Books

I love books.  Don't you?  I love the way they feel, the way the pages sound when they turn.  I like to be around them.  Which is why I went to Jimbocho today.  Just like there is a restaurant supply district here and a musical instrument district, there is a section of town that is near three universities that is the used book store district.  I am not kidding.  It is on Yasukuni-dori and it looks like this:

When you get off the train, you see these big murals on the wall in the station because Jimbocho is block after block of used book stores.  They smell delightful, holy cow.  You walk in and they smell like old paper and years of knowledge accumulated and stored.  I spent a couple of happy hours this morning wandering in and out of the stores, and I certainly did not get to all of them.  After all, it was too early for the adult book stores to be open.  And there were some that were not adult book stores that had not opened by the time I had to leave to get lunch and then meet the class.

(A parenthetical word about lunch, here, while it is on my mind:  Most places in town you can get some version of soba or udon, which is pronounced oo DO(n).  You sort of swallow the "n".  And the bowl of noodles will be about six bucks, which is great.  There is another kind of lunch joint that sells rice with thinly-sliced steak and onions on top.  Which sounds pretty good, of course.  Then they give you a raw egg, and the expectation is that you mix some soy sauce with it and pour it over the meat and rice.  It does not really cook, so now you have raw egg all through your lunch, and if you are me you regret doing that.  Yesterday I tried to not do that part, and the octogenarian woman who spoke no English ran over and said in Japanese "Put the egg in it before you eat it!  No!  No!  Don't eat it without the egg!  The egg!  Put!!  The!!  Egg!!  Put it on the dish first!!  HOLY GOD WHAT IS WRONG WITH YOU?!? ARE YOU A MORON?!? PUT THE FUCKING EGG ON THE FUCKING RICE YOU IDIOT!!!"  Or something like that.  That was the gist anyway.  I put the egg in.  And then decided I did not want to eat that for lunch anymore.  So I had noodles today, which had much less shouting accompanying it and was delicious and cost me $6.80.  End of parenthetical statement.)

Where was I?  Oh, Jimbocho.  So a beautiful morning perusing books, most of which were written in a language I can not read.  This was the problem.  I really almost bought a whole bunch of them just for the covers, but I restrained myself.  The smell when you walk in to a used book store is one of my favorite smells in the world.  If someone bottled it I would wear it as a cologne.  It is different from a library, there are added notes of desperation and resignation.  Desperation and resignation on the part of the books, you know.  Some of them, even if they are handsomely bound in leather, have long since resigned themselves to the fact that no one is ever going to buy a book chronicling the ebb and flow of city finances for some now-defunct small town in rural Michigan, for example.  But there they sit, and they make such a lovely aroma when you walk in.  It is like they are air fresheners except they actually smell good.

There are so many used books and used book stores the books are even out of the street.  There are piles and piles of them for a buck or two.  And you walk by the first joint and think "Wow, that is a lot of books."  The you realise that you have just seen the first of maybe a hundred book stores.  The map at the top of this post shows the stores.  There are, to put it mildly, lots.

Each store is small, maybe eighteen feet wide, and most of them are arranged the same way:  Books on both sides and then a central set of shelves as well.  And a lot of them are arranged with two front doors, so that you can go in one side and out the other.  Holy god there are books.  Stacked right to the ceiling.  Big books and little books and books of all sizes.  Sets are sometimes tied together with twine. 

As I looked them I started to notice something even more obsessive:  They are often typed by store.  So you have the World War II book store.  Pretty much everything in there has to do with the Great War.  Then you have a joint like this one, which was all sheet music.  The whole joint was sheet music.  Music for everything from Bach to the Beatles.  Operas, individual songs, some from the 1920's, some published last year.  Again, desperately hard not to buy them just for the covers, but I persevered.  Then there was the place that is filled with books like the ones below.  Canvas bound hard-covered books in these very pleasing cardboard dust jackets.  No idea what they are about, but there is a whole store full of 'em if you have a need.  You pay the shipping and I will send them along.  They were really pleasing all on the shelf like that.  And only five or six bucks each!  Such a bargain, if only I knew what they were. 





















 Then there is the place that is only movie scripts.  Maybe some TV scripts in there too, hard for me to tell.  Here is one movie that I missed, I wonder what it is about?  Well, I don't wonder, it seems pretty self explanatory really, but either way, I seem to have missed its debut in theaters:

 This place had a scary looking statue watching you as you poked around, to make sure that you didn't try anything funny.  I did not try anything funny.

 This store is all pop and fashion and music magazines.  VERY hard not to buy the Star Wars magazines in Japanese.  Some great hair-metal band covers too. 

 Like this one.  I don't know who these guys are but I really really want to.  They are on fire.

 And there is a lot of pulp fiction.  I mean bin after bin.  Crappy sci-fi, crappy romance novels, cheap teen fiction.  Most of it for sale for a buck or two, there is just the language thing.

So a lovely morning walking around.  And a lot of time spent with books and people who love books.