Days at the Morisaki Bookshop

 

Book Review

Title: Days at the Morisaki Bookshop

Author: Satoshi Yagisawa

Translator: Eric Ozawa

Publisher: Manila Press, 2023

Pages: 150

Love is both simple and complex at the same time. As an experience, it is simple. But certain factors such as the relationships it brings and the motives behind the relationships make it quite complex.

Japanese writer Satoshi Yagisawa’s debut novel about a second-hand bookshop in Jimbocho, Tokyo, and some people associated with it, is as simple and complex as love itself. Reading this short novel is like bathing in a cool, crystal-clear stream. It refreshes you more and more as you immerse yourself in it. I finished reading it in one go yesterday; it enchanted me.

The protagonist is 25-year-old Takako whose boyfriend ditches her. She was too naïve to understand that the young man was only taking advantage of her while he was really in love with another woman. “This guy is rotten to the core,” Uncle Satoru tells Takako about that young man later.

The Morisaki Bookshop belongs to Uncle Satoru, a middle-aged man. When Satoru comes to know about Takako’s situation (she quit her job in depression), he invites her to spend some time at the bookshop. She moves into a room full of books upstairs. Unable to sleep one night, Takako, who had never liked books, picks up a book on the theme of love and tenderness. The book transforms Takako. A miracle of sorts take place. A miracle is nothing but a change of attitude. The world suddenly becomes beautiful to Takako. She realises how she had been wasting much of her time hitherto. Now she starts reading book after book.

Satoru too has been struggling with a personal tragedy though he seems to be happy externally. His wife, Momoko, left him five years ago without telling him why. Satoru is a kind-hearted man who is wrecked by this personal tragedy. He compares himself to a boat that “travels lightly, drifting aimlessly at the mercy of the current.” But then, Momoko returns.

Momoko has a sad story to tell too. She didn’t leave Satoru because of any dislike. On the contrary, her love for him motivated her to leave him. If I speak more about Momoko, it will be a spoiler. Let me leave that to you to find out by reading the book.

Many lost loves and a few regained ones form the essence of this novel which also brings a lot of books into the narrative. After all, the plot revolves round a bookshop. Up the Hill is one such book. The protagonist of this novel is an unsuccessful writer whose beloved leaves him and marries a wealthy man in order to save her family from poverty. The protagonist decides to become a successful and famous writer in order to regain his beloved. He does succeed in the due course of time. But when he does become famous and rich, his beloved is no more.

The whole idea of waiting for someone you love till the day you die is absurd, according to Wada, the young man who gave the novel, Up the Hill, to Takako. He has read it five times though he thinks the plot is a cliché. He has been waiting for his beloved for pretty long too! Not knowing that fact, Takako fell in love with him!

There is an abundance of love in this little book. There is hope, mystery, magic. And brokenness as well as healing. It is feel-good fiction which you will love if you like that genre.

PS. This book is one of three brought over by friend Martin on his last visit. I’m moving on to the second one today: Rough Crossings by Simon Schama.