Nanako Hanada’s The Bookshop Woman chronicles the unique magic books have to connect people. In her 30s with her marriage and career on the brink, Nanako joins an online matching service that she refers to as PerfectStrangers. Though it resembles a dating site, it’s meant to connect people for thirty-minute conversations around shared interests. To make her profile stand out, she sets a goal to give personalized book recommendations to every person she meets through the site. Her profile reads:
Hello, I’m the manager of a very unusual bookshop. I have access to a huge database of over ten thousand books. I’ll recommend one that’s perfect for you.”
The Bookshop Woman draws readers in with this unconventional premise, and the author’s retellings of her encounters with strangers are both lighthearted and introspective. The vignettes of her half-hour sessions across Tokyo provide considerable room for reflecting on how people portray themselves online and in-person, and the shifting nature of identity as they navigate between the two.
Thanks to the advice of a couple of veteran users of PerfectStrangers, Nanako changes her profile picture to portray herself more authentically. As she gains popularity and climbs in the site’s rankings, she matches with more and more people. Through the process of discovering enough information to make a recommendation that each individual would enjoy, she also deepens her understanding of herself and society. These brief meetings with strangers take on special significance for her.
It was fun to see how deep you could go in that limited time. It was like free diving to the bottom of a lake, clinging on to the rope and letting yourself slide down and down, and then clasping hands with someone on the lake bed for a brief moment before resurfacing once more. The time I spent this way always shone with a special brilliance to me.
Although not every encounter goes smoothly, she remains passionate about her project. For example, early on, she suggests several books to a digital nomad named Takashima, but he replies that he had already read them ages ago. After this disappointing experience, she develops her own set of guidelines for recommending books, noting that the process requires subtle alchemy, a bit like fortune telling.
Whimsical illustrations and line drawings of profile pictures from PerfectStrangers can be found throughout. These reinforce the individuality of each person Nanako meets during her journey. Especially in the chapter “People in Transit”, she comes into contact with many who are going through periods of change. Their conversations don’t shy away from life’s struggles, touching on career transitions, relationship troubles, loss of loved ones and homelessness.
By doing what she loves, Nanako’s future becomes increasingly clear—it is as if the door to her new life opens before her.
All this made me realise that if you just did things a little bit differently, it could lead to new encounters—even if you were still in the same old place you always had been. I’d dived into the world of PerfectStrangers to escape my own lacking life… And yet when I’d given the door just a little push, I’d found another world right there on the other side, one that had seemed far away but had really been so close: the World of Booksellers.
In Japan, The Bookshop Woman was published in 2018, becoming a bestseller and later inspiring a television drama. Now that it is available in an English translation by Cat Anderson, it provides readers outside of Japan with a glimpse into its bookstores and introduces a variety of titles, many of which aren’t yet available in English translation. In addition to those mentioned within the text, an additional list of recommendations from the author, spanning a wide range of genres, is available at the back of the book.
The Bookshop Woman will resonate with book lovers everywhere, thanks to its heartfelt exploration of human connection through literature.