The foreign language section

I have always been an avid reader. I would read anything I could get my hands on. My love of books led me to write when I couldn’t find the stories I wanted or when the characters didn’t behave like I thought they should. But for a while I had stopped reading. Books were expensive and I didn’t have money for more than a few dozen a year. I could have gotten a library card, sure, but there was more to it than that and I don’t really want to go into it. Suffice it to say, I just wasn’t reading.

But that all changed when I came to Japan. I started downloading books on Japanese culture and history on my Kindle. This kept me occupied for a while ate up the minutes on trains and busses, but that cold lump of circuits and megabytes has never held my interest like a real book. And I had precious few of these. I ran out in a matter of months.  So I slid back into the habit of not reading. I wrote, people watched, or just day dreamed as the world slid by the windows on my long public transit journeys.

Then I moved to Wakayama. On one of my first recon missions, I found a Book Off – a chain of used bookstores. On a whim I stepped inside and asked for the foreign language books. Eigo no hon wa doko desu ka? It took the clerk a minute to realize I wanted books in English and not books on English, but then he led me to a small section in the back corner of the store. 

I guess the foreign language section of any used bookstore will always look the same – a strange conglomeration of genres, topics, and languages. It was the same at the small, cozy bookstore I worked at in college. Cookbooks, textbooks, nonfiction, children’s – all nestled together on one shelf. A kaleidoscope of shapes and interests. Running your finger over the spines, it is impossible to get a sense of who the previous owner was.  It is like literary schizophrenia. And it is beautiful.

Standing in front of the foreign language section in this Japanese bookstore, I wondered what kind of gaijin traded these books. Charlie and the Chocolate Factory, One Hundred Years of Solitude, a book about the crown princess of Japan, Gone With the Wind, a Sookie Stackhouse novel, and Harry Potter in three languages. So many books that tell so many different stories. I take home as many of the fiction titles I can find that interest me – Opera Book Club books and best sellers mostly, but some classics and some obscure titles from authors who probably no one has ever heard of. Walking to the counter I have an arm full of reader’s ADD. And I wonder what they will think of me when I bring my own assortment of books to trade in.