Days at the Morisaki Bookshop, by Satoshi Yagisawa, translated by Eric Ozawa

This book satisfied me on many levels, although member reviews from our mother-daughter book club were mixed. Several felt the story lines in parts I and II were excessively disconnected from each other. And while my seventeen-year-old enjoyed the plot and secondary characters, she found the main protagonist unrelatable.

I concluded Yagisawa most likely wrote with two potential audiences in mind. One is a young generation of non-readers like protagonist Takako, whom he hopes to draw in with romantic tension and retain with efficient storytelling, ultimately infecting them with the love of books Takako discovers. The other potential readership is established book lovers attracted by the setting—Tokyo’s book town, Jimbocho—and will resonate with the many virtues and pleasures of reading inscribed in the story.

As I number among the second type, I now aspire to visit this real-life reader’s paradise. Jimbocho’s streets are lined with dozens of secondhand bookstores whose niche specialties include film magazines, historical novels, foreign literature, children’s books, postcards and photographs, and traditionally bound Edo-era texts. To live above one, like Takako, sounds like a dream come true.

With regard to the two separate story lines, it seems to me that the first, in which Takako finds healing and family in a literal and figurative world of books, makes possible the second. Here the opening outward she initiates in the pages of fiction continues as Takako broadens her perspective on life, her fellow humans, and ultimate meaning.

So dense is Yagisawa’s writing that when I reviewed the book to mark developments worthy of book club discussion, nearly every page of the slim volume bore a sticky tab. I also found it an intriguing study in translation. Though my two years of college Japanese have long since faded from memory, certain passages prompted me to speculate about the nuances of the original and meditate on the license and limitations of the translator.

If some enthusiastic fan were to compile a list of works mentioned in the book and available in English translation, I would gladly hunt them down. And despite the forestated ambivalence among our members, More Days at the Morisaki Bookshop is next on our list.