Jinbōchō

We have been to Jinbōchō one of the last days of our trip. Greta, which takes me, often and well, to places I do not know, took me there.

There are quite a few bookstores in Jinbōchō (Tokyo): they stay on the sides of the streets, are often thematic, and have old and new books. There is, even, an Italian bookstore.

Almost all bookstores spill out onto the street, many do so with shelves that push out from the perimeter of the buildings. Others, in fact, look like reversed socks: the bulk of the bookstore is outside, the shelves look outward.

I have a kind of attraction to this kind of place: in Paris there is Rue Mouffetard, where stores are half in and half out. In these places, the rules of urban coexistence according to which the inside and outside are distributed, those rules there, which we take for granted, skip a bit.

It was scorching hot as we walked around the streets. We took refuge in a café and then, on our way out, continued up the stairs to the top of a building across the street: up there, the bookstore, this bookstore in the picture, and the street in front and those around it, looked like something else entirely.

It felt like home.