Friday, June 13, 2002
After our walk along the bay, I maneuver the Mancunian to Japantown, because I really, really want one last meal of Japanese food. We're the kind of couple that rarely spends money on anything but food and books and Japantown had exactly the food and books I wanted. The Japanese bookstore, Kinokuniya, was the first place I wanted to visit when I arrived in San Francisco, and it made a fitting last place, too.
The irony is not lost on me. Whenever I went to a larger city in Japan (Kobe, Osaka, Kyoto), I always headed straight for Maruzen, a bookstore with English-language books. Now in the US, I'm looking for a store with a decent selection of Japanese-language books.
As it turned out, I didn't buy a single thing. All of the books in Japanese are still much too difficult for me to grasp. Just leafing through them, looking at pages and pages of kanji, made my heart sink. I have very serious doubts about my ability to ever learn Japanese. In the section of books about Japanese language, I was happy to see that all the ones I liked, I already owned. So I resolved not to buy another book until I gotten through the ones I already have. I did bring home their catalog, though.
As it turns out, it was the Mancunian who bought something: a トトロ T-shirt. I was really surprised he bought it, but touched, too, that he doesn't just tolerate the movie, but loves it on his own.
Posted by M Sinclair Stevens
June 23, 2003
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Shopping for Japanese books.