Convenience Store Cat's Night Shift

About this book:

When the automatic doors of SunMart chime at ten p.m., the night shift begins—and Mikan, the calico cat who has claimed the register counter as her throne, is already watching. In the fluorescent glow of this neighborhood convenience store, the weary salaryman finds a purr against his ankle that breaks his trance; the bakery worker with frozen fingers cradles warm *nikuman* and a moment of kindness; the night nurse wipes silent tears beside the magazine rack. Chapter by quiet chapter, the store becomes a lighthouse for the city's midnight travelers: students cramming for dawn, strays sheltering from rain, delivery drivers chasing coffee, all witnessed by a cat who knows that the smallest gestures—a chin scratch, a shared bento, a warm spot near the steamer—are the ones that carry people through the dark.

Kenji, the college student clerk, calls her the night manager. The regulars call her luck. But Mikan simply does what cats have always done: she patrols the aisles, guards the cardboard castles in Aisle Three, and offers her presence to anyone carrying the particular weight of 2:00 AM. Through rain-slicked windows and the hour before sunrise, twenty-six vignettes unfold like steam rising from a fresh pork bun—gentle, aromatic, and shot through with the golden light of human connection surviving the night.

*Convenience Store Cat's Night Shift* is a love letter to the liminal spaces that hold us when the world goes quiet. For readers who found comfort in *Before the Coffee Gets Cold* or *The Guest Cat*, here is a novel that fits in your pocket but stays in your ribs: proof that even in a fluorescent box at the edge of a sleeping neighborhood, there is always someone watching the door, waiting to remind you that you're not alone.