Jimbocho Bookshop

In a quiet corner of Jimbōchō, Tokyo's renowned bookshop district brimming with quaint antiquarian stores, a shop owner savors an end-of-day beer while browsing through newly arrived books. Behind him is a maze of rare first editions and used paperbacks, Russian novels and German monographs and English paperbacks that smell, eventually, like every paperback in every secondhand shop in the world. The maples turn. The awnings stay blue. Upstairs, a lamp burns orange above a plant on the sill. The owner lives above his work, the way many people used to.