* Copy courtesy of Simon & Schuster *
A bestseller in Japan, Dinner at the Night Library by Hika Harada is translated by Philip Gabriel (translator of The Travelling Cat Chronicles) and is my first foray into the seemingly exploding genre of Japanese comfort novels. The genre contains character-driven, cozy, feel-good stories set in everyday locations like bookstores or cafes and focusses on themes of relationships and loneliness. Usually featuring an illustrated cover and written to be uplifting in its examination of human connection in everyday life, I believe this was a fair representation of the genre.
The Night Library of the title is located outside Tokyo and contains collections of books both owned and written by famous authors now deceased.
"An old library . . . a library devoted just to writers' collections . . . definitely a most odd, unconventional sort of place." Page 112Our protagonist Otaha loves working with books and when she receives a message inviting her to apply for a job at the Night Library she can't believe her luck.
Open only at night, staff working at the library share her love of literature although nobody has ever met the owner. A series of workplace projects begin to take shape as collections are entrusted to the care of the library and books mysteriously appear on the shelves without being catalogued.
Before being employed by the Night Library, one of the characters worked in a used book store where books were judged on how new, clean and popular they were. I was shocked to read one of the practices employed in the used book trade:
"With old books, we'd just clean them up, using sandpaper to clean off what was called in the trade the upper part, the outside of the pages, which get faded and dirty, and then sell them." Page 183What? Surely this isn't a 'thing' but I put the book down to do a quick search and swiftly stumbled onto a bunch of videos showing book lovers how to remove foxing and yellowed page edges with a fine grit piece of sandpaper. I'm still deciding how I feel about this, would you ever do it?
Back to the book, and the library employs a dedicated cook to prepare dishes from the books held in the collection and I was certainly hungry while reading this cozy mystery. Otaha gets to know her coworkers and we learn some of their backstories as she tries to work out who the mysterious owner is.
Dinner at the Night Library by Hika Harada is a gentle cozy mystery with plenty of Japanese culture and a tonne of Japanese books and authors mentioned. Not having read widely of Japanese fiction, I couldn't enjoy the references or bookish chat between the characters but I'm sure many other readers will.
