Tanuki's Lost-and-Found Shop
A Forest Mystery

About this book:

Nestled in the mist-cloaked hollow of an ancient oak, Mamoru the tanuki runs a most unusual business: a lost-and-found for the creatures of Hinoki Woods. With his bamboo hat, his leaf-shaped counter, and a ledger full of missing acorns, thimbles, and troubles, he's seen every variety of forest carelessness. But when a bronze bell vanishes from a trembling ermine's neck and a hedgehog's heirloom silver thimble disappears from a locked cellar—both marked only by a perfect golden leaf bearing a cryptic drawing—Mamoru senses something far more deliberate than ordinary scatterbrained misplacement. Someone is playing a trickster's game in the valley, and the stakes rise with every falling leaf.

As autumn surrenders to an early winter, Mamoru must follow a trail of banded hairs, vanishing pawprints, and the scent of parched rice and wild persimmon toward the forbidding Red Ridge. From the murmur of the stream to the owls' old riddles, every chapter deepens a mystery that blends cozy charm with genuine suspense. The forest's rich cast—anxious ermines, imperious hedgehogs, gossiping jays, and foxes who don't know their manners—comes alive in prose that smells of cedar smoke, damp moss, and toasted persimmon paste.

*Tanuki's Lost-and-Found Shop* is a forest mystery steeped in Japanese folklore, where shape-shifting is a practical skill, a calm belly keeps the magic steady, and the most puzzling cases are solved not with force but with patience, a good broom, and tea around the hearth. Perfect for readers who love their mysteries gentle but clever, their settings atmospheric, and their heroes quietly, stubbornly kind.