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A review by justinkhchen
Days at the Morisaki Bookshop by Satoshi Yagisawa
3.0
3.5 stars
Harmless and inoffensive, Days at the Morisaki Bookshop is another entries to the gradually growing collection of translated Japanese 'cozy' literature, similar to Before the Coffee Gets Cold. While I appreciate the gentleness and the intimacy of a single location, human-focused stories, I can't help but feel something is lost in translation—the unadorned prose feels superficial, and the emotional delivery is more Hallmark greeting cards rather than something more heartfelt and profound, as if the English vocabulary only managed to convey the straightforward, surface level action, without contextualizing the nuance in the subtext.
While I'm happy to see contemporary Japanese literature making wave in the market, I don't think for me reading stories like this in English is the best option. Even though I can't read Japanese, I'll be curious to re-read this in its Chinese iteration to see if I feel any different!
Harmless and inoffensive, Days at the Morisaki Bookshop is another entries to the gradually growing collection of translated Japanese 'cozy' literature, similar to Before the Coffee Gets Cold. While I appreciate the gentleness and the intimacy of a single location, human-focused stories, I can't help but feel something is lost in translation—the unadorned prose feels superficial, and the emotional delivery is more Hallmark greeting cards rather than something more heartfelt and profound, as if the English vocabulary only managed to convey the straightforward, surface level action, without contextualizing the nuance in the subtext.
While I'm happy to see contemporary Japanese literature making wave in the market, I don't think for me reading stories like this in English is the best option. Even though I can't read Japanese, I'll be curious to re-read this in its Chinese iteration to see if I feel any different!