The Magic of Reading

 

Days at the Morisaki Bookshop by Satoshi Yagisawa tells a story about healing power of books. It is a story about book lovers. One day Hideaki the boyfriend with whom Takako has been going out blurts out that he is getting married and not 'Let's get married' or " I want to get married'. He is getting married to a colleague in another department. Takako quits her job as she can no longer work in the same office as Hideaki who seems to think that they can still continue seeing each other for dinner.

Takako is twenty-five years old. She is from Kyushu and came to Tokyo for work after graduating. Now that she has lost her job, she spends her days sleeping. Her uncle Satoru invites her to go and stay with him in Jimbocho. He runs Morisaki Bookshop that has been in her family for three generations.He has taken over the bookshop that her great-grandfather started. It has been a decade since she last saw her uncle whom she was not that fond of. He is 'unconventional and hard to figure out'. She reluctantly accepts her uncle's invitation to stay rent-free in the tiny room above the bookshop. She has never been to Jimbocho and she is surprised to see rows of bookshops on Yasukuni Street, the main avenue. Morisaki Bookshop specializes in literature of the modern era.Jimbocho is full of secondhand bookshops. According to Satoru, the neighbourhood houses ' the largest concentration of secondhand bookshops in the world. Most of the bookshops there deal primarily in one specific field or type of book. There are stores for scholarly books. There are stores that only handle scripts for plays. There are some more unusual shops that only deal in stuff like old postcards and photographs.' Her uncle explains that the neighbourhood was a centre of culture in the Meiji era at the end of the 19th century and in that era a lot of schools were built there hence there were all those stores selling scholarly books.

Takako was never a reader prior to coming to Jimbocho. One night, Satoru takes her out to a café and shows her around the neighbourhood. After talking to her eccentric uncle about his youth and how he feels after his wife Momoko left him five years ago , she feels strangely agitated and is unable to sleep . She decides to pick up a book. She closes her eyes and picks out Until the Death of the Girl by Saisei Murō. She is so absorbed in the book that she reads through the night. When she finishes reading it, she feels at peace. From then onwards, Takako discovers new worlds within the stacks of books. In the course of her stay, she gets to know her uncle and later her aunt who returns to the Morisaki Bookshop one day.The Morisaki bookshop has something to teach both her uncle and her about life, love and the healing power of books.

Days at the Morisaki Bookshop is Satoshi Yagisawa's debut novel. It won the Chiyoda Literature Prize. It was first published in 2010 and is translated from Japanese to English by Eric Ozawa. A movie entitled Morisaki shoten no hibi was made based on the book.

Days at the Morisaki Bookshop is a sweet tale about love and book people. As the translator writes in his note, Satoshi Yagisawa's novel is about 'the many pleasures of reading: the joy of discovering a new author; the hedonism of staying up too late to finish a book; the surreptitious thrill of getting to know someone by reading their favourite novel ; and the freedom of walking into a bookstore and scanning the titles, waiting for something to catch your eye.' Incidentally the translator met his wife, Nicole by chance in a bookstore.