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Cute and heartwarming
I actually am quite fond of this book. If it matters, I'm a man in my mid 20's.
A Japanese woman wins the lottery and spends some of it opening a Japanese cafe/diner in Finland. The story covers her daily life in Finland, the difficulties of running a new restaurant in a foreign country, and the relationships she builds with both the locals and the Japanese natives she meets there. Can be quite humorous at times, with the sources of humor often being the difficulties of everyday life. The conversations are primarily between women of a variety of personalities that are in their 30's-50's or so. I read it over the course of a month or so, needing to look up words at least twice per page turn (though I didn't always so and could generally get the gist from context afterwards). a fair balance between dialogue and description. Honestly (but kind of jokingly) the most difficult part at first was understanding the words of a Finnish boy learning Japanese, as his dialogue is almost entirely beginner Japanese written in Katakana so as to express the accent and "novice" level, I can only assume.
I’d recommend this to anyone who might enjoy a sweet slice of life centered around a small restaurant setting in Northern Europe.