What you are looking for is in the library

by Michiko Aoyama

translated by Alison Watts

There’s an increasing divide between a story impacting me, as the reader, in a positive way, and me liking a plot as it unfolds beneficially for the point-of-view protagonist. Lately, I’ve found it easier to like a story that I disagree with—one with a philosophy or political thrust that I find distasteful, tedious, or hopelessly naïve—as long as what is happening to the characters isn’t bad. I think the whole subgenre of “cozy”—born from the cozy mystery and more recently applied across wider genres like fantasy—is proof that escapism in the 2020s is more about feeling connected to people while nice things happen than battling world-shaking destruction or fighting through ennui and hollow comfort. Many foundational stories from the 1990s and 2000s were about making something happen in a world that felt static and overly available; now, carving out stability and finding a few weeks where routine can soothe one’s nerves is de rigueur. The times, they are a-changin’.

What you are looking for is in the library falls directly into the path of “cozy” by way of social-structural integration. It is a delightful collection of interdependent stories, each one focusing on a character that “betters” themself through a quirky recommendation from an insightful buddha-esque librarian:

"Is being a sales assistant in a department store really not such a great job?”
I don’t know what to say. Ms. Komachi waits patiently for my reply.
“Well, I mean…Anybody can do it. It’s not like its was my dream job or anything I desperately wanted to do. I just kind of fell into it. But I live on my own, so I have to work to support myself.”

those felted toys are definitely not amigurumi

Each chapter, I found myself rooting for the character to find happiness. Each time, they did. The book is joyful, within the metes and bounds of proscriptive, achievable success. It is formalistic in a non-derogatory sense of that word: in the library overflows with comfortable and expected rhythms. The minor woes one might encounter in different eras of a human lifetime–recent college graduate; young mother; unemployed drop-out; all the way up to retiree–are faced and overcome with insight from a book and a small felted toy, both received from the stoic librarian. Taken together, the gifts from the library offer up a quirky angle from which a new revelation can solvesa core problem holding the narrator back from enjoying themselves. A children’s picture book kindles a desire to learn to cook: a book of gardening shows balance between corporate life with hobbyist entrepreneurship.

The small souvenirs lead the way:

“About the bonus gifts…How do you choose them?”
When it comes to books, I am sure Ms. Komachi draws on her intuition and many years of experience as a librarian to decide which books would suit different readers. However, she could not have known I would come across river crabs in the supermarket, or my experience with crab-walking at the school sports day. She must have some special power, I feel sure of it.
“I just choose at random,” she answers.
“I beg your pardon?”

This made me laugh. And while Ms. Komachi, the buddha/librarian, often offers words that allow for personal contentment, rather than goad steady “growth” and “improvement,” not one of the five stories upends the formula and has a POV character end where they start. You as reader are positioned to root for the characters to “succeed,” and there is a constant hum of capitalist/corporate inevitability running behind each tale. The intimate sense of “betterment” being tied to “productivity” and “usefulness” is the crux of why I don’t think the grand arc of any individual story is very interesting while the book as a whole is a wonder.

It does strike me, however, that the metric by which I judge whether the story is appealing to me was whether is had some sort of meta-impact on my life beyond the reach of the pages–whether it stuck with me, or changed the way I think about something. Am I, in fact, the one tying my leisure activity to “betterment” and corpo-capitalist “usefulness?” Can I eschew my “productivity”—this very website?—and simply allow the joy of reading to seep into my life, absorb the joyful turns and happy outcomes for the fictional characters on my page? A book–a fiction book–can still be good when it is only pleasurable, right?

It seems as though there continues to be more at the library than I expected. No matter what you have going on, or going wrong, in your life, What you are looking for is in the library is fun to read:

“It’s a very common condition,” she said with apparent relish. “Singles are envious of those who are married, and married couples envy those with children, but people with children are envious of singles. It’s an endless merry-go-round. But isn’t that funny? That each person should be chasing the tail of the person in front of them, when no one is coming first or last. In other words, when it comes to happiness nothing is better or worse–there is no definitive state.”

Even though the characters all arc into stereotypical self-improvement, their growth seems to rely on a core of personal acceptance and enjoyment. If that is the cozy lesson of this book, then I am all for it. And besides, anything that promotes libraries is a fundamental good no regardless of what else happens.