Page 5 of The Bookshop of Forbidden Books

The clock had hardly struck eight the next morning when the metal shutter rose, flooding the bookshop with sunlight. Customers were rare before ten o’clock, except for the odd student in need of schoolbooks, and the even smaller handful who still read periodicals. Since the governor’s first term, the opposition newspapers had shut down, and only a single paper remained, which belonged to a wealthy businessman close to the seat of power. The articles that ran in the Lighthouse invariably praised the government’s actions and criticized other countries. Alongside those were a few op-ed pieces, plenty of local news, and, on Sundays, updates from the clergy, a culture page and the weekly weather forecast.

Mitch set about his usual morning tasks – unpacking boxes, arranging table displays, checking the order log. But despite his best efforts, his mind kept circling back to the same questions: how to share banned books right under the noses of the authorities, and with whom. In the end, he decided that the best course of action would be to rely on his own intuition. He’d been in this business for long enough to recognize the kind of reader he was dealing with, but is it true that you are what you read? Do you lean left because you read Camus? Does reading Marx make you a revolutionary? If you’re a fan of Romain Gary, does that make you a humanist?

The door opened and a woman stepped into the shop. Her hair was tied in a low knot at the nape of her neck, and she wore a sleek black trench coat cinched at the waist, revealing her legs from the knees down. Her sleeves were rolled up, exposing slender and work-worn hands. She set down her suitcase and wandered from table to table, picking up a book here and there, putting it down again.

She hadn’t noticed Mitch yet, or maybe she had, and was ignoring him. But he was watching her. He was sure she’d never been in in his shop before, and couldn’t tell whether or not she could be trusted.

A strange woman lingering in his bookshop early in the morning like this might very well have been sent by the authorities to entrap him. Mitch believed that anyone who enforced unjust laws had a corrupt soul, but he refused to give in to paranoia; it was more likely that this woman had simply come in here to get out of the rain. What better time, he thought, to put his intuition to the test?

She was flipping through a volume of poetry and jumped when he spoke to her.

“I was a million miles away – didn’t see you,” she blurted, smiling apologetically.

“This one slipped through the net.” He nodded toward the book in her hand. “You should take it – I’ve only got one copy left, and I’m not sure how much longer I’ll be able to hold on to it.”

She didn’t seem to understand. Russell Banks, the author whose poetry collection she was holding, was a dissenting voice, Mitch explained, a visionary who exposed the divisions in society and spoke out against the plutocratic stranglehold on democracy.

“That might not be exactly what I’m looking for,” she admitted.

“What sort of book are you looking for, then?”

“I have no idea.” She sighed. “It’s for a long trip.”

“A tourist guide, maybe? Where are you going?”

“Not a guide. More like… a travel companion. Something friendly.”

Her phrasing appealed to him. He stepped over to another table and came back with a Haruki Murakami novel, 1Q84.

“Here you go,” he said, handing her the book. “And if you wouldn’t mind a bit of friendly advice, read it slowly, to appreciate it fully.”

“I’m not a fast reader… And I hardly read at all anymore,” she confessed. “I just never have time. To be honest, I came in here almost by accident. I’d just got to the station when I found out my flight was delayed, so I figured I’d kill some time in town. I can’t stand airports.”

She opened her handbag, seeming oddly vulnerable all of a sudden, and paid for the book. Then she thanked Mitch, picked up her suitcase and left without looking back.

Mitch watched her make her way down the street, resolutely ignoring the rain falling in a fine mist around her, and wondered to which distant shores Aomame and Tengo would accompany her.

* * *

The following Sunday, Mitch decided to visit his mother.

The secret bookshop had been taking up so much of his time; he felt guilty, as if he’d been neglecting his duties as a son. It had been too long since he’d last visited, but he had to take two trains and then walk for half an hour to get from the tiny village station to the Sweet Rose Residence, where she’d been living for the past four years. A flowery name for a place whose residents no longer knew who or where they were. Mitch spent every penny he could spare to make sure her existence in this depressing place was as comfortable as possible. During his childhood and teenage years, he’d been extremely close to his mother, but things had changed when his father died, as if a part of her had been torn away. Her move to the south coast had put even more emotional distance between them, and then her memory had begun to fail.

Whenever he visited, he always brought a slice of the same kind of cake she used to bake every Sunday morning when he was a boy. She ate it with relish, smiling at each bite, as if to tell her son there were still some things she remembered. But as the months passed, her smile had become little more than a thank-you to the kind stranger who’d brought her a sweet treat.

The doctors had spoken to Mitch about the stages of memory loss. Earlier that year, Mitch’s mother had taken a plunge into the void. She’d retreated into silence, her gaze lost in the fog of absence. Time and time again, Mitch left the Sweet Rose Residence heavy-hearted, his emotions in tatters, resolved never to visit again because it was pointless – and yet he always came back, to hug his mother and breathe in her smell, to be reminded of a time when he’d been without worries and the world was a less hostile place.

During this visit, he told her all about his work on the secret room and his plans for it. With her, at least, he knew it was safe to say anything. He acted out the determination with which he’d hacked through the brick wall, and described the clever mechanism he’d devised to conceal the opening with an old bookcase. No one would suspect a thing, but just a light pressure on the back wall caused the whole thing to swing inward, revealing the secret room.

Looking at his mother’s hands, blue-veined and brownspotted, he remembered the hours she’d spent helping him with his homework at the kitchen table. Whole evenings in each other’s company. Why this memory now? He had no idea. Maybe he was remembering his mother’s sharp mind. Or maybe some of her motherly love still lingered, trapped within the four walls of this room. Or maybe it was her soul, leaving her in fragments, pieces of it touching his.

Mitch found himself clinging to these maybes because his mother – who always used to make him summarize his schoolwork on index cards – had just unwittingly given him the solution to his current dilemma. He would do the same now: make a card for each of his regular customers and use it to figure out who had been the most affected by House Bill 1467. The ones who loved books that stirred something within their hearts. Books that made them see the world a little differently. Mitch was a dreamer, yes. But he believed wholeheartedly that people were shaped by what they read.

First thing on Monday, he applied himself to the new task. He combed through his sales records and managed to pick out a few familiar names: people he might be able to trust. Then he carefully considered how best to approach them. He felt a little like a drug dealer, which wasn’t really so absurd – reading could very quickly become an addiction. Morning and night, he watched for his fellow addicts on the train. Deaf to everything around them, muttering or laughing or crying in their seats, sometimes even making involuntary gestures – the kind that would’ve marked them as crazy had they not been holding a book in their hands. The ones who often missed their stop, like his father once had.

Chapter 5

Mathilde