Why Visit a Foreign Bookstore When You Can Buy Books Online? Inuhiko Yomota on Kitazawa Bookstore in Jimbocho | My Apprenticeship in Old Books #9

Open the heavy door and you are suddenly wrapped in silence. At Kitazawa Bookstore in Jimbocho, where time-worn Western books are shelved all the way to the ceiling, an entirely different kind of time was flowing. Comparative literature scholar Inuhiko Yomota writes about the Tokyo where he hunted for foreign books in the 1970s, and about returning to that shop after half a century. (From “My Apprenticeship in Old Books” #9, Hon no Machi, May 2026 issue)

“No matter how tired you are when you get home at night, always look through the table of contents and the index of any foreign book you bought or received that day.”

These are the words of Professor U, the English literature scholar who was my teacher in my university days (see installment 5 of this series). I learned an endless amount from him, but apart from the interpretation of difficult English poetry and literary theory, this one teaching carved itself deep into my heart, and I have never forgotten it. Now and then, though, when I have let myself be distracted by the chores in front of me and neglected to buy foreign books, the words he spoke so casually half a century ago come back to me, and I can only reproach myself and resolve to straighten my back.

Tokyo’s Foreign Bookstores in the 1970s

So where in Tokyo did I buy foreign books in the 1970s, as I went from university on to graduate school? English books I ordered through Kinokuniya Bookstore by the east exit of Shinjuku Station. Iena Bookstore in Ginza was where I would drop in on a whim, find some unexpected book and buy it on impulse; like a fishmonger’s stall laid out with lively fresh fish, it always had interesting new books on film. French books came from France Tosho in Nishi-Shinjuku, Chinese books from Uchiyama Shoten. Back then I couldn’t yet read Hangul, so I never bought books in Korean.

Kitazawa Bookstore in Jimbocho occupied a slightly different place among these foreign bookstores. In the religious studies department at my university, everyone would say casually, “If that’s what you’re after, go and look at Kitazawa,” or “The other day Kitazawa had a book like this.” I mean graduate students such as Keiji Ueshima, who later went on to study Nepal’s living girl goddess, and Shinichi Nakazawa, who did much to turn anthropology into a flashy advertising industry. I couldn’t let them get ahead of me, so I too promptly passed through Kitazawa’s gates.

An Entirely Different Time Was Flowing

Open the heavy door and you are suddenly wrapped in silence. In a dim space that seemed to be at dusk all year round, time-worn books were shelved all the way to the ceiling. I could feel that this was a world entirely apart, cut off from the secular world outside, with a solemnity all its own. At Kitazawa Bookstore flowed an entirely different kind of time that I had never known—the vast time of English books, in which completing the collected works of an 18th-century man of letters could calmly take half a century.

The first thing I bought there was the Bollingen edition of C. G. Jung’s Collected Works in English translation. In my university days I had kept borrowing it from the library without ever managing to finish it, checking out the same volumes again and again; when half a year’s worth of my scholarship was paid into my account, I bought about ten volumes in one go. I recall that afterward, too, it was mainly here that I built up my collection of books on mythology and religious studies, by Kerényi, Eliade and others.

Back to Kitazawa Bookstore

Many years have passed since then, and once it became easy to order books from abroad over the internet, I stopped completely the habit of walking into a foreign bookstore while out in town and picking up some book I didn’t know. Or rather, even before that, France Tosho and Iena Bookstore had both disappeared. When the coronavirus turmoil had died down and I flew to Paris for the first time in years, I found that many of the little bookshops in the Latin Quarter that I used to haunt had vanished, and I felt as though a war had passed through.

It was then that I thought I would drop by Kitazawa for the first time in a long while. What if this great foreign bookstore had disappeared too? I felt a twinge of anxiety, but when I actually went, Kitazawa Bookstore was still there, as serene as in days gone by. Apart from the ground floor having become Book House Cafe, it had not changed in the slightest from half a century ago—just like a medieval monastery. On the shelf stood Jung’s two-volume Nietzsche’s Zarathustra seminars, a record of lectures from the 1930s whose very existence I had not known until then; it must have been published after the Collected Works was completed.

(Inuhiko Yomota, comparative literature / “My Apprenticeship in Old Books” #9, Hon no Machi, May 2026 issue)

Inuhiko Yomota
Born in 1953. Comparative literature scholar and film historian. He studied religious studies at the University of Tokyo and comparative literature at its graduate school, and taught for many years as a professor at Meiji Gakuin University. His many books include Nihon Eigashi 110-nen (110 Years of Japanese Film History) and High School 1968. He is currently writing the series “My Apprenticeship in Old Books” for Hon no Machi.

▶Read #10: “Not Worthy to Tie Their Shoelaces”: Meeting My Younger Self on a Secondhand Bookshop Shelf

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This article was published in the May 2026 issue (Vol. 13) of Hon no Machi, the community salon magazine of Kanda, Ochanomizu and Jimbocho. You can read the full text, along with the other articles, in the PDF.

▶Read the May 2026 issue of Hon no Machi (PDF, in Japanese)

Founded in 1980, Hon no Machi brings you the latest from Book Town every month, together with Jimbocho’s bookstores, publishers, cafés and galleries.

▶ Other installments of “My Apprenticeship in Old Books”: All installments

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