ガイコツ書店員 本田さん 1

This is a comic manga based on the author’s experiences as a bookstore employee. Dealing with customers of all types and nationalities. Keeping the bookstore running. Undergoing training. Some chapters were hilarious, others left me a bit flat.

The text is on the dense side, for a manga. The skeletal protagonist’s commentary often includes grammar from N2 and up. The vocabulary range feels on the large side to me. It’s not really the setting so much as the dramatic and exaggerated tone of the commentary. For example, comparing stocking the shelves to war preparations. Many titles are name-dropped, but are written with a black circle to block out one of the characters — if you know the reference you’ll know it, but it’s hard to look them up. Some sections have a lot of katakana to show somebody speaking a language unskillfully, which might be wobbly Japanese spoken by a foreign customer or Honda-san’s own uncertain English.

(Note: there are many foreign customers, and they’re all different. Some have basically no Japanese. Others are highly skilled, and their dialogue is written in the usual kana/kanji style. I didn’t feel stereotyped.)

The setting is a bookstore so the dialogue comes in a variety of politeness levels. The store employees use humble customer service language to the customers. There’s a chapter about dealing with sales representatives from publishers, where there’s some business language and industry jargon.

There’s full furigana on all typed text. (As usual, the hand-written parts have none)

I graded this as harder than SPY x FAMILY but I think it’s only by a little bit.