Non Hughes

(TL;DR: it’s What you are looking for is in the library by Michiko Aoyama, translated into English by Alison Watts.)

I keep a spreadsheet of the books I finish reading every year, with each entry scored out of twenty in a system-less vibe-based way. I also take extensive notes on things like plot, characterisation and prose, because they matter to me as a writer, but when it comes to the score it is entirely a gut feeling. A reader’s enjoyment of a story told, not a writer’s appreciation of the craft.

In the four years that I’ve kept this sheet, not a single book has scored 20/20. That’s not for a lack of talent or love, but because of a talk I once saw on software testing plans. Can’t remember who it was by now, but he would colour branches of a test plan from red to orange, amber, yellow, green and blue, based on how confident he felt in the testing that had been performed against that branch. He never marked a branch blue, he said, not once, because then there would be nothing to strive towards. Nothing to improve on. Most branches were yellow or green, and that was ‘good enough’, while leaving open the questions: what could be better? Is there something we could do to further improve our confidence in these tests? There has to be, even though this is the best I’ve seen so far.

I really love that. You might think I’m telling you this because What you are looking for is in the library was the first to score 20. It was not. It was the second book in four years to score 19 though, which means I can’t think of one single thing that might improve it. I was even tempted to bump The Final Empire by Brandon Sanderson down to an 18 because I loved this book so much, but it’s been 3 years since I read that so I might simply have forgotten how epic it was.

The book

What you are looking for is in the library is a collection of 5 stories about people living in Tokyo, who receive book recommendations and little needlefelt creations from the librarian at their local Community House. They each go to the library with a different goal in mind, and each receive a recommendation they don’t expect, along with what they asked for. Though the characters don’t have much in common on the surface – a retired salary man, a shop worker, an unemployed artist, a struggling mother and an accountant who longs to own an antique shop – they’re all looking for meaning or inspiration in their lives: what to do next, how to achieve a dream, how to find a dream to want to achieve in the first place.

The characters are distinct from one another, not just in their goals, but in their voices. I particularly admire how Aoyama was able to show their differences through the ways they find the Community House, and their impressions and descriptions of the library and librarian. They each meet this large, pale woman and make different assumptions about her, or focus on different details even when they see the same scene: a woman needle-felting, in the corner, with a biscuit tin full of arts supplies. It’s a small thing, but really wonderful.

The descriptions of people and place are spot on for me, precise and vivid: He had the same fusty air as his stock, which is often the case with proprietors of shops that sell old things. It’s not extravagant or flowery, and doesn’t need to be. The forthrightness of it is part of the charm.

The dialogue is awesome too, in a quiet way. The book describes deeply personal desires, people struggling in a world that feels unfit to support their dreams, but they never have big blown up arguments, and there’s no drama. I don’t know if this is a hallmark of Japanese (non-manga) fiction in general, or just the books I happen to have bought, but I pick them up to read about the silent struggles of day to day life in a way we rarely emphasise in the west. Conversations in which most of the words go unsaid, or are misunderstood in very ordinary ways. Simple descriptions of normal, day to day activities, environment or objects, whose ordinariness add weight and meaning to a scene.

Dunno, I think that’s just something I love in works translated from other languages, in general. Something magical happens in the translation process, in my opinion, little quirky sentences that you wouldn’t write the same way directly in English. Details you wouldn’t pick out in this country/culture, or simple, hardy words used despite the existence of more specific, evocative options, which somehow turn around on you to build a more specific, evocative scene than those options ever could.

That’s not to say that I love every translated work I’ve read just because they have nicely described details – The Vegetarian by Hang Kang holds the lowest score of any book in the spreadsheet, at 6/20, and I never finished Forbidden Colours by Yukio Mishima, despite both of these very beautifully ticking the box of ‘precise, perfect descriptions’.

What makes Aoyama’s book so special isn’t the prose, but its understanding of- and curiosity about the world, about society and what it means to have a place in both. Argh! I don’t have the writing prowess to describe how deeply moved I was by these five characters and their journeys. It felt almost like looking at myself, at different stages of my life, and maybe the stages still to come. I’ve been that customer-service-job kid who in their secret heart looks down on the people who have been stuck in the industry for a decade. I went through an unemployed given-up-on-my-dreams-but-don’t-know-how-to-follow-anything-else phase. I haven’t had a kid, nor have I retired from a company I worked at for 42 years, but I know the feeling that your life is slipping away in the 9-5, and the despair and fear of rejections, the certainty that you’re not going to make it mingling with the knowledge that you have to, because it’s the only thing that matters.

Overall, this book left me not with hope exactly, but with a feeling of inevitability, or maybe faith: I’m meant to be where I am now, and whatever happens next is what’s meant to happen. Not because it’s preordained or anything, but because I’m striving to achieve my goals, and that means I’m either going to succeed at them when I’ve grown and learnt enough, or I’m going to outgrow those goals and find something that suits me better. Yeah. I’ll succeed when I’m meant to succeed, so long as I keep going. All the failures and setbacks I meet along the way will be just the ones I need to meet, in order to reach success at the end.

So ya, that’s it. 19/20. Go read it.