Shigeru Kashima's 'A Study of the Kanda Jimbocho Bookstore District': A Way of Measuring Distance from the Title and Table of Contents [Mini-Lecture]
Last night, before going to bed, I opened my Kindle and Shigeru Kashima's 'A Study of the Kanda Jimbocho Bookstore District' caught my eye. I could have bought the physical book, but at the time, I felt like reading something casually, so I one-clicked it with a light heart.
Once the download finished, the neat title appeared on the white Kindle screen. Kanda Jimbocho, A Study of the Bookstore District. Just by seeing the familiar name of the town alongside the somewhat old-fashioned sounding term 'Bookstore District Study,' my own memories began to stir. Which used bookstores will appear? Is this street covered? Holding such expectations, I first gazed at the title for a while.
From there, I naturally began my usual reading habit. Instead of jumping straight into the main text, I slowly look through the title, obi strip, and table of contents in that order before reading. For convenience, I would like to call this approach 'reading from the table of contents'.
A way of measuring distance from the title and table of contents
Books are roughly made of three layers (or four, if you look closely).
The outermost layer: The 'surface' that catches your eye on a bookstore shelf, such as the title, obi strip, and cover copy.
The inner layer: The 'blueprint' where you can see how the author arranged the material, such as the chapter structure and table of contents.
The deepest layer: The actual main text.
The even deeper layer: What the author failed to mention or could not express well. The layer that the reader ends up interpreting.
To 'read from the table of contents' is a way of reading where you first savor this middle layer. You compare the impressions received from the title and obi strip with the structure that emerges from the table of contents. The
'It's not what I expected,' 'I didn't realize it covered such a broad topic'
The magnitude of that discrepancy is something I view as a pleasure in itself.
The image I first formed from the title of Shigeru Kashima's 'A Study of the Kanda Jimbocho Bookstore District' was quite simple. A walking guide that talks about the origins and memories of each shop while strolling through the Jimbocho used bookstore district. That was the image. However, as I traced the table of contents from top to bottom, that image was immediately forced to be revised.
As I followed the chapter titles, I saw that it wasn't just Jimbocho as a 'town of used bookstores,' but also:
The origins of place names, topography, and the living sphere consisting of valleys and hills
The history of education surrounding the Bansho Shirabesho (Office for the Study of Barbarian Books) and the relocation of universities
The formation of the used bookstore district and the publishing and distribution mechanisms behind it
Pre-war and post-war urban planning and the culture of the student district
Signs of subculture after the used book boom
I could see that topics like these were blended into each chapter. While it is a book about walking through the single town of Jimbocho, it seems to be a book where timelines, maps, and names of people intersect, and urban history, economic history, and literary geography are layered together. That sense of depth drifts strongly even at the table of contents stage.
At this stage, two images of Jimbocho will be lined up in my mind.
Jimbocho as an 'essay guiding you through a secondhand bookstore district,' which naturally arises from the title
Jimbocho as a 'microcosm of urban history that illuminates modern Japan,' as indicated by the table of contents
Reading from the table of contents is also an act of roughly measuring the distance between these two images. In the case of 'A Study of the Kanda Jimbocho Bookstore District,' that distance seems to be much larger than I had expected. Feeling this, I finally decided to turn the page to the beginning of the main text.
What you learn when you start reading the first chapter. Jimbocho rising from a sense of geography
When you actually start reading the main text, this expectation is betrayed in a good way.
The first chapter begins with 'The Place Name Jimbocho,' and the author first declares, 'I would like to write about it not in an essayistic way, but in a socio-historical way.' He aims to reposition Jimbocho, a 'secondhand book town' unparalleled in the world, within a broad context of industry, economy, education, dining, and housing, and to illuminate modern Japan itself in reverse. Such a concept is clearly stated at the beginning.
Furthermore, Kashima offers a 'sense of geography' gained from his experience living in Kanda Jimbocho 1-chome for six years from 2003 to 2009, walking around almost every day. Jimbocho is located in a valley once called 'Oike' (Big Pond), with a terrain surrounded by small hills. People's living spheres are naturally separated by the combination of valleys and hills, and 'the other side of a hill' is perceived as a different town. Such physical sensations are discussed first.
What is brought in there is a recollection by Tatsuo Nagai. The elevation difference between Jimbocho and Hongo-dai/Yushima-dai, and the scenery after climbing up Kudanzaka. While quoting such descriptions, Kashima outlines the space perceived as 'the town where I was born and raised.' Surugadai to the east, Kudanzaka to the west, Suidobashi to the north, and the Imperial Palace moat to the south. The sense of the living area that Nagai felt in his boyhood and the sense Kashima felt when he walked around for six years are superimposed.
Once the horizontal axis (spatial axis) is fixed in this way, the vertical axis (time axis) is introduced next. From the end of the Edo period to the Meiji era, as the Bansho Shirabesho (Institute for the Study of Barbarian Books) was born and eventually led to a university, Jimbocho, which was a samurai residential area, transformed into a 'cultural town' and a 'bookstore town.' To grasp the trigger for this, Kashima goes back to the origin of the town name. The meaning of the ancient word 'Mitoshiro' (Kanda), 'Kanda Mitoshiro-cho' created by the town name change in the early Meiji era, and 'Jimbo-koji' named after the residence of the hatamoto Jimbo Nagaharu. Such details are introduced one after another.
Furthermore, the story jumps to the address of Eiichi Shibusawa. The scale of Shibusawa's residence, which moved from Yushima to 'Ura-Jimbo-koji,' its location marked on a map from the early Meiji era, his position as Okura Daijo (Senior Assistant Minister of Finance), and the price of the land as government-owned land that was sold off. Comparing biographical materials and maps, Kashima painstakingly traces that Shibusawa's residence seems to have been in the vicinity of the current 'Jimbocho 1-chome 7-banchi.' The entire area where Komiyama Shoten and Isseido Shoten are lined up was once a Shibusawa residence of over 500 tsubo, and it was bought and sold in 1873 for several tens of millions of yen in current prices. Such estimates even appear.
As described above, even if you only read the introduction of the first chapter, the initial expectation of an 'essay about strolling through a secondhand bookstore district' is completely rewritten. This is because the town of Jimbocho emerges as:
a place rooted in a concrete sense of terrain and living sphere,
a place that has changed its form while intertwining with the movements of education, economy, and politics since the Meiji era,
a place where you can illuminate modern Japan from a different angle by tracing those changes.
as a place.
The distance I felt when looking at the table of contents approaches with even more concrete tactile sensation by reading the beginning of the first chapter. The box of 'Jimbocho essay' that I had prepared on my own is easily broken, and instead, a slightly larger box called 'urban history that views modern Japan through Jimbocho' is presented. As a reader, I will have to adjust the scale of my reading little by little while re-measuring the size of that box.
Keeping the feeling of being off-base as a pleasure of reading
Looking at it this way, the point of 'reading from the table of contents' is not whether the prediction is correct. Rather, it can be said that it is a preliminary exercise to enjoy where and to what extent it goes off-base.
The method is simple.
First, try to roughly create an image in your head of 'it's probably a book like this' from the title and the words on the obi.
Next, trace the table of contents from top to bottom, following the order of the chapters and the keywords to confirm 'what kind of topics are bundled together in this book.'
Then, try to measure the distance between your initial expectations and the image of the book that has emerged from the table of contents.
The important thing is not to be disappointed that the distance is 'off,' but to prepare yourself in advance with the composure to grin and think, 'I can't believe how far off I was.' The more your expectations are missed, the more your own reading framework is shaken. This is because the very premises you use to read things become exposed.
Shigeru Kashima's book on Jimbocho was exactly that kind of book for me. I opened the pages thinking it was a book about walking through Jimbocho, but before I knew it, I was being drawn toward my own history of reading and sense of the city—questions like 'how have I viewed the city?' and 'how have I thought about the relationship between books and the city?' I feel that the scenery I see when I finish reading has changed by the exact distance I measured from the title and table of contents.
The next time you pick up a book, please try to look at the
title,
obi (if there is one),
and table of contents,
and make a small bet with yourself, wondering, 'How far will this book deviate from my expectations?'
By the time you close the pages, a new path should have been added to your own reading map, exactly by that distance.