Days at the Morisaki Bookshop

by Satoshi Yagisawa

translated by Eric Ozawa

My strength in reading does not lie in allegory.  I am most comfortable engaging with a world of fiction as presented, happy to help a book plug gaps in the narrative with my own personal experiences and beliefs. I prefer to keep everything cohesive and smooth even when a plot can’t stay the course on its own. This relatively placid mental movement through stories helps me enjoy certain types of fiction more–mystery; crime; thriller–and certain types of fiction less–Aslon the lion was a Jesus reference? Did not notice (sincerely).

The direct way I read narrative fiction leaves me little room to puzzle over the big questions at the heart of reading. Days at the Morisaki Bookshop was so smooth it looped back around and forced my brain to consider an existential concern about the written word–in service of what goal are certain details presented and others omitted? There may be meaning buried in Morisaki–for example, the need for reflection to give form to experience–but I could see little of that in the moment.

For certain readers, that central question of fiction is never be to far from one’s mind–it’s a strange suspension of what books truly are to let the world as written sweep you away. Books are deliberate words on a page–the “intentionality of fiction” is another way to phrase it. Plays, movies, and videogames grapple with similar issues in different ways—the sparse visual backdrops for plays lend a clearer path to “if that’s there, there’s a reason” logic, but Chekhov’s gun seems to apply to any storytelling. An issue I often have with videogames is that their narrative worlds start to melt away and I am left staring at their constructed wireframes. I will parse the mechanics, optimizing my play instead of letting myself be whisked off into their magical worlds. The games I’ve had the best times with, mechanically, I’ve been lukewarm about, narratively: the worlds of Mass Effect and Fallout: New Vegas both repelled me, so I didn’t mind playing a character that had a bit more of an edge to them than “save all the kittens, get all the powers.” The nuances of the story came from me, because I wasn’t trying to optimize, save the world, or be “the best.”

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If I didn’t float through novels with an uncritical eye for the framework, then every word I read must be acknowledged as intentional by the author. The world within the book might fade as I began to puzzle over each selection or ask why this paragraph came before this other, or why these plot points were staggered in this order–does it make the ultimate reveal more or less exciting that I knew about this first? Can I already figure out the central mystery, or were there not enough clues for me, the reader? I already get hung up on videogame narrative not going the way I want–I shudder to think what might happen when reading a novel with an eye critical towards what is actually there rather than with a mind ready to supply color to what isn’t.

Within fiction, the truth that there should be more to the world than is being described on the page requires help from the reader: this need, for the reader fill in the gaps, is why I do not like visual adaptations of fantasy series. Why would I cede that much control to a director or set designer or a person just doing their job trying to get wardrobe on an actor under a certain budget?

I hope these comparisons to other forms of storytelling emphasize how deeply I allow books to just be, and how little I critique form or structure when reading them. This is why when Morisaki breezed through my life, it didn’t leave much of a dent. There was one scene, though, that clunked against my smooth fiction brain and forced me to think about why it was there:

The innkeeper came in carrying a serving tray and discreetly turned on the fairly ancient television in the middle of the room. I think there was something wrong with the volume, because the sound of people laughing on screen would suddenly cut out, disappearing inside the cathode-ray tube of the TV. When that happened, the room seemed even more silent than before. I found the way the sound cut out weirdly scary, and eventually I got up, went over to the TV, and turned it off.

Up until then, I had been enjoying the brisk storytelling, but suddenly I was forced to confront the “intentionality of fiction.” What is this doing here? Surely I can cobble together some reason for the TV to be frightening–standard tropes of new media formats encroaching on the old?–but why the volume? A lack of internal control? Reliance on fallible technology? Cathode-ray tubes contrasting the longevity of the physical format of a book versus the transience of the way we can and have presented motion-pictures? I had to ask myself, more than once, “What is this here for?” This is the conch represents order 11th grade English class stuff.

I didn’t leave Morisaki with any answers. In fact, the rest of the book gently slid back into place for me, a polite tale of a narrator in love with reading:

From that moment on, I read relentlessly, one book after another. It was as if a love of reading had been sleeping somewhere deep inside me all this time, and then it suddenly sprang to life. 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 read.

A wish fulfilled for fiction lovers–unlimited time with unlimited books. Outside of that singular moment with the spooky TV—a moment of detachment that created a contrasting sense that I belonged on every other page—I was never again outside of the narrative; the book completely, and seemingly effortlessly, brought me into someone else’s life. Even though nothing particularly profound seemed to happen, the experience was pleasant enough. Because of that ease in bringing me somewhere else, I, like the narrator, “...know I’ll never forget the days I spent at the bookshop.”