The book on my desk is a 1968 Iwanami paperback edition of Sōseki's Kokoro, bought last Sunday at a stall on the south side of Yasukuni-dōri for ¥300. The cover is foxed at the corners. The previous owner has underlined a single sentence on page 142, in pencil, and made a small mark in the margin shaped like a question mark, which I have been thinking about since I opened the book on the train home. Whoever they were, they were reading carefully. The book has been carried, and read, and shelved, and sold on, and is now on my desk, where I am about to read the same sentence and try to imagine what the question was.
This essay is about Tokyo's used-book ecosystem — the streets, the shops, the chains, the small ones I love most — and about why buying used books is, for me, the most natural and the least effortful expression of mottainai I practise. I do not think of it as a virtue or a discipline. I think of it as a habit that pleases me. The pleasure is part of why it works.
Jimbocho, briefly described
If you have not been to Jimbocho, the easiest way to describe it is this: it is a neighbourhood in central Tokyo where, for roughly six city blocks, almost every ground-floor shop is a used bookshop. The density is unusual even by Japanese standards. There are over 130 antiquarian and secondhand bookshops within fifteen minutes' walk of the Jimbocho metro exit. Several have been in continuous operation since before the war. The shop fronts open onto the pavement; many of the books live outdoors, on tiered shelves under canvas awnings, in any weather short of rain.
The neighbourhood developed in the late nineteenth century around the cluster of universities — Meiji, Nihon, Senshu — that anchored the area. Students sold textbooks; shops bought them; the trade compounded. By the 1920s, Jimbocho was already what it remains today: the largest used-book district in the world, by some measures, and certainly the most concentrated. The annual Kanda Used Book Festival in late October closes the streets entirely and lines them with stalls; even on a normal Sunday in May, the pavements are slow with people stopping to examine spines.
I go on Sundays, usually in the late morning. The shops keep idiosyncratic hours and most are closed on Wednesdays. The browse is, by design, slow. The pleasure is in the slowness.
Book Off, complicated
I have a complicated relationship with Book Off, the chain of large used-media stores that has expanded since the late 1990s into nearly every Japanese suburb and several Asian and American cities. The complications are worth being honest about.
Book Off is, on one hand, the most successful book-recycling operation in Japanese history. It has kept hundreds of millions of volumes circulating that would otherwise have gone to landfill or paper recycling. Its prices are extraordinarily low; a paperback that retailed for ¥800 may sell at Book Off for ¥110, which has measurably broadened access to reading for a generation of Japanese readers who could not have afforded new prices. By any reasonable mottainai accounting, this is good.
On the other hand, Book Off pays sellers vanishingly small amounts, often a single yen per book, regardless of the book's actual value. Antiquarian dealers in Jimbocho have, for two decades, told stories of rare first editions arriving at Book Off, being priced at ¥110, and being snapped up within hours by traders who flip them at their true market price. The system is structurally indifferent to the mottai of individual books. It treats books as fungible weight.
I shop at Book Off occasionally — for paperbacks of recent novels, mostly, where the chain's volume genuinely benefits the reader. I do not shop there for anything I would consider precious. The categories are different practices, even if they look the same from the outside.
Ohya Shobo
The shop I love most in Jimbocho is Ohya Shobo, a narrow three-storey antiquarian dealer that has specialised, since 1882, in pre-modern Japanese woodblock prints, illustrated books, and old maps. It is not a shop one visits for bargains; the prints are properly priced and many of them are out of my reach. It is a shop one visits to be in the presence of objects that have lasted.
The owner — a quiet older man whose name I have never asked because asking would feel like an intrusion — knows his stock by hand. I have watched him, twice, retrieve a specific seventeenth-century woodblock from a tightly packed drawer of identical-looking folios in under thirty seconds. The retrieval is an act of memory that I do not think can be transferred. When his shop closes, eventually, the memory will close with it.
I have bought one thing from Ohya Shobo, three years ago: a small Edo-period map of central Tokyo, framed now over my writing desk. It cost more than I had intended to spend that month. It is, reliably, the object in my apartment I look at most. The mottainai accounting on this purchase is impossible to write down. The map's mottai, accumulating since the 1820s, is not measurable in yen.
Bookmoby and the small new shops
A more recent layer of the Tokyo book ecosystem is the small independent bookshop — places like Bookmoby in Shimokitazawa, or Title in Ogikubo, or Cow Books in Nakameguro, which sit somewhere between secondhand and curated-new and operate on a scale that allows their owners to know individual customers' reading lives.
Bookmoby in particular I find quietly important. It is a small shop on a side street, with a curated selection that mixes used and new, and an owner who reads everything she stocks. The mottainai claim of a shop like this is different from Book Off's and different from Ohya Shobo's. It is not about volume, and it is not about preservation of rare objects. It is about the slow loop in which a book passes from a reader who has finished it through a curator who knows it to a new reader who needs it. The loop reduces waste of both books and reading attention.
I bought a copy of Yoko Tawada's Memoirs of a Polar Bear at Bookmoby last winter for ¥980, used, with a small inscription on the inside cover from one friend to another, dated 2018. I have kept the inscription. When I pass the book on, eventually, I will leave it in.
The economics, briefly
Because I am a personal-finance writer, I will give the numbers, even though they are not why I do this.
For the past four years I have bought roughly seventy per cent of my books used. The average used book in my purchasing pattern costs about ¥350; the average new book I would have bought instead costs about ¥1,800. The difference, across roughly sixty books a year, is around ¥87,000 annually. I am not a particularly heavy reader by Japanese standards.
The savings are real. They are also entirely beside the point. I have never once stood in front of a Jimbocho stall and thought about the savings. The ¥87,000 a year is a side effect of doing something else, and the something else is the practice. Money saved as a side effect of a pleasure tends to be money that stays saved. Money saved as a project tends to leak.
Inheriting the margins
What I want to end on is the small thing that, in my honest accounting, keeps me coming back. It is the marginalia.
Almost every used book I own has been read by someone before me, and a meaningful fraction of them carry the small evidence of that reading. A pencil underline. A folded corner. A pressed leaf, once, between pages 88 and 89 of a 1975 collection of Tanikawa Shuntarō's poems. A receipt used as a bookmark, dated 1992, from a coffee shop in Sapporo that I subsequently looked up and found is still in business. A child's note tucked into the back of a worn copy of Botchan that I cannot read because the handwriting is too young, but which was clearly important enough to its author to be slipped between the last page and the cover.
These are not damage. They are, by my reading, small contributions to the book's continuing life. The book is not less because someone underlined page 142. The book is more. It has been used. The mottai of the book — its essential thingness — has been thickened by the previous reading, in the same way the wool coat is thickened by its darned elbow.
When I finish a used book I tend to leave my own small marks in it before passing it on. A folded corner where I would like the next reader to look. Sometimes a single underline. Almost never a comment; the silent mark is more generous than the explained one. The book then goes back into the loop — to a friend, to a sale shelf, to one of the small free-book boxes that have begun appearing in Tokyo neighbourhoods over the last few years.
This is the practice. It is not really about the money saved or the trees not cut, although both of those are true and both matter. It is about being part of a chain of attention that did not begin with me and will not end with me. The book on my desk is being read for what may be its third or fourth time. The pencil mark on page 142 is older than I am. The question in the margin is one I am about to answer in my own way, knowing someone else asked it first.
This is, I think, what mottainai means when it is most quietly itself. Not refusal of waste. Continuation of use. The object completes its purpose by being passed forward, slightly thicker each time, until the chain quietly closes.