Aoyama

If necessity is the mother of invention - and it often is - the ones who invented bookstore and library should have been outdated grandma by now. We're living in the world known as Kindle, or a state called Amazon, or a universe governed by tablet. Bookstores and libraries are shrinking, if not vanishing.

In this sense, it may be heartening for book lovers like me to see the survival, however difficult, of bookstores and libraries. That's the reason I paid a visit to the Books Kinokuniya Tokyo on my daughter's Taylor Swift concert night. Kinokuniya is the largest bookstore chain in Japan, famous for the immense size and collection of books including English ones.

That's how I learned about Michiko Aoyama's novel What You Are Looking For is in the Library, and met the enigmatic librarian Sayuri Komachi. Set in the fictional local community library, the five chapters narrate the way people - be they a department store sales assistant, a furniture manufacturer accounts clerk, a former magazine editor, an illustrator-to-be, or a 65-year-old getting use to retirement - contemplate a life change. None of the five characters know what they are searching for - until they meet the librarian.

Each chapter is a bite-sized lesson from the librarian. The last chapter on the mourning about books (that aren't selling as well any more) and bookstores (that are disappearing) strikes a chord with me. The 65-year-old retiree's daughter says it well to her father, "Stop it. When everybody says that, as if they know what they're talking about, it turns out into a trend. Books will always be essential for some people. And bookshops are a place for those people to discover the books that will become important to them. I will never allow bookshops to vanish from this world."