“What Are You Looking For?”
This is the question that reference librarian Sayuri Komachi asks of every patron who visits her desk in the community house library. She asks them further questions to get a better feel for which books they would find useful, and then she prints out a list of books for them to check out. But with each list of books Mrs. Komachi gives out, there’s one book that doesn’t fit with the rest. A children’s story in a list of instruction books for computer skills. A book on plant biology among books about starting a business. A book on spiritual symbolism of the moon amidst a collection of children’s books. To each patron’s surprise, the book that doesn’t belong turns out to be the one they needed at that particular time.
This is the premise of What You Are Looking For Is In the Library by Michiko Aoyama.
The book is split into five chapters, each told from a different character’s point of view and focusing on their struggles. A young woman fresh out of college. A middle-aged man wishing to start his own business. A career woman with a toddler. An unemployed daydreamer. And a man adjusting to retirement.
What I find striking about this book is how it reads like a Studio Ghibli story. The prose is slow and detailed, but it never feels like the story is dragging where it shouldn’t. It also gives each character a distinct voice in the way they talk, the words they use, and the details they focus on.
Some readers wish we had more details about Mrs. Komachi and how she does what she does, but I disagree. We do learn some things about her in the time she gets—she loves honey dome cookies, she passes the time with felting, and the hairpin she wears is a special gift she got from her husband. Readers also learn more about what she enjoys and what she thinks about things from one of the chapters. But I think if we were to learn more than that, it would spoil the magic of the story, like learning a magician’s secrets.
What You Are Looking For Is In The Library also feels like a self-help book in a lot of ways, so at times it can come off as over-simplified and preachy. But the lessons it doles out are each character’s own personal takeaways from the books they read and the experiences they have, and the resolutions in their stories aren’t so simple or predictable. For example, the middle-aged man checks out a book called How Do Worms Work, and his takeaway is how the parts of plants above and below ground are like having parallel careers.
What I didn’t like about the book was how each character responded to how large Mrs. Komachi is. I don’t know how Japanese culture sees fatness, but it bugged me that all five characters were shocked at how big she was, like they’d never seen a fat woman before. And the fat-shaming language some of them use to describe her only makes it worse.
On the whole, What You Are Looking For Is In The Library is a cozy read with a few surprises in store. So if you have a chance to check it out for yourself, please do. And if you can, I recommend checking out the audiobook version, as they picked excellent voice actors for each of the five narrators.
Final rating: 4.9/5
Many thanks for reading.
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