On a recent trip to the bookshop, two books with rather flashy jackets catch your eye. They appear to be out of place, perhaps abandoned in the best-seller area by a fickle customer.

You pick them up almost without thinking, perhaps attracted by the colorful jackets or the cute cartoons. Upon opening them, however, you realize that their contents are the last thing you expected -- one is about stocks and the other about foreign investment banks and mergers and acquisitions.

"People need to learn difficult things easily," said Takaaki Hoda, coauthor of the investment book "OL Ryoko no Kabushiki Diary" ("Office Lady Ryoko's Diary of Stock Investment").