I am a big fan of Japanese fiction, and have read quite a few Japanese books, the most recent being Diary of a Void by Emi Yagi. So when I saw this book, What You Are Looking For Is In The Library by Michiko Aoyama, I couldn’t resist it:

What are you looking for?

So asks Tokyo’s most enigmatic librarian, Sayuri Komachi.

But she is no ordinary librarian.

Sensing exactly what someone is searching for in life, she provides just the right book recommendation to help them find it.

We meet five visitors to the library, each at a different crossroads:

• The restless retail assistant eager to pick up new skills
• The mother faced with a demotion at work after maternity leave
• The conscientious accountant who yearns to open an antique store
• The gifted young manga artist in search of motivation
• The recently retired salaryman on a quest for newfound purpose

Can she help them find what they are looking for?

Which book will you recommend?

The blurb above for this book does a very good job of summarising the plot. Each of the 5 people we meet along the way is at a junction in their life’s trying to work out what to do next in their life’s. Each one of them finds their local library, a library within a community centre in an unassuming location, one that they had not known about before, even if they had gone passed or close to the library on many occasions before.

Entering the library, they are not really sure exactly what to look for, but are advised to look for the librarian who can help them, a rather large woman who is found needle-felting small items when the person first sees her, an activity she returns to unceremoniously once she has given her recommendation and is done with the person. The book recommendations she makes are not books that each person would have chosen, but are definitely what they need and lives are changed by them.

There was a lot I liked about this book, the stories are charming, many of them are very relatable, and because there are 5 different people who go to the library struggling with their own issues, there is something in this book for a lot of people to relate to. It is an easy read, and is a feel-good book.

While I didn’t dislike this, the book did read to me like a set of stories that could have been part of a series of articles in a magazine, say. While there are elements of the stories that overlap, and recur in later stories, each person’s chapter is a standalone story. The salient details of describing the library, and the librarian are repeated every time, like you would need to if you were reading the stories after a break, or reading just this one story in this month’s magazine and didn’t pick up the following month’s copy. I personally found the repeated descriptions of the library and librarian a little annoying.

Would I recommend the book, mostly yes. I thought it was OK, but you do need to not mind that repetition of key elements of the book, and it is not a book that will stay with me for a long time now that I have read it. I would give it what I think is a generous 3 stars out of 5.