What You Are Looking For Is in the Library
Michiko Aoyama’s slender novel, What You Are Looking for is in the Library (2020, English translation 2023) connects a series of vignettes about largely disconnected individuals living in contemporary Tokyo. The central hub of the many spoked story is the community library with its large librarian who seems like a character who has stepped out of a Miyazaki film like My Neighbor Totoro. She sits needle felting, her back turned to patrons. When approached, however, she asks a simple question, provides locations for books, and recommends a book that may seem wildly off base but ends up speaking to the deepest of her patrons’ needs. Every exchange with a new patron follows the same ritual: she asks the simple yet profound question: “What are you looking for?” After listening to their response, she prints a list of book recommendations, then offers a “bonus gift” of a small felted creations. As the stories accumulate (there are five in total), characters intertwine only slightly, but the community library plays a role in them all. First a disillusioned twenty-three year old salesperson, then a middle-aged man with a dream that seems unrealistic, begin the parade of patrons into whose hearts the librarian seems to peer. The character I connected with most was the one in the middle: the middle-aged professional woman who is also mother to young child. Each vignette reads like a short story told in first person. A black and white line drawing precedes each chapter/vignette in which the reader scopes out her next narrator. Guided by the wise selections of the otherworldly librarian, metaphor, story, and the never-to-be-underestimated power of human connection provide each character precisely what they need. And yes, they find it in the library, just as the title suggests they will.
As the book continues each seeker grows older (23, 35, 40) and then younger (30 NEET: Not in Employment, Education, or Training) concluding with a 65-year-old retiree but all their paths lead to the librarian’s corner at the community center library. All respond to her question, “What are you looking for?” with slight discomfort, focusing on some subject matter they feel they aught to pursue. In time, however, each character understands that while the question might be about a book query, it also involves something bigger. The simple act of being asked sets them on a path to make a change, embrace a truth, or follow their dreams even if they hadn’t realized what that was they aspired to do. In other words, What You Are Looking For is in the Library is a book about small epiphanies. It is hopeful and life-affirming. It also demonstrates the incredible power of libraries (and reading) to improve people’s lives.
As I read this small novel, it reminded me somewhat of Joyce’s Dubliners. Like Joyce’s first book, this book takes place in a city populated by people living normal lives. As with Dubliners, characters from one story cross paths with characters from other stories. However, Joyce famously set out to portray the paralysis he observed in the people of Dublin, Aoyama’s stories champion growth, the antithesis of paralysis. Indeed, every story includes a character experiencing some level of inner crisis, but by the story/chapter’s conclusion, that character has shifted his or her thinking, even if only slightly, and has grown through the stasis of their original troubles. In other words, this little book is anything but glum; it provides readers with ample opportunity to reflect on self-growth and champion human connection as a powerful tool to become our best selves.
Bibliography:
Aoyama, Michiko. Translated by Alison Watts. What You Are Looking for is in the Library. Hanover Square Press: 2023.
A Few Great Passages:
“How could I have forgotten the story when I'd read it so many times before? Or misremembered, more like. It's fun, though, to reread a book I loved as a kid. You pick up new things” (32).
"’In a world where you don't know what will happen next, I just do what I can right now’” (42).
“‘As long as you continue to say the words 'one day,' the dream is not over. Maybe it will simply remain a beautiful dream. It may never come true.
But that is one way to live, in my opinion. The days go by more happily when you have something to dream about. It's not always a bad thing to have a dream, with no plan for ever carrying it out’” (77).
“And the strange thing is that surrendering myself to the wonders of a world apart from humans makes me begin to feel calmer” (96).
“Every day felt like I was merely going around in circles, marking out time, day after day, and going nowhere” (135).
“What am I looking for? I could give many answers: my future path in life, a way of releasing my frustrations, the patience to raise a child, etcetera. But where would I find them? And besides, this was not a counseling room.
‘Picture books,’ I answered simply” (138).
“Being born is probably the most difficult thing we ever have to do. I am convinced that everything else that comes afterward is nowhere near as hard. If you can survive the ordeal of being born, you can get through anything” (140).
“[W]hen it comes to happiness nothing is better or worse-—there is no definitive state” (161).
“How uncanny the way what one reads can sometimes synchronize with reality”(164).
"’You may say that it was the book, but it's how you read a book that is most valuable, rather than any power it might have itself’" (168).
“What are you looking for?
When Ms. Komachi asked me this question, my first thought was: I'm still searching. Searching for somewhere I can be accepted as I am. Just one place is all I need. Somewhere to be at peace”(223-224).
“I believe that every kind of contact between people makes them part of society. And that goes beyond the present moment. Things happen as a result of our points of connection, in the past and in the future” (285).
“Books will always be essential for some people. And bookshops are a place for those people to discover the books that will become important to them” (288).
"’When I buy a book, I also become part of the process as a reader. People working in the book industry are not the only ones who make the publishing world go round; most of all it depends on the readers.
Books belong to everybody: the creators, the sellers and the readers. That's what society is all about I believe’" (291).
“[Y]ou have to understand that even if I have some inkling about a person, I don't tell them anything. People find meaning in the bonus gifts for themselves. It's the same with books. Readers make their own personal connections to words, irrespective of the writer's intentions, and each reader gains something unique” (296).
“Until now, I have always thought of things in terms of whether or not they could be useful to me in some way. But that may have become my stumbling block.
Now I know the importance of the heart being moved” (299).
