This one is from my wife’s Did Not Finish pile. She bought to try and branch out from the usual Kate Morton style books that she reads based on a recommendation from a friend.

I was fresh off of reading Remarkably Bright Creatures and needed something similarly light for evening reading, so figured her loss would be my gain.

What you are looking for is in the library is less of a story and more a small collection of five short stories that delicately indirectly link in with each other outside of the core narrative. Each one more or less follows the same pattern:

  1. Person has common or relatable life issues taking up their day.
  2. For one reason or another (it vaires between each character) each of them end up at the little community centre library attached to a school.
  3. The odd fat librarian lady (if that feels too harsh, imagining it reading over and over in varying detail) coaxes their story out with a stare and gives them a reading list, most of which is directly relevant, and one of which is almost completely irrelevant.
  4. Each person goes away thinking that the irrelevant book is really weird; why would they even recommend it?
  5. The irrelevant book fixes their life, sometimes indirectly.
  6. Happy ending.

Straight away, I was sold.

I could see why my wife couldn’t get on with it though, and I think it’s the peril of reading foreign books translated. The latter two stories - following a 30 year old NEET called Hiroya, and a 65 year old retired gentleman named Masao - added more depth to the language and the story, but the first couple were a slog, very flat and one dimensional. Not being an expert of Japanese literature outside of a handful or Murakami books and the odd other here or there, I can’t say definitively that it’s because of the translation but I think it’s safe to assume that some aspects get lost in the process.

The other thing that really stood out like a sore thumb was each characters insistence on spending a paragraph or so describing just how fat or weird the librarian was, which feels like a Japanese thing. From huge, to fit to burst, or from the stay puft marshmallow man from Ghostbusters, to the panda form of Genma Saotome from Ranma 1/2 (a solid 10/10 anime by the by; yet to read the manga to avoid spoilers), the author really wants to nail home that this person is unusually and off puttingly large. The phrase ‘my eyes nearly jump out of my sockets’ is re-used a lot.

And yet it met the assignment. It was refreshingly light and easy to read, and in many aspects easier than it could have been, especially with how the author links them in.

Usually with this kind of story I’d expect there to be no real chapters, very Terry Pratchett style. One character would get their bit, then another, maybe a third before going back to the first. Build them all together organically.

Instead, each gets their own short story, with reference points in the latter ones to the previous. The computer teacher in the first story that follows Tomoka, a 21 year old womenswear sales assistant who doesn’t want to be a womenswear sales assistant anymore, is the wife of Masao in the last story. Tomoka’s friend Kiriyama is key to resolving the career issues of Natsumi in the third story, who was a former magazine editor before she got pregnant and got busted down to an office job because it would be easier for her now that she’s a mum (again, I assume that’s a conversation handled as direct as that over there; over here they usually bend over backwards to come with better reasons to avoid being chased by Pregnant Then Screwed…).

This writing style allowed me to really focus on the story at hand, whilst also getting the ‘callback’ joy and building the web of connections. It added the dimensions not really felt in the first couple of stories, and certainly kept me coming back for more.

It also helps that while the stories are as simple as that seven bullet list above, they are also that good. The last is probably my favourite, but I might be a bit of a sucker for the emotional retired Dad types of stories; trying to find his place in a world where he’s no longer working after being with the company for 45 years (again, very much not a western thing nowadays), realising a few things about his relationship with his wife and daughter that he might have been missing, and the culmination of the web the book weaves throughout.

Would I recommend it? Yes, with the caveats above. I’m certainly trying to get my wife to give it another go. It’s not my favourite book I’ve read this year so far (that might go to Everything Is Tuberculosis by John Green), but it’s one I’ll be re-reading once or twice over in the years to come.

Rating: 8/10