She frowned and looked at the shelf below it, and the next, finding the same thing. How could that be? No one other than her and her father had the key—at least, not that she was aware. And she knew her father had been too busy with work in the village, and at the embassy, to have time to dust all the shelves. It had been nearly six months. How could there not be any dust?
The deeper she went, the stranger it felt. Shelf after shelf, the books remained clean. Even the reading area and the armchairs waiting in a silence were pristine. But while the books were kept in a strange, preserved state, nature was beginning to grow wild. Green weeds sprouted through the gaps in the boardwalk and wound around the trees.
Kaiyou retrieved a shovel and bucket from the storeroom and set to work on the boardwalk. She knelt by the trees, prying weeds from the earth and clearing the soil before discarding the debris in a heap outside. Returning inside with clean hands, she found herself drifting into a nearby aisle. The shop was sorted by genre, yet the authors here were in total disarray, their spines creating a jagged, jumbled line. She gathered a stack of mismatched volumes and lowered them to the floor, but stopped herself before the first book was moved. She needed a plan.
Returning to the entrance of the shop, she pulled a blank, oversized sheet of paper from her trunk and a ruler. In Tokyo, a well-constructed diagram solved everything. If she could categorize every volume by title, genre, author, binding material, and size, she could rearrange the shelves to her liking better.
She spent the first hour in a trance of productivity. This was the world she understood: data, dimensions, and ink. She moved through the first aisle with a measuring tape and her pen, creating a complex grid that accounted for every centimeter of shelf space.
"Aisle two," she muttered to herself.
She started with the history section, picking up a volume on the early Edo Period (江戸時代), noting the weight of the hand-pressed paper and the specific indigo hue of the cover. She measured the spine at exactly 3.2 centimeters. She noted the slight foxing on page forty, her editor’s eye identifying the exact type of oxidation. She recorded it all in a neat, microscopic script that looked like it had been printed by a machine.
She moved to the next book, a thick tome on agrarian reform. Then a collection of maps. She felt a surge of confidence seeing the information on the page. She imagined her father, Takeru, looking over her shoulder and nodding at the efficiency of her columns. But as she reached for a fourth book—a delicate collection of haiku—she felt a strange resistance, as if the book were held in place. She pulled harder, and the volume slid out with a soft thump.
She frowned, marking the haiku collection on her chart. But when she turned back to the shelf to place it, she froze.
The Edo history book she had just meticulously measured was no longer where she had left it. It had shifted to the left, nestling itself comfortably next to a collection of poetry. She pushed the history book back into its designated slot, using the heel of her hand to force it into alignment. She looked back at her page to verify its position, but the paper felt heavy in her hands. The rigid lines of her grid were softening, the vertical bars curving like the stems of young bamboo.
Before her eyes, her neat, disciplined handwriting began to melt. The characters for “Edo Period (江戸時代)” were stretching, the strokes thickening and sprouting tiny, leaf-like appendages that reached for the edges of the paper.
A bead of cold sweat ran down her back. Her diagrams and charts didn't fail. They were the one thing in her life that stayed true.
"It’s just the light," she lied to herself, hurrying to the next aisle.
Her movements becoming frantic, her professional pride shifting into a desperate need for order. She tried to count the shelves and the books, referencing them against the diagram she had drawn, but every time she turned a corner, the geometry of the shop seemed to stretch and shift around. A towering bookcase of philosophy that had been on her right was suddenly on her left. The nature section, which should have been filled with studies on flora and fauna, was now inexplicably filled with technical manuals—old, dusty blueprints for weaving looms and irrigation systems.
These were the ghosts of her Tokyo life, the very diagrams she had spent years perfecting. But here, they looked out of place, foreign to her eyes.
She stepped back from the shelves, the atmosphere change. While she hadn’t felt at home when she stepped inside, a gnawing dread was wrapping around her heart, making it difficult to breathe.
“This can’t be happening,” she whispered, trying to find her footing in logic again. “It’s not logical that books are moving on their own.”
The shop responded with a low, groaning vibration that started in the floorboards and traveled up through her legs. High above, in the rafters, a heavy volume of botanical illustrations tipped onto the ground.
Kaiyou dove out of the way just as the book slammed onto the boardwalk where she had been standing seconds before. It lay there, its pages fluttering like the wings of a dying bird, open to a plate of a carnivorous sundew.
A note of defiance rose in her, masking the tremor in her hands. If the shop wouldn't let her touch the books… She abandoned the aisle, leaving the clusters of books she’d pulled scattered on the ground.
She marched toward the corner of the bookshop where the sunken irori sat built into the floor. This, at least, she understood. She scooped out the ash, her mind automatically calculating the volume of wood and kindling she would need to build a fire. She hit an agate stone against a steel striker until a spark caught. The flames slowly grew. She watched it with a critical eye, checking the oxygen flow and the stack of the logs as if she were verifying a diagram in a Western thermodynamics text. But then, the fire snuffed out. Smoke billowed, heavy and thick, blowing across the entire shop.
Kaiyou recoiled, coughing into the crook of her elbow. “No, no—not like that,” she wheezed, swatting at the heavy air.
Her eyes stung, not just from the smoke, but from the frustration of failing at something so simple. She had stood beside this hearth a thousand times, watching her mother’s hands move with effortless grace.
Smoke continued to billow, her eyes stinging as she stood and stumbled away from the irori onto the boardwalk, trying to breathe.
A heavy thud sounded behind her. Kaiyou turned to find a pile of books scattered across the floor—the very same ones she had just finished stacking. She walked over and picked up the volume that had landed face-down. After marking the page to save the place, she turned it over to see the title. It was a book on yokai, and it had fallen open to the chapter on Tsukumogami—spirits said to inhabit and imbue ancient objects.
Her eyes went back to the irori, then she shook her head. A book falling and opening to the exact page wasn’t trying to tell her something. There was a method to using the irori that she didn’t know, that was all. She looked up. Was there a trick to keep the smoke from flooding the shop too. A window maybe?
She shelved the book on yokai and gathered the others in her arms carefully stacking them onto the shelf they had fallen from and in the correct order.
Across the bookshop, one of the lanterns started flickering, and went out, then all the others, until she was standing in the darkness, the bookshop was illuminated only by the sunlight coming in from the windows at the front of the shop.
She stifled a groan. “Great. Just great.”
Slowly, she made her way around the bookshelves, to the front of the store. She relit the square paper lantern and carried it throughout the bookshop, relighting all of the other andon from the flame. But the shadows seemed to grow and coalesce around her. She stepped back to the center of the shop, stumbling as wooden boardwalk buckled underfoot. The vibrant yellow leaves of the alder tree began to fall in a frantic rate, the edges of the leaves appearing crisp and jagged.
"I'm just trying to help!" Kaiyou shouted at the empty air.
In response, the irori—which she thought had been snuffed out—hissed. A plume of thick, grey smoke surged, blowing toward her, coating her hair and the shelves she had just meticulously organized. The books she had stacked by author's name began to slide out of their places onto the floor. The ink on the Tsukumogami book began to swirl, the characters sliding off the page like spilled ink.
Kaiyou looked around in horror. The swirling ink and shifting shelves were fighting against her. Something about it… there were memories like this from her childhood. Moments that couldn’t be explained. She had been an odd child, always lost in stories or hidden fantasies. When she had left for the city, all that had faded, but now it was as if the shop were reminding her of everything she had forgotten. The whispers, the living wood, the feeling of not being alone—
Panic came over her and Kaiyou raced outside and sat on the edge of the eaves, drawing up her knees to her chest as she looked out into the bamboo forest. The trees were swaying in the gentle breeze, the sunlight shining through the canopy, casting dappled lighting across the cobblestone and moss road.
Frustration bubbled up inside her, and she felt tears at the edge of her eyes. Why had she thought she could do this? She had spent years in Tokyo, her world defined by the absolute clarity of technical manuals. She had been their most meticulous editor, catching errors in Western blueprints that others missed, until the new high-speed rotary presses arrived and she had been let go for refusing to let a single translation error pass through the gears. Inheriting her mother’s bookshop had seemed like a blessing at the time—a place where her careful eye might finally be valued again. But now, she wasn’t so certain.
Laying her forehead on her knee, she closed her eyes and focused on breathing, the cold iron of her city life feeling like a weight she couldn't set down…
The memory hit her with the sharp, acidic tang of industrial ink. In Tokyo, the Ministry of Engineering was a towering building of gray stone and relentless noise. Kaiyou sat at a desk that was one in a row of fifty, positioned under a skylight that offered a view only of the soot-stained sky. There were no trees there, only the rhythmic hiss of the steam-powered presses in the basement that shook the floorboards from dawn until dusk.
She remembered her last day vividly. Her supervisor, a man named Sato who always wore his stiff Western suit, had dropped a stack of blueprints for a new locomotive on her desk.
"The translation is done," Sato had said, his voice barely audible over the clatter of typewriters. "Just verify the technical specifications and sign off. We need it at the printer by noon."
Kaiyou had opened the manual, her pen poised. Her eyes scanned the page, catching on an oversight. A calculation for the engine had been rounded down for the sake of a cleaner layout. It was a minor discrepancy on the page. Pratically, it was a fatal mistake.
"This is incorrect," she had said, bringing the text to her supervisor sitting down at his desk. "The pressure conversion from the English text is off by three points."
Sato checked his pocket watch. "The rotary press is waiting, Sugimori. We are bringing Japan into the modern age. Perfection is a luxury of the past."
"It isn't a luxury," she had whispered, her fingers tightening on her pen. "It is the truth within these pages. If engineers follows this, the engine could fail."
"The truth is that you are too slow," he countered, sitting back and reclining in his chair, his eyes narrowed. "You treat every technical diagram like a piece of poetry. You spend hours agonising over the kerning of a font while the world moves past us. The Ministry needs technicians, not artists. We need people that can keep up with the printing press and its speed."
He had taken the blueprints, still wet with her red-inked corrections, and handed them to a younger man two desks down—someone who didn’t care about numbers or truth but where his standing was in the workplace.
By evening, her desk was empty. She had walked out into the Tokyo rain, her trunk filled with specialized dictionaries and rulers that no longer had a purpose, feeling like a broken part that had been tossed aside because it no longer fit in this world.
“Is something the matter?” someone asked.
Kaiyou looked up from the engawa, startled from her reminiscing as she became aware of the bookshop and the cedar trees surrounding it again. An old man stood on the stone path, leaning lightly on a walking stick. He looked like a traveler from another time, with a tall wooden chest slung over his back and a kimono held in place by an elegant, gold-embroidered obi.
“I’m sorry,” she said, doing her best to keep her voice even and give the man a smile. “The bookshop hasn’t reopened since the owner died. I’m actually not sure if it ever will be open again.”
“That’s a pity,” the man said with a frown. “May I ask why?”
She waved toward the entrance. “The bookshop seems to hate me.”
It sounded stupid when she said it out loud, childish even, but she had never been more certain of anything in her life. She had come here with the intention of taking over her family’s bookshop and the shop was not happy with the decision.
The man chuckled and stepped onto the engawa. “It will take time.”
Kaiyou raised her head and turned to look at him, catching sight of a slight smile on his lips. What did he mean by that?
"Come,” he said, taking a step past her, “why don’t we have some tea?”
Kaiyou remained crouched on the ground, arms wrapped around her knees, as the man entered the bookshop. For a few moments she remained where she was, not wanting to move beyond her sadness, until she began to wonder what the man was doing inside and why there was something familiar about the way he asked her in for tea, like he was more than someone passing through. Who was this person and what were his intentions?
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