NABC Store Manager's Diary — September 5, 2026 (Sat)

Yesterday I attended an evening meeting in Tokyo and stayed overnight, so today I took the shinkansen from Tokyo Station back to Nagoya. After the meeting, at the social gathering an interesting book came up in conversation, so I stopped by the Maruzen bookstore in Marunouchi before boarding the shinkansen to try to buy it. Search results suggested it was in stock, but I couldn't find it on the shelf and unfortunately left Tokyo Station without buying it. The book in question was "Living the Continuation of That Day" — people said reading it makes you want to talk about it with someone, though whether it's actually good is another matter. Intriguing, right? A conversation you would expect at a gathering of book lovers. https://www.tsogen.co.jp/sp/isbn/9784488029548 On the shinkansen I had Kiyoken's shumai bento and got into a travel mood; before I knew it we had arrived at Nagoya Station. There's a talk event tonight, so I spent the day at the register preparing flyers and the like. Oh — new arrivals came in. A new book by popular tanka poet Soichi Chigusa, who is from Nagoya, arrived from the publisher Seijisha: the tanka collection "April Zōshi." The design is stylish and delicate, so we wrapped the copies on display in plastic; I left one unwrapped as a display copy. I also stocked a new ZINE. Someone I met at a ZINE event made one with their friends, so I took a few copies on consignment. It was their first ZINE and the type is extremely small — at my age I probably can't read it comfortably. If I force myself to read it I'll risk my eyes, but it seems fine for younger readers, so I'll let it be. Still, I'd like them to be a bit more considerate next time. Accessibility for reading is something I'd like to see considered even in the ZINE world. Just after 5 p.m. people began arriving for tonight's event. Chikura, a member of Zindies, also stopped by. They will be speaking at the Code4Lib JAPAN Conference 2026 at Kogakkan University in Ise starting tomorrow, and they joined tonight's event before that. Coincidentally, the speaker Kazufumi Iida also came by the store, so I introduced them. I wonder if Iida found it interesting. About 20 people attended Iida's talk. Remarkably, participants had come from Saitama, Tokyo, Kanagawa, Toyama, Kyoto, and of course locally as well. More than half of those attending were from libraries, and there were also bookstore staff among them. The theme of Iida's talk was "Ten Things People Who Work with Books Should Consider in a World Where 90% Read Few Books." Having spent my life among people who love printed text, I was deeply rooted in the old idea that reading equals reading printed characters, and I had a hard time adapting to younger people's new forms of reading. But it's clear we need to be more flexible in how we think about the act of "reading." From the floor, a bookseller from Toyama spoke about their shop's "Night Reading" initiative held in the bookstore, and a children's bookshop from Kanagawa talked about online reading groups with mothers. It seems many initiatives are growing in the field. The afterparty was a small group at a nearby Furaibo. I joined after finishing closing duties at the shop. During the talk, Iida mentioned that postwar reading-promotion activities originally targeted adults as well, which made me think that it may be somewhat wrong that reading promotion has become focused primarily on children. Reading-promotion efforts aimed at young people have already produced certain effects (even if those forms of reading were unexpected by older generations), and now it seems that promoting reading among adults may be what's needed. For people who don't read books, we should use every means to show that "reading" can be enjoyable. If we can do that, perhaps that's enough. Kazufumi Iida's next talk will be on Friday, November 6, at 19:00. The theme will be "Reading Comprehension and Its Subtle Relationship with Reading." Stay tuned. https://zindies.co/events/318?locale=ja