Book Review: Days at the Morisaki Bookshop

Days at the Morisaki Bookshop

After a sullen and sad week, I decided to pick up a random book on my Kindle, Days at the Morisaki Bookshop. It’s not that I knew much about the book, it was just an excuse to stay longer in bed. And that I did.

I started reading it with laziness surrounding me. But with every passing page, I sensed the dullness segue into a peaceful resort.

An hour later, I was not in bed anymore. I was at the Morisaki bookshop. 

The book, Days at the Morisaki Bookshop, is about a girl in her mid-twenties who has lost her job and her boyfriend. Understandably, she is not feeling the thrill of being at the pinnacle of her youth. For days that turn into weeks, and weeks that turn into months, she sleeps. 

A few weeks later, she gets invited to stay at the Morisaki bookshop. It might sound troublesome but I resonated with our protagonist, which might explain why I was staying in bed on a beautiful Sunday, rejecting my friends’ invites to at least 3 different places. Anyway, I started believing that moving to the bookshop was not just for her, but for readers like me as well.

We stayed there; we slept; we read. The book was like a breath of fresh air for me. I did not know that words had the power to exude relaxation. It helped me disconnect from my crowded, noisy, polluted reality and jump into the calm, serene, easy-going, and beautiful lanes of used bookshops in a small village called Jimbocho.

Since it was a breezy read expressing the love for books and a quiet life, it contained various short notes on different books and quotes. One of them caught my attention:

“The act of seeing is no small thing. To see something is to be possessed by it. Sometimes it carries off a part of you, sometimes it’s your whole soul. (Motojirō Kajii’s Landscapes of the Heart)

At some point in the past, someone reading this book had felt moved to take a pen and draw a line under these words. It made me happy to think that because I had been moved by that same passage too, I was now connected to that stranger.

Another time, I happened to find a pressed flower someone had left as a bookmark. As I inhaled the scent of the long-ago-faded flower, I wondered about the person who had put it there. Who in the world was she? When did she live? What was she feeling?

It’s only in secondhand books that you can savor encounters like this, connections that transcend time. And that’s how I learned to love the secondhand bookstore that handled these books, our Morisaki Bookshop.”

It makes one wonder about the magic of books. How we can connect to anyone who comes across a book you’ve read and felt the things that you’ve felt.

The book progresses and I get to meet Momoko. Initially, I felt bad for Uncle Satoru (who is Gojo Satoru’s namesake and this small discovery made me chuckle). But as I kept reading, the depth of the situation hit me. 

Why is it so difficult to live and let live? Why does life keep interfering? Is the key to happiness trying to live but not let life happen? How is that even possible? Maybe that’s why people say one should enjoy the journey and not the destination. Because the journey is what happiness is- before life happens. To me, to you, and anyone.

By the time I finished, this book, Days at the Morisaki Bookshop, left me with a genuine smile—a quiet reminder that, sometimes, a simple escape is all we need. It was a well-spent Sunday.

Visiting Morisaki Bookshop wasn’t a grand journey for me, but a small, meaningful retreat from life’s noise. It doesn’t offer grand heroics or gut-wrenching tragedy. Instead, it offers something more rare: peace. This is a story that brings you back to yourself, like a warm hug after a hard week.

So if you ever feel lost, remember—everything will be fine. Breathe. You’re doing better than you think.

ABOUT THE BLOGGER

ESHA SHUKLA

Esha is a literature student. All she does is jump from one story to another, taking leaps into the many worlds she has created for herself via books, movies and art. Inspired by Wellington Wimpy, you can easily catch her eating a burger somewhere.