Sometime in May

These days I'm spending mostly locked up in my office proofreading and rewriting texts and checking layouts for four books that will be published around the same time in July. It’s totally unexciting work, but that’s what the job of an editor is all about, just like the work of graphic designers and art directors basically takes place at a desk.

Whenever I have some time - a holiday or just a lunch break - I keep visiting antiquarian bookshops, chiefly with the aim to find information and ideas for the above-mentioned editing work. That’s actually also one of my big hobbies at the moment, which started when I went to see the Bauhaus exhibition at the museum of the Tokyo Geijutsu Daigaku in Ueno together with my wife, and we went from Ueno to Sendagi, which according to rumor had turned into quite an interesting neighborhood. Now I check out "Bousingot, "Oyoyo Shorin", and "Ohraido Shoten", some of the "antiquarian bookstore cafes" that are the talk of the town at the moment. There are lots of unique shops selling new and used books in the Yanaka-Nezu-Sendagi area around Shinobazu-dori, which is why they're calling the place now "Shinobazu Book Street". It’s in fact somewhat the Omotesando for book lovers. Among the customers at Bousingot are a young couple of book fans who have obviously traveled from far all the way to the shop, and an older resident of the area and apparently a regular here. It’s a nice atmosphere, and I just love it to see how books contribute to the vitalization of parts of the city.

A few days later I'm scouring the Shimokitazawa neighborhood. I check out "Kosho BiBiBi", a specialist in culture-related books, and the recently opened large-scale bookstore "Honkichi". The latter amazes me with an extensive lineup of cultural publications, especially titles from/about the 1980s. The shelves reflect the owner’s taste, and the phrase "a globally individual bookstore" on the shop’s flyer sums it up perfectly. I close my tour of the day with a coffee at "Iihatoobo", one of the pioneering book cafes in Shimokitazawa, and am surprised to find Okura-san from Yoroshita Music sitting at the table next to mine. He was once the manager of YMO and Sakamoto Ryuichi, and now that we meet for the first time in over ten years, we have a lot to chat about.

The last Sunday in May I spend in Nishiogikubo. The Ogikubo-Nishiogikubo-Kichijoji axis - nicknamed "Onikichi - is dotted with antiquarian bookshops, so that’s my target today. I spent in fact the first half of my twenties in Nishiogikubo, but haven't come here for decades. I buy some books on macrobiotic food among others at the "Nawa Prasad" book store on the third floor of the famed "Hobbit-mura" in Nishiogi, which also accommodates an organic food supermarket and restaurant, and later check out the strong lineup of illustrated and art-related books at the stylish "Gogoshimaya", marvel at the rich selection of old magazines at "Nekonote Shoten", browse through countless rather odd new literature publications at "Shin-ai Shoten", and finally land at "Sukoburu-sha", my personal number one in Tokyo in terms of culture-related used books. The shop with its mountains of books looks devastatingly chaotic, and I learn that they stock about one million books here and in their warehouse in Fukushima!

Iimura-san in his shop "Sukoburu-sha" in Nichiogikubo: "An earthquake would cause quite a mess here." I'm sure it would!

In one of the mountains I spot the owner, Iimura-san. He recognizes me, and we end up chatting for an hour. Iimura’s place was featured three times in the Tokyo edition of Asahi Shimbun’s regula column "Chuo-sen no shi (Chuo Line poetry)", and it also appears at the beginning of the book edition. Iimura is a living Google, and what he runs there is one of the most outstanding cultural archives I've ever seen. He always has something interesting to talk about, and he’s immensely knowledgeable about all kinds of things.

"Newspaper people keep coming to look for things and get inspiration, and I've just made that my business," he tells me while showing me clippings of newspaper articles. An antiquarian bookshop these days is indeed much more than just a shop that sells used books.

Katsuma Kazuyo wrote a book on "how to become a Google", and that archive quality is actually a bit of what book shop owners and editors are supposed to use as their own sales points, on top of which they put their own special kind of individual book-selling or editing magic. The question is then whether the product is offered in the tangible form of books alone, or also in the form of other services. From Iimura’s shop I take home a couple of hints for thinking about something that’s been on my mind for some time, and I decide to have a coffee at Nishiogikubo’s own "Soleil" while giving the "editor-Google" thing another thought.