Days at the Morisaki Bookshop: A book about books

The novel, which won the Chiyoda Prize, evokes all our favourite second-hand bookshops. (Photo by Malte Luk via Pexels)

Japanese writer Satoshi Yagisawa’s novel Days at the Morisaki Bookshop will lay you down gently in a comfortable hammock just where the sea breeze can catch you. It takes you back to all your bookly emotions, where the written word becomes seen, heard and felt, fusing with a personal past, and very soon then able to take you into many imagined futures, every one of them open-ended.

Days at the Morisaki Bookshop by Satoshi Yagisawa

Translated by Eric Ozawa and recently published by HarperCollins, the story is deceptively simple – almost in YA mode – and narrated without much fuss, a linear telling that only complicates itself with necessary truths that are comforting and poignant. But first there is Takako, a young woman going through a mandatory heartbreak after a workplace romance. Into this narrow achy-breaky space squeeze a whole lot of old books like only old books can.

Yagisawa sets the stage in an old used-books shop where dusty classics jostle with second-hand bestsellers. Like a person falling in love for the first time, young Takako slowly and sweetly wakes up to her new home, its walls made of books, in a bookshop owned by her family and run by her eccentric uncle Satoru. Like Heidi long ago in a hay loft, Takako snuggles into the pages of a new book yet to be read every night. She discovers along the way eternal truths, befriends and declares fierce favourites among authors.

As Satoru, puzzling over a wife who had abruptly left one day, and Takako, whose boyfriend has dumped her most casually, go about running the bookshop, the pages of the books themselves send out a healing energy, chapter by chapter, tale by tale.

Tucked away in Jimbocho, Tokyo, the Morisaki Bookshop is filled with hundreds of second-hand books, quietly and gently awaiting Takako’s awareness of them. As the Translator’s Note says: ‘In the course of the story, he (the author) catalogs 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.’

Perhaps it is the advent of Kindle and e-books that now brings an illicit thrill to holding a book and inhaling its scent and the feel of old paper touched by so many before us. All the touchy-feely aspects of a book, the life lessons, the self-help aspects hidden deep in beloved stories, word play, translations, prize-winning text, old classics and the peculiar intoxication of language itself…

The novel, which won the Chiyoda Prize, evokes all our favourite second-hand bookshops, be it the Daryaganj open market in Delhi on a Sunday, Moore Market in Chennai or the Blossoms stores in Bengaluru’s Church Street. That jump of the heart when confronted with books piled up anywhere. As the Waterstones bookshop poster says: ‘Words cannot do justice to the pleasures of a good bookshop. Ironically.’