ブックオフ
One of the big recent successes of Japanese retailing has been Book Off. The company started during the recession years of the 1990s selling second hand books and CDs, and has now expanded into used furniture and interior goods at its B Life stores. B Kids and B Sports recycle children's wear and sports goods.
The company claims that over 200 million books are circulated annually through its over 1,000 stores (many of them franchises). Book Off has also gone international with outlets in South Korea (Seoul), France (Paris), Canada (Vancouver) and a number of outlets in the USA (New York, Hawaii, LA, San Diego).
Books are purchased at a tenth of the new price and sold at half of the new book price. After a certain amount of time if the book remains unsold it is moved to the 100 yen shelf.
The Shirokanedai branch of Book Off (Tel: 03 5475 5696) has over 40,000 foreign-language books starting from 200 yen. The mega-store, which is open from 10am-8pm, also incorporates a bakery and cafe. Take Exit 2 from Shirokanedai Station on the Nanboku or Mita Line of the Tokyo subway.
Founded in 1990 by Hiroshi Sato, Book Off has over 7,000 employees, the vast majority of them part-time workers. The company has its HQ in Kanagawa Prefecture.
Book Off
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黒井千次
Life in the Cul de Sacby
Senji KuroiStone Bridge PressISBN: 1-8806-5657-4
216 pp
What began as a series of interlinking short stories, Kuroi has woven into an unsettling whole in this novel of Japanese suburban dis-ease. The various families in the titular cul-de-sac, whom we visit several times over the course of a few years, spend almost as much time speculating about their neighbours as they do preoccupied with their own problems.
And their problems are numerous: all the male-female relationships seem on the point of dissolution, with suppressed anxieties and dissatisfactions manifesting themselves as a wife's obsession with a stuffed raccoon doll, or a husband's straining to catch a glimpse of the vital young lovers in the place next door.
Kuroi spikes his prose with hallucinatory moments that he purposely does not set off from the mundane reality that has spawned them, leaving the reader momentarily off-balance and forced to work out whether they have actually happened, or are merely the product of a character's febrile imagination. Is the old well under the house overflowing, filling the kitchen? Does the little girl from next door have a thousand needles crammed into her mouth in a grotesque parody of an ancient Japanese vow of truthfulness?
Such moments capture well the domestic neurosis that can overtake family units when there is nothing much more to them than the fact that they live together. The only evidence of closeness is shown in fleeting gestures between the women of the street, who at least are able to empathise with the others’ plights. But in the end, no-one is shown as able to find their way out of their emotional cul-de-sacs.
Richard Donovan
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移動図書館
For small, rural towns in Japan with no public library, residents rely on a mobile library service provided by the nearest city with a public library.
In
Matsushiro, just outside Nagano, the mobile library calls once a week on Saturdays, from the main library in Nagano city.
AccessTo get to Matsushiro, take the Nagano Dentetsu Yashiro Line train to Matsushiro Station from Nagano. Alternatively, take the more frequent
local bus from Nagano Station to Matsushiro from bus platform #3 outside the station.
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