A rice cooker, a statue, a bicycle, a cash register, and a cherry tree walk into a short story collection...

In Japan, the gods don’t always live in temples. Sometimes they live in your rice cooker. Across five stories set in modern-day Japan, sentient objects — a rebellious kitchen appliance, a travel-starved temple statue, a matchmaking bicycle, a network of vigilante cash registers, and an eighty-year-old cherry blossom tree — intervene in the lives of the humans around them with opinions, demands, and an alarming amount of emotional intelligence. They nudge. They scheme. They guilt-trip. And somehow, they always know exactly what you need, even when you don’t.

A dishwasher plots his escape from a tyrant chef with a rice cooker as his co-conspirator. A diabetic college student attempts to steal a Buddhist statue and take it to the beach. A panda-obsessed introvert gets dating advice from her bicycle. A salaryman’s junk food habit gets shut down by a barcode scanner with a god complex. And a grieving daughter follows a talking sakura tree through her dead mother’s secret life of extraordinary kindness.

The Kami No Sekai Omnibus collects all five stories in one volume — quirky, heartfelt, and sometimes laugh-out-loud funny, each one exploring the invisible forces that push us towards braver, kinder, more honest versions of ourselves. Whether it’s a countertop appliance faking its own death or a cherry tree unraveling decades of hidden love, these stories prove that the best guidance often comes from the last place you’d think to look.