Welcome to Frère, a picture-purrfect share bookstore tucked away in a cozy corner of Shinjuku, complete with its very own adorable cat mascots! In a share bookstore, each shelf is curated by individual "shelf owners," each contributing their own books and personal touch to the space. Inside, you'll meet as many fascinating and unique people as there are books: a hairstylist struggling to keep up with the latest trends, a student trying to make ends meet, a bartender eager to understand people through literature, and other colorful patrons seeking the perfect read. Peek into their lives and watch their relationships blossom as they connect over their shared love of books and the stories that bring them together.

A Good Day Starts with Cats and Books has story by Satori Satori. English translation is done by Emily Hemphill with an adaptation by Emlyn Dornemann. Published by Seven Seas Entertainment (February 10, 2026).

Rebecca Silverman
Rating:

If you know anything about me, it's probably that I love books and animals. You may also know I currently have seven cats. (And a dog.) All of these things add up to Satori Satori's A Good Day Starts with Cats and Books being tailor-made for me. But will it work for you?

The short answer is “yes.” Despite its title, a love of felines is not required to enjoy this work, although the two kitties present in the text, former stray Chiyo and shy girl Sumi, are more entertaining if you've regularly interacted with rescue cats. But the text itself is a gentle exploration of the relationship between people and books – why we read, why we buy, and, most of all, why we share our reading with others. The interconnected short stories making up the narrative are all centered around something known as a “shared bookstore.” This concept, which I'd actually never encountered before, is a bookshop where people can rent shelves to sell their books. The idea is that with many single-shelf merchants in the shop, there's more variety and possibly more eclectic selections. Each shelf owner curates and names their shelf, and customers are drawn to the shelves of owners whose book curation style speaks to them. Of the curators we meet in the book, one leaves handwritten reviews and analyses in the back of every book he puts on the shelf, another sells her own works in handbound books. A third struggles to find the best way to appeal to readers, starting out by excessively turning over his collection until he's able to find the right fit.

The stories each explore the relationship between curator and reader in different ways. Each one introduces the protagonist of the next tale as a minor character, giving the text a natural sense of flow while still centering it firmly on the idea of the shared bookstore. The cats come in as a gimmick for the shop – the owner, who runs other businesses besides, brings his tabby cat Sumi to work, and if he's not there, he asks that shared shelf owners bring their own kitties during their shifts. Mostly this ends up being Chiyo, a tuxedo cat with a lot of attitude. There's a light metaphor of the cats representing the different types of reader who come in, although it's not particularly well developed.

A Good Day Starts with Cats and Books is a kind book. It doesn't settle on any one explanation for the love of the written word, but it appreciates all explanations and reasons. That is more than enough to make this worth reading.

Erica Friedman
Rating:

These days when one reads the words “It's all connected,” one immediately jumps to epic stories of conspiracy and the supernatural. In A Good Day Starts with Cats and Books everything, well, everyone is connected, but in ways that feel organic, almost fated.

We learn about shared bookstores, a real phenomenon that is taking off in Japan right now. In shared bookstores, individuals rent out a shelf as their own micro-bookstore. Their shelves can be curated and decorated any way their want. At Frère, the shelf owners also work a shift, to help keep the bookstore open.

The story begins with a stylist in Tokyo at a Shinjuku salon who visits Frère and expands to include a family in Okayama, a young man who is having a hard time finding a job, a woman whose awkwardness keeps her from trusting her own enjoyment of things. These people are brought together not just by Frère and its cats, but by a single individual who is a shelf owner, prolific reader and reviewer who has built up a significant audience with his impressions of the books he reads. These people will have their lives and outlooks shifted by the books they buy, read and sell in ways that are unpredictable. It is all connected, but in the way that all life is connected.

For me the single moment that expresses everything that this book did well was as an old woman takes a walk through her neighborhood and for the first time in years actually looks at things and sees them. If this novel asks anything at all of us, it is to just take a moment and notice ourselves and our surroundings and just be in those things.

My impression of this book is the same feeling as the American side of the Niagara falls. It is intentionally uneven, there is a lot of growth, trees, moss, rocks and the like that splits the flow. The falls are not the huge hydroelectric generator of the Canadian side, but they are stunningly beautiful in their messiness. The story here flows inexorably to an end we expect, but through moments of human emotion and natural beauty, even in the center of a city eating itself.

This is not a illustrated novel, but very much a book for readers of books and well worth a read.