Chiya Fujino’s 2022 novella 団地のふたり(Danchi no futari) chronicles the daily lives of two 55yo women who were childhood friends and still live in the same danchi apartment building.
Natsuko Sakurai is an illustrator whose once-popular art style is no longer in demand. To make ends meet, she sells nostalgic items like old toys and sheet music collections on online auctions, and she’s also become extremely proficient at cooking on a budget.
Noe Ota has returned to her childhood home after getting divorced. Though she was once hailed as a prodigy, gendered harassment prevented her from succeeding in academia, and she now works part-time as a lecturer at a university.
Instead of dwelling on their faded ambitions, Natsuko and Noe find comfort in the low-stakes routines of midlife. They fix window screens for elderly neighbors, collect twentieth-century memorabilia to sell online, and share conversations over Natsuko’s home-cooked dinners.
Fujino transforms the retro danchi apartment complex into a warm and friendly community. None of the women who live there feel the need to update their lives; they’re just happy to enjoy the pleasures of a low-pressure lifestyle in a charming old building.
This five-chapter novella feels very light and breezy, and I get the feeling that it’s aimed at readers in their 20s and 30s looking for an alternative to sky-high Tokyo rents. Instead of an overarching plot, the book features a series of loosely connected episodes, allowing the reader to dip into Natsuko and Noe’s slice-of-life adventures at their leisure.
団地のふたり was adapted into an NHK television drama in 2024, and a manga version has been serialized since April 2026. Apparently this story is quite popular!
Atsuhiro Yoshida’s 2025 short fiction collection #Tokyo Apartment brings together 21 stand-alone stories about people living in and around Tokyo. The characters are usually living on their own, almost always in retro buildings removed from the city center. There’s very little wealth or glamor in these stories, but their protagonists nevertheless manage to become swept up in the magic of a densely populated megacity.
A representative story is Tokage-shiki gomuin kaisha (“Lizard-style rubber stamp company”), whose narrator recalls a time when he lived in a building that was once famous for being the largest apartment complex in Japan. The building had multiple floors of businesses, and the narrator worked at one of them as an apprentice to an artisan who took commissions for document signature seals. While dining at his favorite pubs in the same building, the narrator grew friendly with a woman who also worked there. He courted her by sending letters to her apartment – which was naturally in the same building. This story perfectly captures the flavor of the comfortably chaotic retro spaces of the old business/residential complexes of West Tokyo.
Not all of the stories are so cozy, however. Sutorei kuriketto (“Stray cricket”) is about a young man with no money, no friends, and no real prospects for finding a decent job. For the time being, he washes dishes in a small diner. He doesn’t have much room in his life for hobbies, but every night he brings back scrabs of cabbage to feed to a cricket that has entered his tiny apartment through a ventilation shaft. While listening to the cricket chirp in the darkness, the narrator is inspired to help the tiny creature find its way back outside. He might have nowhere to go in his own life, but at least the cricket can be happy and free.
Many of the stories end on a more ambiguous note. In Heya o kimeta hi (“The day we decided on an apartment”), two single fathers become online friends as they swap stories and advice with one another. In time, they become real-life friends and begin sharing childcare responsibilities. They mutually arrive at the conclusion that their lives would be easier if they lived in the same apartment building, so they hire a realtor to find a suitable property. There’s something about this sort of housing decision that feels final, however, and this causes the two dads to wonder if they’re really ready to take such a momentous step into the beginning of middle age.
For the most part, the stories in #Tokyo Apartment are fairly mundane, but there are occasional touches of magical realism. In Yūrei no denwa (“Ghost telephone”), the character Moriizumi returns from Yoshida’s novel Goodnight, Tokyo. Moriizumi manages a service that helps people dispose of their old telephones, which often have too much sentimental value to throw away. In a conversation with a crow who makes nightly visits to her balcony, Moriizumi reflects on how analog technology can feel haunted by the ghosts of people with whom our connections have faded. The crow, who is a connoisseur of the unused objects people dispose of on their balconies, agrees with Moriizumi but prefers to focus on making new connections.
A word I often see in reviews of Atsuhiro Yoshida’s writing is yomi-yasui, or “easy to read.” Yoshida has spent more than a decade carefully cultivating a light and precise writing style, and #Tokyo Apartment is indeed a relaxed and chill reading experience. It’s entertaining to encounter such a wide range of variations on the theme of “apartments in Tokyo,” especially since the narrative voices of these stories are so distinct – which is no mean feat when accomplished within the simplicity of the author’s characteristic style.
As an aside, I might recommend the stories of #Tokyo Apartment to people studying Japanese language. Any one of them might be good for inclusion on the syllabus of an upper-level Japanese language class. In particular, the first and final stories of the collection are short, amusing, and easy to understand from context clues, and I imagine that either of them would be a nice treat for anyone just starting to read Japanese fiction.
Ryōko Nagara’s Kitaguni yura-yura kikō (北国ゆらゆら紀行) is an episodic travelogue manga that follows a young woman named Tsukiko who left her job to return to her hometown of Sapporo.
Tsukiko is too burnt out to resume full employment, and her savings are running low. Her friend Chitose invites her to move into a Shōwa-era sharehouse co-rented with her flatmate Kensuke and Kensuke’s girlfriend Miwa. Their landlord, a world traveler who no longer lives in Japan, says that Tsukiko can stay if she can manage to clean up all the junk in the spare room.
As Tsukiko recovers from her recent life changes, she and Chitose explore Sapporo at a leisurely pace. Chitose is a writer who aspires to create a magazine celebrating the city’s regional culture. For the time being, she posts articles on her blog and creates zines. Chitose brings Tsukiko along while she scouts for material at small local stores and restaurants. When they’re not out and about, the two women dig through the cardboard boxes left behind by the landlord and uncover all sorts of treasures, from vinyl records to unique Hokkaido woodcrafts.
In my review (here) of Tomoko Shibasaki’s short story collection A Hundred Years and a Day, I touch on the phenomenon of “analog nostalgia,” the fascination with tangible media and the objects of an earlier era. Shibasaki’s collection dwells in a gentle sense of decay, but Kitaguni yura-yura kikō is marked by its youthful energy. As they stroll through beautiful streets lined with old houses and enjoy lively conversations over local cuisine in charming restaurants, it’s clear that Tsukiko and Chitose are thoroughly enjoying themselves.
Despite the fun she has with Chitose and her friends, Tsukiko suffers from depression and anxiety. The tiny apartment she occupies at the beginning of the manga is filled with trash, and she loses track of time while doomscrolling late at night. When Tsukiko considers the possibility of finding a new job, she imagines herself as a defenseless egg yolk sweating and apologizing while surrounded by menacing shadows.
When she invites her friend to move into her sharehouse, Chitose gives Tsukiko something tangible to hold. The manga’s emphasis on analog media, from Chitose’s printed zines to the old Walkman and cassette tapes that Tsukiko digs out of the landlord’s cardboard boxes, isn’t just simple nostalgia. Rather, it’s a concrete solution to a distressingly amorphous problem.
As the anonymous author of one of my favorite video game blogs writes (here) regarding the appeal of retro media, “We weren’t meant to live in an endless feed.” The rituals required by analog media once “gave life a shape that wasn’t constant images on a screen to choose from,” and these rituals serve as an anchor in the flow. Kitaguni yura-yura kikō doesn’t glorify the past or fetishize commodified nostalgia. Instead, tangible objects serve as a visual shorthand for places and relationships that don’t vanish when you close an app.
I don’t mean to suggest that Kitaguni yura-yura kikō is an introspective character study. More than anything, it’s a sweet and gentle travelogue, and it’s very charming. This manga makes me want to visit Sapporo and take long walks and eat delicious food. Still, I appreciate the subtext of the story, which is about readjusting to life lived at a slower pace while relearning how to have a meaningful connection with the place you live, the people who share the space with you, and your own embodied existence.
Contemporary Japanese Literature 