Book Off

Spent the majority of last Sunday wandering round like a complete prat.

I have been on a quest for a decent bookshop for a while now, and Dave told me of a second-hand English bookstore in Ebisu called Good Day Books.

He also gave me a map another teacher had drawn for him. The map had been scratched angrily into the page with one of those black, ultra-thin Pentel efforts. Buildings were heavily shaded with black cross hatchings and roads were scored with the great ferocity - this was clearly a Shane teacher.

However, it was to later transpire that the map was utter bollocks.

I set off, arrived at the station, followed the instructions and within 15 minutes realised that I was way, way out of position. Using my male intuition, instead of reversing my direction, I decided it might be a good idea to take what I considered to be short cut back to the station.

1 hour later it was lashing it down with rain. I couldn’t see the book shop. Or the station. Or any people. And my surroundings were starting to resemble the map – dark, angry, angular buildings. Also the rain was soaking through the page forming a large grey splodge making the chance of finding this bloody shop very slim.

Finally found my way back my start point and decided I would have one last go. This time I ignored the map and decided to let the ley lines guide me. And lo and behold within minutes I had found it. It was 100 yards from the station all along.

Why I walked down that street and took that particular turning I’ll never know because it was completely contrary to what the map suggested. But luckily I did.

The shop is great. It has a wonderful fusty page smell and the owner, whose accent seemed to contain traces of Oz, American, South African and Solihull, is clearly madder than a van of badgers.

I picked up some battered copies of Asimov’s I, Robot printed a bit pissed up and Hard Times by Mr C Dickens. I’m well sofistikated and that.

Should you be in the Ebisu area of Tokyo, I thoroughly recommend it:

http://www.gooddaybooks.com/