I would like to point out that if you prominently place a cat on the cover of a book, I expect there to be a significant cat character in said book, and there was not. No cats, at all, in fact.

That aside, I really enjoyed this. A young woman finds out her boyfriend is marrying another woman, and she's been the bit on the side this whole time, then dumps him, quits her job, and ends up moving in with her uncle, who runs a used bookshop in a neighbourhood in Tokyo dedicated to booksellers. There she starts to come out of her shell, and falls in love with reading. Much of this is a love letter to twentieth-century Japanese literature, which is a topic I know absolutely nothing about. However, you don't really need to know the books she's talking about (though I think you'd get more out of it if you did, and the translator has a note at the end about which ones can be found in English). Mostly it's just a gentle look at family relationships and friendships, and learning to be your own person. (There's a low-key m/f romance plot towards the end, and sadly she doesn't end up with the bookish female grad student hangs out with a lot).

There's a second book in the series, which I'll probably check out at some point. Really sweet and relaxing, and made me curious about Japanese novels. Though perhaps not curious enough to dive into that rabbithole. I'm also interested in how much context the translator added, because it felt like he explained things a Japanese-speaking reader would probably know, like when the Meiji Restoration was. However, the translator's note at the end doesn't mention that.