Water Moon

Water Moon

Author: Samantha Sotto Yambao Listening Length: 9h 40m
Fantasy Read Online

A woman inherits a pawnshop where you can sell your regrets, and then embarks on a magical quest when a charming young physicist wanders into the shop, in this dreamlike fantasy novel. On a backstreet in Tokyo lies a pawnshop, but not everyone can find it. Most will see a cozy ramen restaurant. And only the chosen ones...

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Now playing: Chapter One The Pawnshop of Almosts and Ifs

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Chapter One The Pawnshop of Almosts and Ifs

Time has no borders except those people make. On this particularly cold autumn day, Ishikawa Hana fashioned that border out of the thinnest layer of skin. Eyelids were useful that way. Because as long as she kept her eyelids shut, she could keep the two halves of her life apart: the twenty-one years she had lived before she opened her eyes, and all that was going to happen next.

She pulled her blanket over her head and pretended that her hungover first morning as the pawnshop’s new owner had yet to begin. It didn’t matter that she was now wide awake, that the last of a tangled string of dreams she could not remember had unraveled more than an hour ago. Her head felt heavier and her mouth drier than usual, but she figured that this was less on account of the alcohol she’d had the night before than on what awaited her.

In a few moments, her father, Toshio, was going to knock on her door to start their day.

Hana insisted on clinging to the tiny hope that the unwise amount of sake they had celebrated his retirement with was going to keep him in bed a little longer. This hope—if it indeed could be called hope given its size—was smaller than a mossy river pebble and just as slippery.