A Feel-Good Tale of Healing From Grief in a Japanese Used Bookstore

Days at the Morisaki Bookshop by Satoshi Yagisawa delivers a tour-de-force of grief and hope within a compact coming-of-age tale set in Tokyo’s renowned center of used bookstores, Jimbōchō

Photo by takahiro taguchi on Unsplash

I was not even supposed to be at the bookstore that afternoon.

That morning, I had forgotten a bag in a cab, which I never do, and had to travel halfway across town to meet the driver. So, the fact that I ended up 10 minutes from the bookstore that afternoon was a complete coincidence.

More predictable, however, was that, once there, I did visit the bookstore. A more prudent individual would have remembered he had around 20 books in his to-read pile and headed back home, but it is both my gift and my curse that if there is a bookstore in the neighborhood, I am heading inside.

In this particular bookstore, visitors are greeted by a Featured section, and there, upon entering, I glimpsed the following pristine, shimmering cover:

Source: Goodreads