A Guide to Saving Tokyo's Melancholy Girl

Every morning, a message popped up on Qingye Shuoye’s phone: [Today’s random gift: delivered]. Sometimes it was half an hour of perfect pitch, sometimes the knack for frying an egg without breaking the yolk, sometimes a key to a strange locker, and sometimes just a coupon for some shop he’d never heard of.

He didn’t want anything to do with it, but he couldn’t delete it, and there was no customer service to contact. Even worse, every time he received a gift, he ran into someone who needed help: a down-on-her-luck idol sneaking a look at the fan message board in a convenience store, a frustrated artist ripping up her paintings and throwing them into the Tama River, an injured musician air-guitaring at nothing, and an aspiring voice actress who had been standing on the street for three hours, too afraid to enter the audition venue.

He hadn’t wanted to get involved. But the things his phone gave him were just enough to help, if only a little. A little was all. He’d help, then leave, without lingering.

Then he started running into monsters, getting pulled into books, and venturing into terrifying abandoned schools. Before long, his everyday life wasn’t very ordinary at all.

A silver-haired girl with violet eyes reading an inverted book in a single-seat spot on the train, a white-haired, red-eyed monster crouching by his bed and begging him to take her in... He’d only wanted to avoid trouble, but before he knew it, he’d been to all sorts of places and found himself living a life that was anything but ordinary.