Book Review: Days at the Morisaki Bookshop, Satoshi Yagisawa

 Book Review: Days at the Morisaki Bookshop, Satoshi Yagisawa

[Translated by Eric Ozawa]

Read: 13 - 25/01/2024

My rating: 4 /5 stars

Book of 2024: 1

From the beginning of summer to early spring, I lived at the Morisaki Bookshop. I spent that period of my life in the spare room on the second floor of the store, trying to bury myself in books. The cramped room barely got any light, and everything felt damp. It smelled constantly of musty old books. 

But I will always remember the days I spent there. Because that’s where my real life began. And I know, without a doubt, that if not for those days the rest of my life would have been bland, monotonous, and lonely. 

The Morisaki Bookshop is precious to me. It’s a place I know I’ll never forget. 

As a lot of these reviews begin, this book came to me via the wonderful Evie T. I unwrapped this beautiful book from its brown reindeer wrapping paper at her birthday celebrations.

I LOVED this. I got lost within it, stuck between its pages, sunk into every sentence. It is so beautiful. A tale about how you pick yourself up after heartbreak, those who help you up, how reading changes lives, a story about friendship, family, self-belief, first impressions, love, heartache, stories, LIFE. 

I loved it. I will reread this when I want to be reminded of the magic of the world. 

This book explores so many of the feelings of mid twenties ennui and heartache. It’s beautifully written and you feel very firmly comfortable being in Takako’s characterisation. She is hurt, cynical, mistrusting (rightly so), miserable, but she has a softness. 

The descriptions of the intense emotions in this novel are what jumped out and clung to me while I read:

• I felt a sudden wave of grief come over me. Fare more than anger, I felt grief. A grief that was so violent, so intensely palpable, that I felt like I could reach out and touch it. (3)

Yagisawa, via Ozawa, describes feelings and emotions using tangible and visceral imagery, which draws you in and makes them feel all the more vivid and relatable. You feel the sick-to-your-stomach pain that Takako is experiencing - you feel it with her, for her. 

Then, Takako discovers reading - there is something so magical about reading a book about someone reading, and falling in love with the very art of reading.

• I read slowly, savoring each book one by one. I had all the time in the world then. And there was no danger I’d run out of books, no matter how much I read. (35)

• At some point in the past, someone reading this book had felt moved to take a pen and draw a line under these words. It made me happy to think that because I had been moved by that same passage too, I was now connected to that stranger. (36)

• I don’t think it really matters whether you know a lot about books or not. [...] But I think what matters far more is how it affects you. (91)

It is a joy to follow along with this transformation. Someone who is isolated, lonely, hurt, introspective, shut off, slowly opens up to expose her heart; through the gentle poking and prodding that reading stories about the world, adventure, people, heartache, love does to her. The stories weave themselves around her, pulling and pushing at her to accept them in, to sit a little taller, to believe in herself again, to believe in the world again, to believe in other people again. 

You feel this happen, you notice the way the writing changes, the tone changes, reflecting this brightness which is new and slow and restorative. It is a pleasure to witness. 

Although I am hardly even close to the prospect of being any form of an expert in Japanese fiction - I have been reading a fair bit lately (though I admit, mostly by Mieko Kawakami). A lot of it feels like it focuses on isolated characters, with their own routines, not anti-social but at least socially limited - whereas Morisaki has our protagonist re-socialise, find the joy in companionship, familiarity with people, family, and establishing relationships. 

Takako’s uncle is a huge part of this. He slightly forcefully cares for her - gets her on her feet again, helping out with the shop, showing her books to read, putting her behind the till to meet new people. He subtly re-socialises her, pulls her out of her wallowing, begrudgingly, she obliges. Her first impressions of her uncle, and her estranged aunt, are reversed when she spends time with them. She realises her close-mindedness and slowly unpicks the fabric of it as she spends more time with them, takes the time to get to know them, to open up and stay open to hearing their answers. 

• People’s impressions really aren’t very reliable, are they? (80)

Her aunt, uncle, the friends she makes at the local cafe, all help to patch up her heart. She begins to let people in again, and a huge part of this is confronting what happened to her - the heartbreak, the betrayal, the hurt from her ex-boyfriend. 

She confronts it within herself, confronts what happened, her part in it, she realises it in a post-event clarity which helps clear the murky water of her memories and heart:

• I was half to blame for the way things turned out. It was my carelessness and my lack of will that made the situation possible. (61)

Part of it was the actual confrontation - her Uncle taking her to confront this man, to hold him accountable for what he did - to make sure her voice, her pain, was heard. It soothes Takako just to have seen him, shouted at him, with her uncle there to hold her up:

• There was someone who worried about me, who got angry because what happened to me mattered as much as if it had happened to him. 

This sense of comradery and kinship, FELLOWSHIP, holds Takako upright, keeps her level, holds her tight, provides comfort, a sense of relief - not everything is on her shoulders; it can be shared.  

She begins to feel she belongs: in the shop, with her family, with her friends, in the community, but most importantly, within herself. 

• That’s when I finally realised it wasn’t just a question of where I was. It was about something inside me. No matter where I went, no matter who I was with, if I could be honest with myself, then that was where I belonged. (50-51)

A huge part of how beautiful this novel feels, a huge part of Takako’s growth, a final message you feel seeping from the book’s pages, is its attitude to love: do not fear it. This feels so hopeful, freeing, optimistic. It heals the hearts of the reader, who has been cutting off the blood supply to love, sealing up the affection chambers, removing themself from the world to avoid being hurt. 

• Love is wonderful. I don’t want you to forget that. Those memories of people you love, they never disappear. They go on warming your heart as long as you live. (65)

• Don’t be afraid to love someone. When you fall in love, I want you to fall in love all the way. (65)

The final takeaway is that love is not a finite resource. When you love you keep loving, when love ends you still have room for new love, when you love one person you still love your friends, your family, other new loves. There is so much room for love in this world - what good does it do to keep it all locked up? 

When a relationship ends, that doesn’t reverse all the good times - they still exist, they’re special to you, they still happened. That love still exists, the acts of love are in the past, but the love that was felt and shared and expressed still lingers. It doesn’t disappear. 

You will never run out of love.