Another Bookstore Gone

Cherry blossoms have already passed their peak, and fresh green leaves are beginning to show. As petals drift through the air, my dog Anne seems to think treats are falling from the sky, leaping with quiet delight.

 

The bookstore in the concourse of the terminal station I pass through on my commute quietly disappeared at the end of the last fiscal year.

I used to stop by to kill time between trains—flipping through books that caught my eye, and occasionally buying one if it truly appealed to me. There was a quarterly magazine for retriever lovers, and whenever its release approached, I would find myself wandering the shelves in anticipation.

 

For me, the closure came rather suddenly.
Perhaps there had been notices.
Perhaps I had simply failed to notice, having stopped going as often as before.

If I had known it would come to this, I might have made a point of buying a book every week or two, as I once did, to support the place. But that is, of course, too late now.

A bookstore is a place that sells knowledge.
Knowledge recorded on paper.

No matter how refined the binding or design may be, at its core a book is simply pages of printed words bound together. Its essential value lies in the knowledge it contains.

 

Of course, there are other qualities one might attribute to books, but fundamentally, what gives value to the medium of paper is what is written within it.

One of my favorite large bookstores was located on the top floor of a commercial complex.

It may be a naive assumption, but I suspect the bookstore itself was meant to be the main attraction—drawing customers up to the highest floor, and then guiding them downward through the rest of the building.

And yet, I too had gradually stopped visiting it.

Until just a few years ago, I would make a detour to stop by. Now, I simply pass it without a thought.

When reading a book, one must first confront its thickness.

A thin book can be finished in a day or two, making it easy to approach. But when it comes to authors like Haruki Murakami, or works like Les Misérables, or even the densely printed texts of Milan Kundera, it requires a certain resolve.

And yet, I find that I no longer have that kind of energy.

Instead, I skim short columns on my smartphone, gaining a vague sense of understanding and moving on.

As I have mentioned before, our personal time is steadily being taken away.

Printed books, in particular, stand at a clear disadvantage before the smartphone.

And so, another bookstore has disappeared.

What unsettles me most is that I find myself accepting this fact as if it were someone else’s problem.

 

And perhaps what troubles me most is how easily I accept it as someone else’s problem.