Ikoku Nikki, Volume 1

Makio Koudai has built a life entirely on her own terms. A reclusive novelist—she's sharp tongued, set in her ways, and far more at ease with the people she invents than the family she keeps at a distance. But everything changes when her older sister dies unexpectedly, leaving behind a now orphaned fifteen-year-old Asa. Every door in the family quietly closes but one…Makio’s. There starts the unsure journey of a prickly aunt and a grieving niece figuring each other out one awkward day at a time. Can two people who never expected to need each other choose to make room for a life neither of them planned?