There are some books that want you to start your own bookshop, replete with a small cafe for reading as you sip your favorite coffee. Nanako Hanada’s „The Bookshop Woman: My Year Transforming Lives – One Book at a Time“ is one of those.

I’ve been reading English and German translations of Japanese novels every now and then, especially after Toshikazu Kawaguchi’s „Before the Coffee Gets Cold“ became famous on TikTok some years back. I am not on Tiktok by the way, but I was curious that people chose to read a book after watching a reel, and decided I would like to check it out.

Since then, I’ve been a regular reader of translations of Japanese novels, also because they are refreshingly drama-free. I love how the protagonists, who have often experienced a big setback in their lives navigate through their trauma gently, yet experiencing the entire spectrum of emotions that one goes through after a traumatic event, like the death of a partner or a friend or some other, similar loss.

I picked up Hanada’s „The Bookshop Woman“ precisely for this reason while at my local library in Germany. Hanada’s book is about a woman, Nanako, who decides to leave her husband and roams around aimlessly for some time, living in hotels and cheap hostels until she realises she needs to get a grip on her life. A bookseller by profession, Nanako joins a social app called Thirty Minutes and begins meeting people and recommending books to them.

Her life on the app and the resulting social interactions lead her to question her own life and choices and get to know what drives other people. She details her journey into bookselling, the art of interacting with people, finding their hidden interests and motivations and finally, the art of recommending a book to someone with the hope that they will like it.

My favorite part of the book is where she writes instructions on how to recommend a book for a person, and here are the ones that stayed with me:

1. You should know a person well, so you can recommend books for them
2. Classics are great for people just beginning to read.
3. Voracious readers have mostly read all the classics; it’s good to recommend alternative titles to them.

I initially thought Hanada’s book was a novel, but it’s actually her life story. „The Bookshop Woman“ was published in 2018 and became a global success. The English version was released in 2024.