What you are looking for is in the library by Michiko Aoyama

What you are looking for is in the Library by Michiko Aoyama

Japanese fiction

Original title – お探し物は図書室まで

Translator – Alison Watts

Source – Personal copy

What better than a feel-good piece of literature to kick off 2024 for Winstonsdad. A book about the power of books and libraries is even more suitable, and a translation is the icing on the cake, and it is one for the Japanese Challenge 2024. Michiko Aoyama was a newspaper journalist. After her degree, she worked in Australia and then back in Japan. Became a magazine Editor. This book was shortlisted for the Japanese Booksellers Award.It has since been translated into twenty languages. So, I start the year with a feel-good book about a wonderful librarian who knows the exact book to help people out.

The library is also on the ground floor. I pass two meeting rooms and a Japanese-style room at the back of the building beside a small kitchen. The door is wide open with a sign on the wall that says ‘Library. Rows and rows of bookshelves fill an area about the size of a classroom. A counter to the left of the entrance is marked Checkouts and Returns. Near the front counter a petite girl in a dark-blue apron is arranging paperbacks on a shelf.

Feeling shy, I approach her. Excuse me, where are the books on computers?’

Her head jerks up and she blushes. She has huge eyes and hair tied back in a ponytail that swings behind her. She looks young enough to still be at high school. Her nametag says’Nozomi Morinaga’.

Tomoka visit the local library not quite sure why.

What a great job a librarian is! I have always thought about the ability to help readers discover books. So when you read a book about one extraordinary librarian, Sayuri Komachi can help the characters that all visit her ,library in the book. In the four stories, five lives are touched by the books she gives them. The young shop assistant, Tomoka, selling womenswear, sees a dead end and is feeling trapped in her job is given a book that helps her find a way out of her boredom and connect with those around her. Then, a man Rto is in his mid-thirties and works in an office at the furniture factory. she also helps him tap on his genuine passion for antiques, but not able quite to see this as a way out, is given a book she gives him is to help him see the light. That is what the book is about not getting there, but the books they’re given, like all great books, make the readers think or connect with those around them and thus help them make that choice from a young girl to a retired man each at a personal crossroads this is, of course, a story we have seen lots. How will the others be helped by Komachi’s book choices for them? this is subtle book about what happens when people are given a gentle nudge towards the light.

My dream is to quit this job and open my own shop. I’d fill it with the things I like, and never have to talk to anybody except customers who are like-minded antiques lovers. But I can’t quit. I have less than one million yen saved up, which is not enough to start a business, and with all the work I have to do, it’s impossible to find the time for the necessary study and prep. But time is slipping away while I’m stuck in this office grind.

Then Rto wants to escape the 9-5 but will he be able to with Antiques.

This is one of those books that leaves you with a warm feeling as a reader. I’m reminded of the TV shows I loved as a kid: Highway to Heaven, where the character helps someone in need when needed, or Quantum Leap, where a moment in time needs to be changed. But this is subtle. Rather than doing it, this is someone nudging the five characters in the book. That book in their hands is like a map to freedom. They have to do the rest. That is what i love about it so subtle, but the change it can, make shows the power of books and the power of a great librarian. One thinks of people like Nancy Pearl, who has promoted libraries and reading this is like a magical version of that where that book they find is nearly perfect every time for the reader at that time!  Have you a favourite feel good book from Japan ?

Winston score – B solid piece of feel-good fiction that is about the joy of finding the right book and reading it but also how much more a book can do for you: open doors, give you ideas, and set the reader on a brand new path in their lives.