More Days at the Morisaki Bookshop, page 1
Contents
Cover
Title Page
Chapter 1
Chapter 2
Chapter 3
Chapter 4
Chapter 5
Chapter 6
Chapter 7
Chapter 8
Chapter 9
Chapter 10
Chapter 11
Chapter 12
Chapter 13
Chapter 14
Chapter 15
Chapter 16
Translator’s Note
Also by Satoshi Yagisawa
Copyright
About the Publisher
1
It’s my day off from work, and I’m walking down the same familiar street. There’s a feeling of calm in the air, like everything is at peace on this warm October afternoon. With a thin scarf loosely wrapped around my neck, I feel myself starting to sweat a little bit.
Even on a weekday around noon, the people I pass on the street walk at a leisurely pace and so do I. And from time to time, we come to a stop and disappear silently into one of the many bookshops along the way like we’ve been swallowed up.
The Jimbocho neighborhood is a little unusual for Tokyo because most of the stores there are bookshops. Each of the used bookshops has its own particular specialty: some carry art books, or play scripts, or philosophy texts; others handle rare items like old maps and traditionally bound Japanese books. Altogether, there are more than a hundred seventy stores. It’s impressive to see all those bookshops lined up one after the other down the street.
If you cross the avenue, you’ll find yourself in an area of offices, surrounded by tall buildings, but within its borders the neighborhood has done a good job keeping the rest of the city at bay. Only here are there rows of picturesque buildings. It’s like the neighborhood exists in a different time, enveloped in its own quiet little world. Which may be why when you’re walking around here, going wherever your fancy takes you, you look up and suddenly realize how much time has passed.
The place where I’m headed is on this corner. If you pass the street with the row of secondhand bookshops and turn onto the side street a little ahead, you’ll be able to see it.
It’s a used bookstore called the Morisaki Bookshop and it specializes in modern Japanese literature.
Once I turn the corner, I hear someone eagerly calling my name.
“Hey, Takako, come here!”
I look over and see a small middle-aged man looking my way, waving me over enthusiastically.
I hurry over to him and whisper my objection. “Didn’t I tell you on the phone that you didn’t need to wait for me? I’m not a little kid.”
He’s always like this, treating me like a child even though I’m a twenty-eight-year-old woman. It’s obviously embarrassing, as you can imagine, to have someone shouting my name like that in the middle of the street.
“Well, it was taking you so long to get here. I got to worrying that you might’ve gotten lost.”
“That’s why I told you, you didn’t need to wait for me in front of the shop. I’ve been here dozens of times. How could I possibly get lost?”
“Sure, I guess, but you know you can be a little bit absent-minded sometimes.”
“You mean you can, don’t you? Take a good look in the mirror sometime. You’ll find a very absent-minded man staring back at you.”
This is Satoru Morisaki, my uncle on my mother’s side, and the third-generation proprietor of the Morisaki Bookshop. The original store, started by my great-grandfather back in the Taishō era, no longer exists. The current store was built almost forty years ago.
At first glance, my uncle Satoru might seem a little sketchy. He’s always dressed in threadbare clothes, with slip-on sandals on his feet, and his shaggy hair makes you wonder if he’s ever had a proper haircut in his life. And on top of all that, he’s always saying off-the-wall things, and he ends up blurting out whatever he’s thinking like a child. He is, in short, a tough man to figure out.
And yet, in this peculiar neighborhood, his odd personality and unusual appearance strangely seem to work in his favor: he’s surprisingly well liked. It would be difficult to find someone around here who doesn’t know my uncle.
His Morisaki Bookshop is an old-fashioned store, in a two-floor wooden building untouched by time, every bit the image of a vintage bookshop. The inside is cramped. You could get five people in there, but just barely. There’s never enough space on the shelves; the books are piled on top, and along the walls, and even behind the counter where the cash register is. And the intense, musty smell particular to old bookshops penetrates everything. For the most part, the books on the shelves are cheap, running from around a hundred to five hundred yen, but the store also sells rarer things like first editions of famous writers.
The number of people looking for secondhand books like these has dropped since my grandfather’s generation. From what I’ve heard, there were some extremely difficult times. It’s only thanks to the customers who love the shop and have kept coming back over the years that it’s still in business.
I first came to the shop more than three years ago.
Back then, my uncle let me come live on the second floor, and told me I could stay as long as I liked.
I can still vividly recall the days I lived here. At that time in my life, I was feeling desperate although the cause now seems insignificant when I look back on it. At first, I often lashed out at my uncle and locked myself in my room like some tragic heroine, crying all alone. Yet he patiently endured it all and offered me kind words and caring instead. As time went on, he taught me how thrilling reading can be, and how crucial in life it is to not hide from your emotions but to face them.
Naturally, my uncle was the one who introduced me to Jimbocho. At first, I was confused to look down the street and see just one bookstore after another.
“The great writers have always loved this place too,” my uncle said, sounding like he was boasting about himself. “It’s the best neighborhood of bookshops in the whole world.” To be honest, I didn’t get what he was talking about then. I couldn’t see what there was to boast about.
But as time passed, I came to understand what he meant.
Jimbocho is brimming with charm and excitement. There’s no other place like it in the world.
My uncle and I are still bickering back and forth in front of the shop when I hear a loud voice shout from inside, “Hey, what are you two doing?” When I peek in, I see a woman with a short, stylish haircut sitting at the counter, staring at us, with an irritated look on her face. That’s Momoko.
“Quit dawdling out there and come in already, will you?”
She waved us in impatiently. She didn’t seem to enjoy waiting in the shop for us by herself.
Momoko is Uncle Satoru’s wife. You’d think she wouldn’t be so different in age and appearance from my uncle, but she has such a straightforward and candid way about her that she seems much younger. My uncle is no match for her. Whenever she’s around, he’s always on his best behavior, like a little lapdog. It’s only when she’s there that you ever see that side of him.
Actually, Momoko lived apart from my uncle for almost five years, as a result of some unfortunate circumstances, but about a month ago she returned home safe and sound. Since then, she and my uncle have been running the shop together.
“So, Takako, what’s new with you?” Momoko asks with a smile. She has such fine, straight posture that she somehow looks elegant even wearing just a sweater and a long skirt. I don’t think I ever want to become someone who fills a room the way she does, but I do wish a little bit that I could have some of her grace.
“Things are good. Peaceful and calm. Work’s going well. How are you?”
“I’m doing great,” she says, flexing her arms to show off her biceps, like she’s doing her Popeye impersonation.
“That’s good to hear,” I say, feeling a sense of relief. Years ago, Momoko had had a serious illness, and we’re still watching her prognosis. My uncle is always very careful about Momoko’s health, but it seems like his constant concern ends up irritating her.
“I’ve got some sweet daifuku mochi with me. Shall we have some?”
“Oh, maybe we should.”
My uncle checks that Momoko has gone to the back and then complains to me in a whisper. “It’s awfully cramped with Momoko here with me at the shop, but that’s how it goes, I guess. It’s just so much easier to work alone.”
“But weren’t you lonely when you were actually left all by yourself?” I’m only trying to tease him, but he gets all worked up and argues with me like a little kid.
“That’s nonsense! I mean when she’s back behind the counter, where am I supposed to go? These days, I’m just pacing back and forth by the entrance like a guard dog.”
“Is that by any chance why you were standing out in front today?”
“Take a guess.” He confesses this pitiful fact with a straight face, then leans forward like he’s going to whisper in my ear. “But I’ve got more important things to tell you, Takako,” he says.
“Like what?”
“The other day I got some pretty good stuff at auction. I haven’t put it on sale yet at the shop, but for you I’ll make an exception and let you have a little look.”
He might’ve tried to sound reluctant, but I know there is no way he isn’t going to show me those books. Yet I’ve been so thoroughly converted that I’m excited to see
“Show me!” I shout without meaning to. “I’ve got to see them!”
“Hey, I just made tea for you two.” Momoko looks at us dumbfounded, with the teapot in her hands.
“This is a bookshop,” my uncle says bluntly. “How are we not going to look at books? Right, Takako?”
“Right,” I agree with a laugh.
My aunt gives us an annoyed look and grumbles, “You two are the worst.”
This is my beloved Morisaki Bookshop. It’s been an inseparable part of my life since the days I lived here.
In its own modest way, it’s a place that holds so many little stories within its walls. Maybe that’s the reason I keep coming back.
2
The Morisaki Bookshop bills itself as a store specializing in modern Japanese literature. The shop does stock some contemporary novels, but those are kept on the hundred-yen cart at the entrance. Inside the shop, there are basically only novels that date from the Meiji era to early Showa. (Which is why the interior is permeated by such a damp and musty smell, but that comes with the territory.)
Maybe it’s because the shop deals with a special type of book that it tends to attract a lot of customers who are a bit eccentric.
Now I’m perfectly accustomed to them, but at first, they threw me off. It’s not that they’re hard to deal with. In fact, for the most part, they’re perfectly harmless. They’re just a little unusual, that’s all. They come in now and then, hardly saying a word, lost in their single-minded search for a book. These customers, who are overwhelmingly elderly men, are, without fail, solitary figures. There’s something about them that makes it impossible to imagine their everyday lives—so much so that if someone told me they were harmless ghosts, or some kind of otherworldly creature, I might actually be persuaded to believe it.
Whenever I visit the shop, I find myself weirdly concerned about whether they’re still healthy enough to come in. I’ve never been close to them, but I can’t help but hope they’re well. I feel a kind of sympathy for them since we all love the same shop. And given the advanced age of most of these customers, I worry about them.
So, if they happen to come in when I’m helping out at the shop, I feel a secret relief when I see they’re doing well.
Back when I was living on the second floor and working at the shop every day, the “paper bag man” was the one I worried about most of all. As his name suggests, he always came in carrying a tattered paper bag in both hands. Sometimes it was a bag from a department store, but occasionally it was a bag from one of the larger bookstores, like Sanseidō. He must have been going from store to store before he came to us, because the bag was often already full when he showed up. It looked quite heavy for his skinny arms. He invariably wore a dress shirt under a mouse-colored sweater.
If that was all, there wouldn’t be anything so peculiar about him. The problem was that mouse-colored sweater. It wasn’t simply frayed, no, it went far beyond that to the point where this article of clothing was so ragged that it was a miracle he was even able to wear it. Now, there was nothing about the old man that seemed unhygienic. In fact, he seemed neat and clean, aside from the absurd condition of his sweater, which looked like it had been dug up from some archaeological site.
The first time I saw him I was quite shocked. I snuck glimpses of him as he silently selected his books, and several times I felt the urge to shout, “Sir, you should be buying clothes, not books!” But he didn’t seem to notice. He bought ten books, stuffed them into his paper bag, and left the shop without saying a word.
Ever since that day, I haven’t been able to take my eyes off him when he comes in. Some weeks he comes in multiple times, but he’s also gone a month without coming. He wears the same clothes every time. He’s always gripping his paper bag of books in both hands. At the Morisaki Bookshop alone, on occasion he’s bought books that cost ten thousand yen apiece. And yet his sweater only becomes more and more ragged. I couldn’t help wondering who on earth this old man was. I was unable to muster the courage to talk to him, so I always ended up silently staring at his back as he walked out.
I tried asking my uncle about him once. “He’s buying so many books—what if he has his own used bookstore in another neighborhood?”
“Nope. He’s buying them to read them himself,” he replied with certainty.
“Really? I guess you can tell the difference.”
“That much I can tell whether I want to or not.”
I guess that’s how it goes. I could hardly distinguish one type of customer from another. But when a new customer walked into the shop, my uncle seemed to be able to tell at a glance whether they’d come to buy a book or if they had just wandered in on a stroll. He said his intuition was the result of years of experience.
“So,” I said, letting my curiosity get the better of me. “What does that old man do for a living? Can you tell that too just by looking at him? It’s not like he spends all his money on books and can’t afford new clothes, right?”
“Hey.” He spoke in the tone of voice you use to reprimand a child. “Your job isn’t to start getting so nosy about the customers. The purpose of a bookshop is to sell books to people who need them. It’s not right for us to start wondering what kind of job people have or what sort of life they lead. It’s not going to make these older customers feel very good if they know the salespeople have been prying into their lives.”
When I thought about it, my uncle’s view seemed like a perfectly legitimate way of thinking about a business that caters to its customers. Even though he was usually making little jokes and chuckling to himself, after running a used bookshop for so many years, when something needed saying he came right out and said it. In moments like that, he could be kind of cool.
Anyway, that’s the reason why the paper bag man’s origins remain a mystery to us.
These eccentric customers each have their own distinct reasons for searching for books. It’s truly fascinating. I’m always impressed by the wide range of circumstances that lead people to seek out secondhand books.
Take, for example, people who set out to collect rare books, without regard to genre, era, or region. They simply accumulate unusual volumes. When a well-known collector came into the shop, he seemed dissatisfied with what we had in stock. On his way out of the store, he said something that left me dumbfounded. “It doesn’t matter if it’s a masterpiece. If the volume isn’t rare, it’s worthless to me.”
And then there are what we call the brokers. They acquire valuable books at as low a price as possible and then sell them to another bookshop, pocketing the difference in price. Basically, their trade is buying books. For these customers, the quality of the work is secondary. They probably never even read them. There are others too, people who aren’t interested in novels, but instead seek out the work of the obscure artists whose illustrations appear alongside a text. Some of those collectors will rely on the barest of leads in their single-minded pursuit of those pictures. And then there are the people who won’t put anything that isn’t a first edition on their bookshelves. Even if they want a book, they won’t buy it until they can find a first edition of it.
The one who takes the cake is the old man who only showed up once during the period when I was living above the shop.
He wandered in at dusk and went straight to the shelf in the back where we keep the most expensive books. As he pulled each volume off the shelf, he looked only at the colophon (that’s the last page of the book) and then put it back on the shelf. He repeated the same action again and again. Occasionally, his hand would pause, and he would stare intently at some spot on the colophon, nod a few times, and then chuckle to himself with an evil grin. To be honest, I found it pretty creepy.
After the old man had finally finished inspecting every book on the shelf, he suddenly walked out. I turned to my uncle, who was sitting next to me, grabbed him by the sleeve, and asked him what in the world that man was up to.
“Oh, he’s looking for the author’s seal,” he said without looking up from the account books, as if there were nothing particularly unusual about this.
“He’s a seal collector. They rarely come to the shop, but there are some pretty famous ones around here. I’m sure I told you about Nosaki, didn’t I?”
