The Winter Guest Book

About this book

The Yukitsuru Inn has stood above the sea wall of Kamishio for ninety years, and for most of them a Sato has kept its guest book. When her mother Fumiko's memory begins to fail, Mari leaves her Tokyo career to take over the inn she swore she had escaped, with its eight rooms, its leaking bath house roof, and its one unbreakable February booking: Mr Oyama, eighty two, who has taken Room Four for three nights every winter for as long as anyone can remember, and who walks the sea wall each morning looking at the water. Renovating Room Four before the season, Mari lifts a loose floorboard and finds a guest book wrapped in oilcloth. It is the winter register from 1994, and one page has been carefully torn out. The missing page belongs to the winter a young woman vanished from the inn, and to the elderly guest who has returned every February since.