More Days at the Morisaki Bookshop

by Satoshi Yagisawa

translated by Eric Ozawa

Mario, of Super Mario Bros. fame, was Popeye. Or, at least, he was supposed to be. Donkey Kong–that gorilla what which ushered in the pre-rendered-graphic era and all–was Bluto, and Pauline was Olive Oyl–the father son and holy ghost of the 1980s arcade. This is not just lore, it comes from the mouths of people who made it. Nintendo lost the Popeye license for reasons unknown, and so Mario, Stubborn Ape, and Girl were created.

Popeye did end up as a launch game for the Famicom–the Japanese name for what became known as the NES in America–so even though Popeye is a uniquely American cartoon doofus, I know he had reach in Japanese culture. But five pages into More Days at the Morisaki Bookstore, the line, ““I’m doing great,” she says, flexing her arms to show off her biceps, like she’s doing her Popeye impersonation” made me stop, and–in the grand tradition of translation versus localization–wonder if Popeye as character-reference was chosen by the author or selected to be more comprehensible for an English-language target audience by the translator.

In my opinion, it would be a weird choice–Popeye is not really killin’ it–but even within the book it sort of feels like a weird choice; the narrator is pretty young, though I guess More Days was originally published in Japan over a decade ago, thus ten years closer to Popeye-relevance. And the character who does the impression is a generation removed, so maybe Popeye is right in her wheelhouse?

We are all quite lucky it was only five page into the book because I found a sample of the first eight pages of More Days in Japanese. While Google Search was of no help at all (it just kept offering me dozens of places to buy the book), once I did finally find a copy Google Translate picked “Popeye” right out of the text:

So, mystery solved: our muttering sailor was there all along. Truly, this is the only real question a reader might have about More Days–it feels as charming as the first book, lovely and simple and friendly, a book I would certainly re-read if I were a mid-teen looking for some kind of vibe that I couldn’t yet articulate. In a related sense of searching out tranquility in a tangled mess of confusion, I read through my review of Morisaki 1—that essay could use a few more editing passes. I cannot believe that I, a person who spent the entirety of my academic youth turning in first drafts because it was embarrassing to me to read my own writing, have finally–finally!–recognized that the time spent editing and rewriting should quadruple the time spent drafting. I clearly do not always do that here on my hobbyist website that functionally is held aloft by about 4 review that get 95% of my traffic, but one does what one can.

Back to Morisaki–I just like this series. There’s not much to grasp onto. “Cozy,” I think, is the term au courant, and it’s the vibe I wanted out of books when I was a kid; characters I like just sort of doing things that aren’t “You must save the world.” Ok, so, I read a lot of fantasy fiction: the characters were wizards etc that had epic quests, which made the idea of them just sort of hanging out seem rare and interesting–sort of like wanting Real World for Middle Earth. This is a pretty big genre now (that I haven’t dipped into at all), so it is clear to me that I wasn’t the only one who wanted to see Garion just sort of like, go to school or whatever. And not wizard school where something stupid happens every year. 

I never knew why the kids in The Baby-Sitter’s Club got to be part of a club that just babysat. Each book didn’t thrust them into a different world-changing timeline that they needed to resolve. They just did what they did. I wanted, in 1980s wildly sexist parlance, girl-book plot with boy-book theming. I didn’t need antagonist-driven conflicts in my Ninja Turtles, just some broad character archetypes that I knew and liked milling around, eating pizza and enjoying themselves. There is no rival babysitter’s club that the OG girls needed to confront and humiliate every week. Though…with the rise of the cozy book genre, a flipped structure where instead of Orcs running a coffeeshop you have the Baby-Sitter’s Club structured like a GIJoe/Cobra dipole cold war might be….something. Something.

Anyway, there is simply no way you’re reading More Days without having read the first Morisaki–though I bet you could, and it might even be fun, filling in your own backstories and searching for clues about what is actually happening and why. But I find it so incredibly unlikely that anyone reading Morisaki 2 didn’t like the first one. Why would you even pick it up? Gosh, I would really hate trying to market sequels—your audience knows exactly what they’re getting from reading the previous book, unless it’s wildly divergent, and then fans of the original would probably be displeased. How do you bring in new people? Commerce concerns aside, this book was a nice way to close out my summer of fiction–what, you don’t make yourself personal, overarching reading themes?—and it it felt like autumn, felt like a transitional text:

“I don’t have that many books yet. I don’t worry much about holding on to them, so I tend to gather them up and sell them.”

“I see.” Tomo fell quiet. “I’d better start selling more, or I’ll be in trouble. But once I like a book, I just can’t let go of it.”

Same, girl, same. There’s an ineffable comfort to be found in the Morisaki series that makes it feel non-committal, like reading an old letter from a penpal. You just peek inside, see what’s going on with Takano, and then dip back out again. She’s pleasant to be around, and so is the book. It’s so comforting, in fact, that sometimes you have to dig up your own mystery about Popeye and the essence of translating a text. Morisaki gives you space to do that. Because it just wants you to be happy.