Days at the Morisaki Bookshop

Days at the Morisaki Bookshop / Satoshi Yagisawa
trans. from the Japanese by Eric Ozawa
NY: Harper Perennial, 2023, c2010. 
150 p.

I read this sweet book in a day -- it's short and easy to read, even with some emotional heft to it. It reminded me a lot more of Banana Yoshimoto's style than the more recent "healing fiction" titles I've been reading. There is nothing supernatural or outside of reality here; just people trying to survive bumps in the road and finding healing in books and coffee. 

It starts out with 25 yr old Takako finding out that her boyfriend is engaged to someone else. They work together so it doesn't take long before she quits -- essentially losing her boyfriend and job in the same few weeks. She's at loose ends and nursing her broken heart when she gets an offer from her uncle Satoru (who she hasn't heard from in a few years) to come and live and work with him in the family second-hand bookshop in the Jimbocho neighbourhood of Tokyo. Being awfully short of money she reluctantly accepts. 

This set up is quite lovely, as Takoko has a season of quiet and rest to find herself again. Her uncle says:

It's important to stand still sometimes. Think of it as a little rest in the long journey of your life. This is your harbor. And your boat is just dropping anchor here for a little while. And after you're well rested, you can set sail again. 

And this is what happens: as Takoko finds healing through discovering a love of reading, and engaging with people outside of a driven office environment, she comes to the point where she can find another job and leave the bookshop.  

The relationship between Takoko and her uncle is interesting - she knew him when she was a child, so they are developing a different connection, one between adults. She finds out a lot about who her uncle really is, and about his wife who had left him five years previously (but reappears halfway through). There is a tiny coffeeshop down the street that Takoko frequents, and some of the characters are based there. Some bookshop regulars are found in both places. All of these side characters are an important part of the story, showing Takoko another way to live, and empathy for other people -- just as her reading does. 

I liked the references to Japanese classics, some more contemporary authors, and some Western titles too. It was a charming element and yet the story wasn't overdone. It was light but I found it satisfying and am planning on finding book two of this story as soon as I can -- I want to hear more about the Morisaki Bookshop! 

Dinner at the Night Library

 

Dinner at the Night Library / Hika Harada
trans. from the Japanese by Philip Gabriel
NY: Hanover Square Press, 2025, c2023
320 p.

Another Japanese novel that has been on my list for a while! This one is set in a library, one that has a very particular mission. It houses the collections of writers who've passed away (generally), and one that researchers can visit to study what writers read - but it's only open after dark. 

It starts out with a young woman, Otoha Higuchi, who is looking for a job, and stumbles across this one. It doesn't have the cache of a corporate position, and is located out of the way on the outskirts of Tokyo, so her parents aren't overly thrilled, but she thinks it sounds fascinating. 

Having a new employee to follow through the story really makes it easy for the author to explain everything to the reader in a natural way -- Otoha, and by extension the reader, is being introduced to all her coworkers, the purpose of the library and how it works, regular library patrons, and so on. 

We find a two person cataloguing department, front deskégeneral staff, and a manager as well as an ever-present cleaning lady, oh and a chef -- and a mysterious absentee owner. Otoha makes her way through her first few months of employment learning about minor scandals with patrons, discovering that there is a chef on-site who makes meals based on food from books (one chapter is all about Anne of Green Gables and the food choices are...interesting), and finally being involved in going to pick up the collection of a popular female author who has died and whose sister is donating everything. The storyline feels unfinished, like part two is on its way. The exact way this library operates isn't entirely clear either, especially the random food sections. But it was fun. 

I liked this, as another weird fictional library (fan of those) and a look at how a writer's reading can shape their own works. A bit metafictional in that way. There were some engaging characters in this one, all originally involved in books in some fashion, whether as former booksellers, pickers, librarians, literature students or what have you The setting was unusual as well, and although the café sections seemed a bit sudden, I still enjoyed the descriptions of literary inspired feasts - and the books they were drawn from. I wouldn't consider this a plot driven novel, but the vibes were good ;) 

 

Mina's Matchbox

Mina's Matchbox / Yoko Ogawa
trans. from the Japanese by Stephen Snyder
TO: McLelland & Stewart, 2024, c2006.
288 p.

I picked up this one recently when it came into my local library. Even though I haven't really enjoyed the other books I've read by this author, I thought this one was appealing enough to give it a try. It was fairly good -- I did like it better than her other work -- but in the end I thought it was pretty forgettable. 

It's 1972, and Tomoko is being sent to live with her aunt's family in coastal Ashiya when her single mother needs to go back to school full time. Tomoko is telling us this nostalgic story from a later viewpoint, and the experience is filtered through a haze of memory. She finds a house of women: her cousin Mina, her aunt, German grandmother, and housekeeper Yoneda, not to mention the pygmy hippo Pochiko who lives in the yard. Her charismatic uncle and older male cousin are only there intermittently. She tells the reader about the year in this magical house with her cousin who is strange but perfect, beautiful, a reader, creative, and imperious, all while also treated with kid gloves because of her illness. All of Tomoko's memories are glazed over with how wonderful everything about this year is for her; it's interesting while you're reading the setup, but then nothing really happens. Everyone is one thing and keeps on being that one thing. The title comes from Mina's collection of matchboxes; she is desperate for more, and Tomoko finds out that Mina keeps them all and creates tiny narratives to match the pictures on the boxes, inscribing the tiny stories inside each one. 

The inclusion of a pygmy hippo and Mina's fixation on matchboxes give this story the odd features that are supposed to make it stand out. I thought the tiny stories that Mina created for each matchbox were unique, and would have liked more of them. I could have existed quite happily without the hippo. Or the strange chapters about Mina and Tomoko's obsession with volleyball, which seemed to come out of nowhere and go on forever, maybe as a way to include Ogawa's commentary on the Munich Olympics. I felt this element was shoehorned in, it didn't feel congruent with the rest of the story and also a bit tone deaf in light of current events. 

While the book started out with a lot of potential, I found it dragged a bit and like I've noted, included set pieces that seemed to be there just for an authorial comment, or to pad out the length perhaps. There were a number of elements that reminded me strongly of Banana Yoshimoto's 1989 novel Goodbye Tsugumi: Mina's sickly nature, Tomoko only having a mother and so having to stay with family in a house near the ocean (and in both the house itself is an important character), the relationship between cousins, and a few more vague feelings of similarity, although much of the plot differs. 

In any case, while I thought this had appeal, particularly around the older women in the book, it didn't quite do it for me. While I did like it more than previous titles by Ogawa, I'm not sure it has convinced me to keep reading her future work. 

There's No Such Thing as an Easy Job

There's No Such Thing as an Easy Job / Kikuko Tsumura
trans. from the Japanese by Polly Barton
London: Bloomsbury, 2020, c2015.
416 p.

I certainly meant to get a few more reviews shared in January! But I for sure have to share this one as part of the Japanese Literature Challenge hosted by Dolce Bellezza. I finished this book a while ago but it has stuck with me. I really liked it, from the slower pace to the focus on a working life -- I find this not so common with contemporary life. 

In this novel, our unnamed narrator is looking for an easy job. We follow her through five attempts to settle into a job that won't require interaction with people and won't demand too much of her. At first she finds a job right across from her home, which entails watching video footage of a writer, alone in a room-- super easy, right? But she still finds ways to interact with the few other people in this office and eventually finds that she can't stomach the ethics, so quits. And goes back to her employment counsellor for another try, and again, and again. She finds jobs writing ad copy with an almost mythic coworker, writing cracker fortunes, handing out flyers, and finally as a kind of caretaker in a forested park. 

But each of these brings with it new dilemmas and even a boring job becomes eventful for her. There is always something in a job that forces her to develop connections to other people and/or office drama. She just cares too much; there really is no such thing as an easy job. 

It can feel like a short story collection as you go, but by the last story all the threads come together and we find out why she was looking for an easy job all along. I found it relatable and touching. There's a lot about work culture in Japan rolled into this story, as well as women's experiences in particular. I liked the measured pace of this and the quirky details that made each job both interesting and deadly routine, no matter how odd it was, something that's likely familiar to many of us who've worked in similar surroundings. These small details made this story stick in my mind and I've thought about it often since I finished it. It's not a Japanese cozy, no cats in sight here, but I liked it all the more for that.

 

Scattered All Over the Earth

Scattered All Over the Earth / Yoko Tawada
trans. from the Japanese by Margaret Mitsutani
NY: New Directions, 2022, c2018.
256 p.

This one sounded really fascinating, as it grapples with language itself, and what happens when there is nobody left to speak your mother tongue with. 

It's set in an undeterminate near future, in which Japan has disappeared from the earth. Hiruko is a climate refugee who is now a storyteller in Denmark, where she's come up with her own language, PanSka (pan-scandinavian). This language shapes the way the story is told, as she meets a cast of diverse characters -- from the Danish Knut, a young man who is a bit of a linguistics scholar, to Nora, the curator of a German museum where Hiruko hopes to find another Japanese speaker. This is Tenzo, a chef and Nora's lover -- however, he's really (secretly) Nanook from Greenland, not Japan. And rather late in the story we also encounter Akash, an Indian trans woman who joins their motley crew. 

Their search for someone else from Japan is rather like a lost cause; Hiruko seems to be the only person in Europe who still speaks Japanese (it's a stretch, you have to just buy in to that premise). They have all sorts of experiences, encounters with all sorts of people all over Europe and Scandinavia, and just when you think something is going to conclude, this rather short book comes to an abrupt halt -- oh, that's because this is the first in a projected trilogy. 

I had hoped to like this more than I actually did. The PanSka element was a bit irritating after a while, like reading too much dialect. An example: “homemade language. no country to stay in. three countries I experienced. insufficient space in brain. so made new language. homemade language.”

Also, the plotting seemed to be based on just adding more and more to the story: strange encounters and coincidences, characters who are unknowingly linked, and many locales. I did appreciate that the breadth of the characters meant that there was representation of a wide variety of languages and cultures, something the book is investigating as a primary theme. But somehow I just didn't connect to it fully, it felt carnivalesque when I wasn't in the mood for that. So I'm not sure I'll read parts two and three when they eventually appear. This is the second book I've tried by this author, and I didn't find the first one compelling, so perhaps her style and preoccupations just don't mesh well with mine. 

Dead-End Memories

 

Dead-End Memories / Banana Yoshimoto
trans. from the Japanese by Asa Yoneda
Berkeley, CA: Counterpoint, 2022, c2003.
208 p.

I usually like Yoshimoto's writing a lot, so I thought that her latest story collection to be translated into English would be a good choice for the 16th annual Japanese Literature Challenge, hosted by Dolce Bellezza.

It's a collection of five stories, all featuring women dealing with some kind of significant moment in their life. The writing style is very typical of Yoshimoto -- calm, slow paced, with a strong focus on self reflection, melancholy, and food. Most of them have to do with relationships of some kind; family ties that can support or smother, friendships that might turn romantic as well,  childhood friendships that exist in memory, and so on. There is a lot of trauma investigated by these protagonists, and this focus reveals societal expectations for Japanese women in particular to hide their pain away and continue on with making their families and society run smoothly. I think the cover captures the melancholy of fall and the feeling of emptiness that imbues many of the characters.

Yoshimoto has said that these stories are especially dear to her, so I went into this with some pretty high expectations. I did enjoy most of them, with a couple of jarring notes in one of the stories where the so-called love interest is misogynistic and really off-putting. But in so many of her stories, the men who are admired so much don't seem to do much to earn it. 

I think that my favourite stories were Mama! (which deals with a woman poisoned at her work cafeteria, and her slow recovery, along with the unexpected support she receives during this experience) which was strange and touching in many ways. And I also found House of Ghosts memorable, with two young protagonists who both come from food service families, and they talk food as a more esoteric theme -- while they also experience the ghosts of an old couple who don't seem to realize they are dead. Ghosts and paranormal experience often show up in Yoshimoto's stories, and this one definitely falls into that tradition. 

Overall, the book was a good read, though some of it fell a bit flat for me. Maybe because I read it all in one quick go, I felt like the stories ran together a bit. It's always better to let a story sit a bit before continuing on to another. Also, these were all very short stories, and in her longer work there is a bit more time to feel immersed in the story and the characters. I liked this but would recommend her classic, Kitchen, or one of my other faves, Moshi Moshi, as an introduction if you haven't already read much Yoshimoto.