The Garden of Words

小説 言の葉の庭

Takao Akizuki spends his rainy-morning free periods at Shinjuku Gyoen sketching shoes instead of attending class, and it's there that he keeps meeting Yukari Yukino, a woman who guards her name and her reasons for being there just as closely. This novelization follows the same quiet friendship as the Garden of Words film, but widens the view to other people drifting through the pair's lives, including Takao's brother Shouta. The result reads less like a single love story and more like a study of everyone who passes through that garden.