NABC Store Manager's Diary — Friday, July 3, 2026

I felt down before going to work today. I'm not sure whether it's because of Roki Sasaki's pitching, because this month's sales aren't good, or because I'm dieting and low on energy, but there's an event tonight that I'm looking forward to, so I need to prepare for it. In the afternoon I went to work. This week the area west of the station has been very quiet. Since the typhoon, people's movements seem a bit stalled. Today Kotomi, a zine creator who has recently been working hard on tanka as well, came by the shop. I handed her the reprint of the poetry collection we made together. Since she seemed to have time, we chatted over tea at Cafe River. It's been a while since we had a long conversation. We talked about the shared shelf. Kotomi rents a shelf at LbIo in Kita Ward and apparently does quite well. My home bookshelf is full, so I was thinking about selling some books through online used-bookstores, but becoming a shelf owner at LbIo sounds fun and might give me hints for managing our shared shelf (not that I'm the one running it), so I'll ask Kotomi to put me on the waiting list. After all, what sells on a shared shelf probably changes depending on the shelf owner and the shopkeeper's atmosphere. In the evening there was a talk event by Hibi Yoshitaka, author of The Bookstores of the Empire and a professor at Nagoya University's graduate school. He spoke last November, and this time I invited him again to mark his double win this fiscal year of the Watsuji Tetsurō Cultural Prize and the Japan Publishing Society Award. The Bookstores of the Empire is a major work tracing the footsteps of Japanese who crossed the sea from Japan to open bookstores in places occupied by the Japanese military—such as the Korean Peninsula, Manchuria, Taiwan, Southeast Asia, the Chinese mainland, and North America. It's 400 pages and priced at 5,400 yen, so it's not an easy sell, but it's not only very readable—it is genuinely fascinating. You can almost hear the breathing of the booksellers who crossed the sea. I'd love to see NHK adapt it into a drama. I especially recommend it to people involved in bookstores and publishing. By the way, the Nagoya City Library has only one copy, at Tsurumai. Branch libraries rarely purchase books priced over 5,000 yen unless there's a compelling reason. There are 2.35 million residents and 21 libraries in the city, though. It's a shame.