In a frenetic, noisy and chaotic metropolis like Tokyo, there is a special district where it seems that time has stopped: it is Jinbōchō, the neighborhood of the libraries. The name comes from a samurai who lived in the area at the end of the 17th century. At the end of the 1800s, three universities opened in the area: the Meiji, the Chūō and the Nihon, which favored the birth of bookshops and literary circles, but in 1913 a terrible fire destroyed practically everything. The one who tried to restore the right importance to the neighborhood was the university professor Shigeo Iwanami who started a publishing house and in a short time bookstores, literary cafes and other publishing houses opened.
This area is located in the Chiyoda area and includes about 160 bookstores, including some of the oldest and most famous in Tokyo. In one of these bookshops the novel “An evening with friends a Jinbōchō” written by Satoshi Yagisawa and edited by Feltrinelli.
Satoru is the owner of one of these bookstores and is a great literature expert; inside his shop, the Morisaki bookshop, there are almost exclusively novels published between the Meiji era and the early years of the Showa era. The shop is very small and the first thing you notice upon entering is the quantity of books it contains: they can be found not only on the shelves but also in every corner of the floor and they release a particular musty smell which characterizes the shop.
A series of regular customers follow one another, extravagant, as indeed is the bookstore, who don’t always come in to buy but also just to comment on a book they have read or simply to have a chat with Saturo. His niece Takako often visits him who, employed in an office in the city, takes refuge in her uncle’s shop in search of some peace, fantasizing among the pages of those books. The life of each character initially continues with great serenity until the succession of a series of events and coincidences leads Takako to ask questions that create more and more anguish. Uncle Satoru will dissolve all doubts and together they will take back their lives and make their dreams come true.
By Valeria Turino