C.S. Lewis in Tokyo

“Books we must have, though bread we lack.” - Alice Brotherton


There’s more to Tokyo than those listed in the tourist guides. Amidst the busy intersections, you’ll discover many bookshops even inside train stations. You get the feeling you've walked into the grounds of Penguin and the Thinkers Library every time you walk off the main tourist paths. I know many bookish people who enjoy not looking in sceneries but going around libraries and bookshops. Though, finding a foreign/English book is a colossal challenge. There wasn't much to look at if you couldn't read Japanese and it is highly unlikely that you will find English shops of that kind in a country where the language gap is so apparent.


But I was delighted to see C.S. Lewis’ Narnia books, where the popular "The Lion the Witch and the Wardrobe" story will be seen in theaters before year end, on the display racks and shelves of English-language paperbacks. I have a complete volume of this series already but not his other classic works on Christian apologetics which is scarcely to be found on these Japanese bookshops (for obvious reasons). I was eager to complete my C.S. Lewis library and I felt that I was in the precise position of Mel Gibson character in the ‘Conspiracy Theory’ movie, hunting for J.D. Salinger’s ‘The Catcher in the Rye”.

A couple of months of searching and I soon found six foreign and English bookstores around Tokyo. Not a bad ratio for book-loving Japanese people, where a book and a sit on a train is “very heaven” to them - whether devouring manga comics or real books to the tune of the whining and screeching of trains. Almost accidentally, I was led to two of these shops as a result of my searching for musical instruments. Then came my greatest discovery-one of these latter shops has one shelf dedicated to the famous witty Oxford don right off the long rows of other bestsellers. A sheer delight indeed. These long-coveted books became the chief drain of my spared money for months. Thanks, too, for half of these English bookshops sell and trade at proportionate prices.

I was not surprised though that Lewis books are so well loved in Japan. Authors like Kazumi Yamagata and the Yagyu brothers ( Naoyuki and Bou) have written books on him. Mineko Honda, a professor of English at Nishogakusha University authored the first serious book about Lewis written in English ( excluding articles and dissertations by other authors). Then there’s the C. S. Lewis Society of Tokyo which started almost two decades ago.

Tokyo really is an oasis for foreign bookworms like me. I always wish that the “spirit grocers” ( the kindly English/Irish pubs, as Lewis used to call it ) around Tokyo, will one day be transformed to libraries with passages and landings also lined with books. #