Kobayashi Bookshop

Kobayashi Bookshop is the small family business at the center of Midori’s account of her upbringing and, later, a concrete marker of change in her family’s life. It supports a household and serves its neighborhood, but offers little financial room beyond that; after her father’s illness, Midori and her sister plan to sell it and divide the proceeds. The shop’s movement from a working local business to a shuttered, hollowed-out space gives material form to both the family’s constraints and its decision to make a new start.

A neighborhood business

When Toru Watanabe searches for Midori Kobayashi in the university records, he finds her family’s address and telephones the number listed. The man who answers identifies the business simply as Kobayashi Bookshop, establishing the shop as the family home and a point of contact between Midori’s university life and her family’s neighborhood.

Midori describes a shop far smaller and less glamorous than the image her schoolmates imagined when they heard that her father owned a bookshop. In practice, it is largely a magazine business: local housewives buy women’s magazines, comics sell steadily, and the shelves also hold popular paperbacks, practical manuals, pens, pencils, and notebooks. The stock reflects everyday demand rather than a prestigious literary collection. Midori’s joke about what her classmates had pictured underscores the gap between the cultural status they attached to a bookshop and the ordinary, commercial work that actually sustains her family.

The business is not, however, a failure. Midori explains that neighborhood customers have come for years and that the family makes deliveries. The shop earns enough to support four people, with no debts, and to help sustain two daughters at university. But it provides no money to spare for extras. Midori recalls the stress of school contributions and the fear that she might be unable to afford an outing with classmates if they chose an expensive place. The shop thus offers security of a limited kind: it keeps the household going, while its narrow margins make social and educational differences sharply felt.

The shop as home and meeting place

When Watanabe visits, the shop occupies the street-level floor of an old building, with the family’s living space above. He arrives before noon to find its front sealed by a metal shutter advertising the day on which a weekly newspaper is sold. After Midori calls down from an upstairs window, he raises the shutter, ducks underneath, and finds the shop dark inside. Bound piles of magazines crowd the route to the back stairs, which lead up to the family rooms.

The contrast between the dim shop and the brighter upper floor makes the building feel divided between work below and domestic life above. Watanabe first reaches a small, poorly lit parlour, then climbs to the second floor, where Midori is preparing food in a kitchen with newer cabinets and a bright sink. The shop is therefore not just the family’s livelihood: it is the entrance, working space, and lower level of the home in which Midori receives Watanabe.

The room and stock also give Watanabe a point of recognition. The modest neighborhood shop recalls the kind he used to visit as a boy when new comics came out, and standing outside brings on a nostalgic mood. That association contrasts with Midori’s more conflicted memories of growing up in a place her classmates misunderstood. The shop can be familiar and affectionate to a visitor while remaining, for the person who lives above it, a source of embarrassment and financial anxiety.

Midori’s account of class and family

Midori connects the shop’s modest scale to the mismatch between her family’s circumstances and the expectations of her school. She remembers being the only pupil who lived in Kita-Otsuka, Toshima, and having her father’s occupation listed as bookshop owner. Classmates treated the occupation as a kind of good fortune, imagining an enormous store where she could read anything. Their idea of the business, she explains, bore little resemblance to the magazine-led neighborhood shop her family actually ran.

That mismatch had practical consequences. Midori says the school had been an ill-suited environment for her family’s means: requests for contributions brought complaints at home, and she worried about the cost of socializing with classmates. The shop’s income could cover the family’s needs, but not the extras that would have made school life feel less precarious. Midori’s account turns the shop into a measure of the distance between other people’s assumptions about her family and her own daily experience of its limits.

The shop’s work is shared across the household. When asked who is running it, Midori says her sister is in charge, though she hates the work; an uncle in the neighborhood helps with deliveries, and Midori herself assists when she has time. She regards the business as manageable rather than physically demanding, while also acknowledging that the family could sell it if the work became too much. Its continuity depends on these relatives’ labor, not on a grand enterprise or a single owner’s efforts alone.

Sale and aftermath

After Midori’s father becomes seriously ill, the future of the shop changes. When Watanabe returns with Midori to the building, a paper notice on the shutter says it is temporarily closed. Inside, the smell of old paper remains, but half the shelves are empty and most of the magazines have been bundled for return. Compared with his first visit, the shop feels colder and more vacant. The changed inventory makes the closure visible: the family is no longer maintaining the ordinary flow of local sales.

Midori tells Watanabe that the family intends to sell the business. Her sister plans to marry the following year, while Midori has three years remaining at university. They expect the sale proceeds to support them for that period, and Midori plans to keep her part-time job. After the sale, she expects to share a flat with her sister for a while. She knows of a prospective buyer who wants to open a wool shop, so the building’s commercial life may continue under different ownership, even as the family leaves it.

Midori also remembers the effort her father put into establishing the shop and paying down its loan. She sees little left to show for that labor once the family prepares to sell, describing the value as having disappeared. The business’s ending is therefore not presented as a simple escape from an unwanted home or as a triumphant financial windfall. It is a practical decision shaped by illness, education, marriage, and the need to divide the family’s resources.

The sale is completed as planned. Midori and her sister move into a two-bedroom flat near Myogadani, a more upmarket neighborhood; Midori expects eventually to move out and rent a place of her own when her sister marries. When she invites Watanabe to lunch at the new flat, he observes that she seems to enjoy living there much more than she did above the shop. Kobayashi Bookshop consequently marks both the constraints of Midori’s earlier life and a transition away from them: the family loses its shared business and home, while Midori gains a different domestic setting and a plan for supporting herself.