Yoha-sha / NAGORO BOOKS is a new bookstore that launched in 2024.

Yoha-sha / NAGORO BOOKS handles both new and used books, and is an endeavor to contemplate new and old, visible and invisible, present and absent, and living and deceased, through the mediums of "books" and "store."

Yoha-sha / NAGORO BOOKS deals with a wide range of books across various genres, including literature, music, film, art, architecture, design, philosophy, anthropology, folklore, sociology, other humanities, subcultures, cooking, handicrafts, travel, and more. It aims to support visitors and readers in accessing their history and present through the store and this website.

December 2023: Physical store soft opened in Nishijin, Kyoto.

January 12, 2024: Grand opening.

November 2024: Online shop opens.

About the store name

"Yoha" refers to the state where waves, once created by the wind, continue to ripple even after the wind has stopped, or the remaining waves themselves. By extension, this word is also used to describe the influence an event has on its surroundings or the feelings that linger after an event has passed.

The temporal delay and spatial displacement between words written by someone at a certain time and place, and their eventual reading by someone else. The time lag until those read words become entangled in the folds of emotion and eddies of memory, accumulate, gradually become familiar, and surface at a moment in one's life.

Past events, memories, and emotions, long gone, influence us here and now through books and the act of reading them. Specific people and places eventually come to an end, and the waves they create slowly disappear, but the phenomenon itself of "events occurring and waves rising" has always been with us and will not cease to exist after we are gone.

Are emotions and words passed on through people and books as mediums, or are people and books passed on through emotions and words as mediums?
Considering the emotions, memories, perceptions, and sensations that happened to drift through this temporal/spatial displacement, and the people and books that serve as mediums enclosing them, we named this place "Yoha-sha / NAGORO BOOKS."