After drifting away from books, I stopped by Kinokuniya in Shinjuku and rediscovered the pleasure of browsing shelves, buying paperbacks, and spending time away from screens.
The other day, there was a welcome and farewell party for the pathology department at the university.
I left the hospital early so that I would not be late, but I still had a little time before the party began. So I got off the train at Shinjuku and stopped by Kinokuniya Bookstore.
Recently, I had been moving away from books at an alarming speed.
However, after buying Haruki Murakami’s Kaho and reading a paper book for the first time in quite a while, I seemed to remember not only the texture of a physical book, but also the pleasure of walking through a bookstore.
As expected, the first floor was lined with copies of Kaho.
For a moment, I found myself thinking that Haruki Murakami might be the last god protecting printed books in Japan.
The rest of the floor was filled with bestsellers, much like the bookstores found inside train stations, and there was not much that attracted my attention.
Of course, younger people—perhaps those up to their forties or fifties—probably find them interesting.
But once you are over sixty, many books begin to feel like reworkings of stories you have already read somewhere before, and they no longer seem quite so interesting.
Perhaps that is one reason I have drifted away from paper books.
I took the escalator up to the second floor, where the literary books were located, and was once again overwhelmed by the sheer number of books filling the shelves.
Although the layout of the sales floor had hardly changed since my student days forty years ago, I could still feel the enormous accumulation of knowledge before me.
In a sense, it also made me realize just how much of our knowledge is now absorbed digitally.
Simply walking along and looking at the spines made me feel excited.
Once again, rather than the latest bestsellers, I wanted to read a classic, so I headed toward the Iwanami Bunko shelves.
Before reaching them, I stopped to look at the Iwanami Shinsho series. There I found a guidebook to Proust entitled An Invitation to In Search of Lost Time, and picked it up to leaf through it.
For now, however, I do not have the time to read it.
I decided to leave it for another occasion and finally moved on to the Iwanami Bunko section.
The first volume of Proust was displayed in a stack, and I picked it up for a moment.
Still, I decided that this was not yet the right time to begin, and put it back.
All sixteen volumes were lined up on the shelf.
I remembered that there was also a Kobunsha edition, and when I checked later, I found that Shueisha had published one as well.
I decided that I should first consider carefully which edition to read, and began looking for something else.
I wanted something thin that I could finish quickly.
While searching, I found Maupassant’s Boule de Suif.
It is a famous book—everything in the Iwanami Bunko series is supposed to be a classic—yet I had never read it.
I bought it and thought it was time to leave. But since I was already there, I decided to look around a little more. Just as I was about to go downstairs, I turned around and went up to the third floor instead.
This floor contained books on philosophy and related subjects.
As I wandered slowly between the shelves, I found myself entertaining a completely inconsequential thought: in the end, I had never really developed any connection with Wittgenstein.
Then a critical essay about artificial intelligence caught my eye.
It was a newly published paperback, with its first edition dated July 1.
I thought that something this recent could hardly be outdated yet, so I bought it, although it was considerably more expensive than an Iwanami Shinsho volume.
I have been reading it on the train during my commute.
And so, although I had entered merely to pass the time, I ended up buying two books.
Even so, there were several people walking around with perhaps ten books in their shopping baskets, and I found myself imagining that they, too, must be serious book lovers.
I did not have enough time to explore the bookstore thoroughly from top to bottom, but I still spent a very enjoyable time there.
The time spent reading a book is also a form of digital detox.
I must make sure not to lose that time.
Time spent with a paper book is time reclaimed from the digital world.
・・・
welcome and farewell party
歓送迎会。新しく来た人を歓迎し、去る人を送る会。
get off the train at
〜で途中下車する、〜駅で降りる。
at an alarming speed
驚くほどの速さで。ここでは「猛烈な勢いで」の自然な英訳。
line the shelves / be lined with
棚や場所にずらりと並ぶ。
reworking
焼き直し、既存の内容を作り替えたもの。
leaf through
本や雑誌をパラパラとめくる。
displayed in a stack
平積みで置かれている。
wander slowly between the shelves
書架の間をそぞろ歩く。
inconsequential
取るに足らない、どうでもよい。
reclaim time
時間を取り戻す。デジタル機器に奪われがちな時間を、自分のために取り返すという含み。
#Reading #DigitalDetox #Bookstore #JapaneseEssay #ColoKen
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