49 pages • 1 hour read
Days at the Morisaki Bookshop
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Background
Authorial Context: Satoshi Yagisawa and Days at the Morisaki Bookshop
Satoshi Yagisawa was born in 1977 in Japan. Days at the Morisaki Bookshop is Yagisawa’s debut novel and has enjoyed commercial success both in Japan and in the US. The novel earned Yagisawa international attention: “[The novel] won the Chiyoda Literature Prize in 2008 and became a massive hit in Japan. It was as impressive a debut as an author could ask for, selling more than 100,000 copies and receiving a film adaptation not long after” (Margolis, Eric. “Satoshi Yagisawa’s Novel Has All the Charm of a Jimbocho Bookshop.” The Japan Times, 19 Aug. 2023). The novel has been published in more than 20 countries to date. In 2024 the English translation was shortlisted for the British Book Award Debut Book of the Year.
Yagisawa’s work has been praised for his ability to convey meaningful emotional and personal growth in his characters, and for his recreation of the atmosphere of a bookshop. Much of the novel takes place in the Morisaki Bookshop, and Yagisawa’s discussion of different books and the cast of characters that come to shop all evoke a classic used bookstore. The story that starts in Days of the Morisaki Bookshop continues in its 2011 sequel, More Days at the Morisaki Bookshop. The sequel follows some of the core cast of characters featured in the original while introducing some new characters into the bookshop. Both novels are associated with the genre of Japanese “healing literature,” which is used to describe fiction that is deliberately slow-paced, simply written, and deals with characters dealing with mundane challenges and routines. Yagisawa has since written two other novels in Japanese that have not yet been translated into English.
Geographical and Cultural Context: The Jimbocho Neighborhood
The Morisaki Bookshop of the novel is a fictional store located in the historic Jimbocho Neighborhood of Tokyo. Jimbocho is known for being the book district of the city, with hundreds of bookshops, both new and used, as well as many coffee shops and restaurants that cater to young people and students. The variety of the bookstores also draws people into the neighborhood, its identity completely intertwined with literature: “Within a 15-minute walking radius of Jimbocho Station, you’ll find around 200 bookstores crammed floor to ceiling with any kind of book you might be looking for, from cheap 100 yen novels to Edo period woodblock prints to vintage erotic magazines” (Rowthorn, Chris. “Jimbocho Book Town.” Truly Tokyo) These shops offer customers any book they might search for, both in Japanese and English.
Jimbocho is an old neighborhood, which underwent substantial urban development in the 19th century. A number of schools opened in the area during the latter decades of the century, including campuses for the University of Tokyo, which helped to encourage an academic book market to develop. However, the neighborhood’s identity as a wide-ranging bookshop hub is comparatively recent. The Jimbocho of today began in the aftermath of a large fire in 1913 (Princen, Gill. “Jimbocho Guide—Tokyo’s Book District.” Yoko Gao Mag, 25 June 2024). After the fire, Jimbocho became a thriving book district because people like Professor Iwanami Shigeo opened bookshops, encouraging others.
The used book market continued to gain popularity from the 1930s onwards, leading to the proliferation of stores catering for diverse audiences. The diversity of the bookshops, whether they cater to new titles or collectibles, as well as the wide variety of genres they carry, makes the neighborhood a welcoming place for any and all interested in reading.
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