“Loin d'ici”is a French restaurant oddly situated inside a cemetery, and run by a very eccentric owner who exhibits not a whit of desire to see it succeed except to fulfill her own hedonistic craving of “enjoying the pleasures of food and drink to her heart’s content”. She is surrounded by a colorful, like-minded staff of unique misfits, none of whom possess the refinement, flattery or tact needed. Yet through a string of mishaps and failures, they gradually find in the restaurant a sense of belonging and purpose, growing with the owner into an indispensable team and top-shelf restaurant. Savor this quintessential comical farce packed with laughs plus valuable hints for succeeding in life.

Iku Kasahara joins the ‘Task Force’, the special unit of the Kanto Area Library Defense Force, in search of her ‘prince’, a Task Force member who once rescued a book about to be seized from her by the ‘Betterment Squad’, the paramilitary arm of the Censorship Enforcement Agency. She does not remember what this man looks like, and is attached to the Dojo Squad, where she is trained to within an inch of her life by its martinet of an instructor, Atsushi Dojo.
She meets a Deaf woman, Marie Nakazawa, a childhood friend of an older member of the Task Force, Mikihisa Komaki, who is advising Marie on books she should read. Iku senses that Marie is in love with Komaki. Meanwhile, the librarian Asako Shibasaki is meeting frequently with a curator who has introduced himself as Shuji Asahina. Hikaru Tezuka, also of the Task Force, is fond of Asako, and is not sure what to think about all this.
Now Komaki is arrested by the Betterment Squad. A book he recommended to Marie had not been approved. Komaki is taken away, leaving the other members of the Task Force enraged at his detention on these dubious grounds.
To make matters even worse, Iku’s parents show up. They were strongly opposed to her joining Library Defense, and now her secret—the fact that much of her job involves armed combat—is revealed.
Will Komaki and Marie be torn apart? What fateful decision will Dojo make as confusion engulfs his unit? And how will Iku get through this?

The near future in Japan, in the age officially known as ‘Change for the Better’.
It is a time in which the expression of thought is censored, and the media is tightly controlled. Bearing up under a harsh regimen of instruction under the terrifying Atsushi Dojo, Iku Kasahara is now a full-fledged member of the Library Defense ‘Task Force’, and divides her time between hard physical training and regular library work. Dojo and the rest of the Task Force are ordered to guard a public exhibition featuring ‘The Handbook of Library Law’, a book widely seen as the symbol of freedom, of which there is only one existing copy. The assignment seems easy enough, but this is in fact a trap designed to wipe out and thus disband the Task Force and restore a twisted society to the correct moral path. Can Dojo and his unit defend both an invaluable book and themselves? The members of the Task Force must put their lives on the line in the greatest battle they have ever faced: The Last Mission.

In 2019, public anger at media excess has led to censorship of television, newspapers, the internet, books, movies, and music under the 'Media Betterment Act'. To fight the armed 'Betterment Squads' that go around destroying objectionable materials, the nation's libraries have formed their own para-military 'Library Defense'. Iku Kasahara is a new recruit to the defense, where her instructor and squad leader is Atsushi Dojo. At first repelled by his by-the-book approach to leadership, she is gradually won over by his commitment to their battle for 'books' and 'the freedom to know'.

By day, Shio manages an aromatherapy salon. But by night, she is the owner of “Striped Sheep”, a business that dispatches men to the homes of women who suffer from insomnia to lie next to them. These “Striped Sheep” in fact represent a brand new profession of so-called “co-sleepers,” whose sole mission is to provide a night of relaxation to restless women. Shio’s four “sheep” consist of Gai, her ex-husband’s brother, Ran, a man with a cool, soothing gaze, the glib Linda and a taciturn book worm named Matthew. As sleep-sharers, these four men find out a lot about what drives or plagues their women clients, and help them gradually discover themselves and the right life pathways. “There are nights when a woman just needs a man at her side.”