Ikoku Nikki, Volume 1: Diary of a Strange Land

The critically acclaimed josei manga series from award-winning mangaka Tomoko Yamashita.

Makio Koudai has built a life entirely on her own terms. A reclusive novelist, she’s sharp-tongued, set in her ways, and far more at ease with the people she invents than the family she keeps at a distance.

But everything changes when her older sister dies unexpectedly, leaving behind a now-orphaned daughter, fifteen-year-old Asa. Every door in the family quietly closes but one . . . Makio’s. There starts the unsure journey of a prickly aunt and a grieving niece, figuring each other out one awkward day at a time.

Can two people who never expected to need each other make room for a life neither of them planned?