Because A Good Day? Includes Some Hemingway

So you might be asking yourself: Are there English books in Japan?

Well, I’m here to tell you that, yes, there are English books in Japan.

I was told by someone in the know that Maruzen sells “foreign books,” and there is an enormous (think seven stories of all things entertainment) Virgin Records store in Shibuya where one floor is devoted to English language books. The American Pharmacy in Ueno has a revolving rack of English paperbacks and there’s even a moderately-sized chain bookstore in Ginza that has about seven shelves worth of the latest trash in English.

But, just like everything else in Japan, books are expensive. I paid nearly fifteen hundred yen (about $15) for a tiny phrase book after I lost mine on the train, and the drugstore paperbacks that run an unbelievable seven dollars in the States are more than twice that price here.

So, yeah, I haven’t read much new stuff here.

I did bring with me to Japan a copy of Gabriel Garcia Marquez’s autobiography Living To Tell The Tale, but Marquez’s prose is like the purest heroin. It’s dark and rich and beautiful and too large a shot of it will kill you dead. I only dip into Living To Tell The Tale for a sentence or two--a page and a half at the very most--at a time, and generally only when the surreal quality of life in Tokyo requires the balance of an even more surreal life lived fully by a man who assures me that no day is ever wasted when one is a writer.

Recently, however, The Brain has been clamoring for some Hemingway and Chandler. Hemingway was actually mentioned in one of The Kaisha textbooks--where it was, much to my great scorn, misspelled “Hemmingway.” And Chandler? I can’t explain a craving for Chandler except to say that his writing is beautifully American in flavor and genre, a fact made even more beautiful when one considers that he wasn’t even an American.

Anyway, I, loathe to pay full-price for what I know can be found used, have been telling The Brain to wait. Wait, Brain, wait. I’ll have Dave bring some out with him when he comes. I’ll put in a request for a care package. We’ll get you some Hemingway and Chandler. Just...wait a few more months.

Well, fat chance on getting The Brain to wait for anything.

Today, The Brain was insistent. Feed me some Hemingway or some Chandler or pay the price, The Brain commanded. I don’t really want to know what the price is for disobeying The Brain when it comes to literature, so I decided that the only thing to do was to take on the seemingly impossible task of finding Hemingway and Chandler, used, in English, in Tokyo.

I sighed and dug out the five-thousand yen that was supposed to get me through ‘til payday (fat chance that) and got online to look for used bookstores in Tokyo.

I had heard, even before I left the States, about Good Day Books in Tokyo. Good Day Books had also been mentioned to me the first week I was in Japan by The Kaisha trainers, the men who’ve been here for years and who are also loathe to pay full price for the books they read on the train. Good Day Books it was.

Good Day Books is a used bookstore in Ebisu. There were tediously exhaustive directions to the bookstore online. (And when I say tedious, I mean, “It’s down the fifteen steps to your immediate right, just past the blue trash can with the gum stuck to the lower left-hand corner of the lid that has a small chip out of the upper right hand corner of the rim” kind of tedious.) Anyway, it turns out that the tedious directions were wrong but that the bookstore was somewhat ridiculously easy to find.

Exiting Ebisu station via the East exit at ground level, Good Day was about two minutes away “by walk” (a Japanified English phrase that one hears constantly and picks up unconsciously). I climbed into the elevator and smelled used books and thought, Ahhhhh.

The elevator doors opened, and I found myself in a little dusty slice of used book heaven. The bookstore is a single room with the usual braced, handbuilt, floor-to-ceiling shelving. It is relentlessly well-ordered, as the Japanese woman who works there with the Brit (who owns the place) seems to spend a fair bit of time organizing and stocking.

Hemingway? Check. An ancient copy of Men Without Women. I mean, crumbly ancient, for 300.

Chandler? Check. A paperback copy of Playback--one of the few Chandlers I’ve not had the pleasure of making myself acquainted with.

And, just to give The Brain something more to chew on: Some Nabokov and a book from the women’s section (YAY!!!) by an author named Diggs.

It took me less than about twenty minutes to find these little gems, and as I had left home hungry (and boarded the Yamanote Line going the wrong way so that I took an extra half-hour getting to the bookstore), I wanted lunch. I had passed no fewer than three coffee shops on the way to the bookstore and nothing appealed to me more than a leisurely hour or two over a coffee and some reading.

I carried my books up to the counter. “Irrashaimase’” the Brit said cynically, carefully to me. “As they say in this country,” he added.

“Oh, do they say that?” I asked innocently.

“Haven’t you heard it?” he asked.

“Once or twice,” I answered. I smiled at him. Please ring up my books, nice man, I thought.

Maybe unaccompanied women with a penchant for light banter don’t often wander into Good Day Books. He took his time. He picked up the Hemingway, mulled over it. Eyed the book. Eyed me. Rang it up.

He picked up the Chandler. Same routine.

He picked up the Nabokov. He commented on the fact that they sold ten copies of Lolita for every one copy of any other Nabokov. He was surprised that he couldn’t shock me with the Japanese Lolita complex. He was surprised that I was familiar with Genji Monogatari, which has its own bit of Rori-con (as the Japanese say it). “Sounds like Woody Allen, doesn’t it?” I asked.

He picked up the book by Diggs. The book is called Behind The Mask: When American Women Marry Japanese Men. It was perhaps the only time he faltered. I smiled, giving absolutely nothing away.

We chatted a bit more. He told me that this Sunday, they’d be having a guest speaker (I plan to go, as she, a woman named Sato, just wrote a book called The New Japanese Woman that I read about last week in Metropolis.) He also told me that Donald Richie would be speaking next month. I despise Donald Richie, so after saying, “I’ll come to heckle him,” I thought to ask, “Is he a friend of yours?” This is how The Brain runs things: Shoot first, think later.

He indicated the woman behind him, the friendly Japanese woman who’d been sneezing her way through a reorganizing effort in the nonfiction section. “He’s not my friend,” he said, “but he is her friend.”

At least I had the sense not to continue to badmouth Richie in his own friend’s store.

After noting the date for both speakers, we chatted a bit more about the bookstore and about the cockroaches in the apartments in Tokyo (Mine has none, thank god), and then I bid him goodbye and left the bookstore.

It was, again, ridiculously easy to find my way back to Ebisu station. I passed up a Dotour and a Pronto in favor of a S’bux. (Yes, they have them here too. Yes, the coffee is expensive and they don’t offer a Venti size. But today, I was all about the American experience in Tokyo: So I ordered a large coffee and a ham-and-cheese panini and a chocolate scone and sat and read through some Hemingway and some Chandler. After a while, I pulled out a journal I’ve recently started in which I’m recording impressions of the students I teach.

Think about that: A Spanish-American woman bought a couple of used books from America from a Brit in a Tokyo bookstore. The coffee probably came from Columbia and was served in a Tokyo branch of a chain that originated in Seattle. The panini was inspired by the Italians and the scone by, I’m guessing, the Scotch. Hemingway was an American writer writing about Spain and Chandler, a Brit writing about a California private detective.

In many ways, you can’t get more American than that.