BOOKS LEFT ON TRAINS
This was in 1998 when Shimokitazawa was still Shimokitazawa. Before they took down the Ekimae Shokuhin Ichiba. Back then if you saw an afroliminal on those street 1 in 10 chances it was me.
My first visit to Tokyo, I stayed almost a month. Half my time I was at my girl J’s tiny densho apartment on the far side of the Tama River and the other half in my best friend’s crib in Shimokitazawa. This was back in 1998 when Shimokitazawa was still Shimokitazawa. Before they took down the Ekimae Shokuhin Ichiba to put in the new train station. Back then if you saw an afroliminal gaijin wandering around Shimo in the middle of the day, one in ten it was me.
My boy had a salaryman job and my girl taught English at NOVA, which meant long hours for both of them. I was on my own a lot of the time. I was supposed to be writing my novel, but of course I didn’t. Mostly what I did was go to the gym (my weightlifting era) or dérive around Tokyo, with my tiny little train book and notepad.
I’ll have to really write about those trips in more depth, but for now there’s one thing I want to tell you about, a phenomenon that I used to see on the trains all the time.
Tokyo trains in those days were crowded just like now, but they were also packed with readers. I mean it, seemed like every damn commuter had their beaks stuck in a book, extremely heartening for a young writer. Even cooler was the fact that a lot of folks when they finished reading a newspaper or a magazine or a big thick collection of manga would leave it on the train for someone else to enjoy. That custom delighted the shit out of me. Nothing made my day like boarding a train and seeing a magazine or a manga beckoning from the seat in front of me. I couldn’t read a word of Nihongo but I would flip through these public books, thrilled by all they represented.
The book-leaving phenomenon was a normal part of the commuter culture of the time. Not anymore. First off, people don’t read like that anymore, not really, no one book-leaves much, either. I spent the last year in Tokyo and during that whole run on all my train rides I kept a sharp watch for a left-behind book or magazine or manga and never found one. Towards the end of my sabbatical I reminisced about the custom with a couple of my Japanese friends and one of them told me that her father used to love doing that. It used to bother her as a kid but he explained to her this is how I share the joy of what I’m reading.
How I share the joy of what I’m reading.
Because that was part of it, wasn’t it? I couldn’t read the books I used to find on the seats (or above on the racks) but when I held them I knew I was partaking in something remarkable, book culture materialized. Not only its generosity, but its joy.
A vanished or vanishing tradition, but one I’ve clearly never forgotten. Took hold of me, it did, just like Japan took hold of me. A tradition, also, that I continue to honor in my own small ways. Whether I’m in NYC or on the train to Jiyugaoka I will still sometimes leave a book on the seat in the hope that someone will receive the joy. (In Japan it’s always a manga that I wanted to look at, but can’t read.)
Back in 1998, Tokyo folks left books on trains because they knew there would be a reader for them. These days I leave books because I hope there will be one.
This is beautiful and quietly tragic. I think audiobooks are a valuable art form, but I also wish we weren't collectively resigned to attention being so continually chopped at as to be without a culture of reading. If the country that considers Murakami a pulp writer and looks askance at Americans for seeing him as Lit-er-ature isn't reading anymore, are we entirely screwed?
Ain't that something. Does anybody here feel like free little libraries approximate this feeling? If I walk past a stoop with books laid out on the sidewalk or a little library mailbox in somebody's lawn, it's a joy. I don't have this same feeling that a stranger left a specific book to share their delight, but it's a joy and a curiosity, for sure.