The Spring 2022 Manga Guide

Yagi the Bookshop Goat

What's It About? 

Yagi is a rare sort of goat — one who loves reading books just as much as eating them! With his special talent to taste feelings contained upon paper, he's always dreamed of becoming a bookseller. Unfortunately, paper-munching goats aren't exactly welcome in bookstores, even in a world where all different animals live in peaceful coexistence.

Eventually, Yagi is able to persuade Ookami, the strict wolf manager, into giving him a job at his bookshop... but can a goat surrounded by books resist his natural instincts? And what about the instincts of a wolf, who's been charmed by a sweet and tender goat?

Yagi the Bookshop Goat has story and art by Fumi Furukawa and English translation by Katie Kimura. Tokyopop released this single-volume manga both digitally and physically for $7.99 and $12.99 respectively.

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Is It Worth Reading?

Rebecca Silverman

Rating:

There are a fair amount of manga that use the herbivore/carnivore designation as a basis for romance, which isn't surprising, since that way of expressing sexual appetite is tailor-made for animal-ear characters to populate the pages. What is surprising is the way that Yagi the Bookshop Goat uses the trope – it's less a sexual metaphor and more just the plain old animal categorization system. Yagi is, in fact, a goat working at a bookstore. Ookami, his boss, is a wolf. But Yagi isn't more sexually timid and Ookami isn't sexually predatory; instead it's more a basic “predators eat herbivores” kind of situation, and that does give this a bit of an edge over its competitors.

Part of what makes this a little different and a lot of fun is the fact that as a goat, Yagi isn't generally welcome in bookstores because of goats' tendency to eat paper. (Or, well, anything.) It's implied that this appetite for paper products means that most goats aren't really readers, with Yagi being the exception – he's shocked and then thrilled as a kid to learn that books don't just taste good, they're fun to read as well. The person who teaches him this is Ookami, a wolf adopted by sparrows who worked at Yagi's local bookstore and is the only person to give the goat a chance to learn about reading. Naturally this later blossoms into romance, but comes after Ookami hires an older Yagi to work at his new bookstore, where he becomes something of a customer draw as the lone bookshop goat around. With Yagi's ability to taste stories he eats, he becomes an impressive employee, albeit one who sometimes snacks on the merchandise. It's hard not to be reminded of the Book Girl light novels in this respect, although Yagi is, shall we say, more physically affected by what he eats than the book-munching heroine of that series.

The volume is divided into two parts, the first setting up the premise and the romance and the second devoted solely to getting the two characters together, by which I mean “in bed.” It features a pretty decent use of Yagi's ability to get emotions from the paper he eats and a near-total lack of icky predatory behavior on Ookami's part – if anything, Yagi is the more aggressive of the two. (The sex scenes aren't hugely explicit, though you can see everything.) On the whole this is a nice story with some cute art, vaguely lame animal puns in the names – like Chita the Cheetah – and a sweet romance. It's a nice one-volume read if you're in the mood for BL in the bookstore.