Who likes pictures of Bookstores!?
I just went through my 2007 Japan Photo set, and would you believe that in all of my pictures of Kinokuniya’s awesome 7+floor flagship store in Shinjuku, I never once took a picture of their sprawling, massive Japanese-language manga section? I think that’s because I hit Kinokuniya towards the end of my trip, and by then I’d taken hundreds of photos of manga stores like Animate and Tora No Anna, but I don’t think I ever gave Kinokuniya it’s due as being a great, centrally located and excellently stocked bookstore–whether you’re a manga fan or not…!
Kinokuniya’s flagship store is located in Tokyo’s capital, Shinjuku, about 5 minutes walk from the south exit of Shinjuku Station. Shijunku station has like 20 exits, so it’s actually closer to the “New South Exit” but walking everywhere or anywhere in Tokyo is a joy, if you happen to be in love with cities and people-watching. Kinokuniya (the bottom red box) is actually on the otherside of the massive Takeshimaya Times Square Department Store, which is giant and beautiful, and has a whole Tokyu Hands inside too! It’s worth the walk.
Unfortunately on both days that I visited the store it was raining outsie, and so an exterior photo of Kinokuniya didn’t really work out. Once again, the photo above is from Wikimedia commons, taken by the user “Ons”.
Instead we took the awesome 7th-floor glass bridge between Takeshimaya Times Square and Kinokuniya. You get a pretty fun view of the city from here too.
I’m kind of surprised by how many folks I’ve talked to that don’t know about this particular Kinokuniya, despite the fact it’s prominently mentioned in most of the travel guides. I know it’s not a 4000 year old shrine or anything, but a giant well-stocked bookstore is my kind of temple.
The glass bridge lets you off on Kinokuniya’s foreign-books floor, which incidentally carries a huge selection of manga in English. Representatives from all of the major publishers could be found, although much like Kinokuniya New York, this store seemed solely interested in Manga By Japanese Creators, with no OEL or manga-influenced North American work to be found. That said, their selection of English-language manga was amazing, balancing popular long-running series with prestige graphic novels and series traditionally popular in Japan. The English-language editions of Pluto, 20th Century Boys, and Black Jack even merited attractive + well-made signage just to draw attention to great work.
Oh, and, they can get English-language manga we can’t even get here, like the bilingual editions of Kodansha’s Division Chief Kosaku Shima, or the bilingual Doraemon volumes. It’s jealousy-inducing.
Keep Reading After The Break:
It looks like the non-manga selection of North American graphic novels has shrunken a bit since the last time I was in town, with movie and tv-related material getting the primary placement (and the most orders). Still, whoever’s doing their ordering here knows their stuff as this is a fairly well-rounded and cultivated collection for a mainstream bookstore. No Chris Ware, no Seth, but you could say that about 90% of North American comic book stores…
Oh and what’s that in the bottom right hand corner of this photo? The U.S.-only release of LEAGUE OF EXTRAORDINARY GENTLEMEN: THE BLACK DOSSIER? The book DC wouldn’t ship across the border to Canada because of some fake-ass legal boogity-man, and it’s sitting in Japan?
Hey DC, thank you for making this easy to get in JAPAN through BOOKSTORE channels, but impossible in CANADA through THE DIRECT MARKET YOU HELPED CREATE. You fucked this one up and it sucks.
But let’s move on to happier things… and if you wanna see more of the books to be found on the foreign-books floor, check out my post from 2007.
All the way back down on the second floor of the store is the manga, anime, video game guides, and artbooks. Basically a haven for otaku. The photo taken here represents about a 1/4 of the total area of the floor which is entirely devoted to nerdish pursuits, with the majority of the space taken up by manga shelving. The shelving is pretty ingenious too, with 3-5 shelves of manga display space on every unit, and roll-out storage underneath. I would love to find a source on these sorts of shelves in Canada… Oh, and, right in front there you can see a display? That’s for Neon Genesis Evangelion, in honour of the new film. Let’s get a closer look.
Here you can see the official Eva manga, the ‘Angelic Layer’ series, and a few other tie-in books. Oh, and right in front there? The new boxed edition artbook of Neon Genesis Evangelion mangaka and character designer Yoshiyuki Sadamoto. I wanted this, badly, but at $150 and being massive (not bringing that back meant I could bring back about 12-14 different manga) I had to pass. You can find a review from someone whose eyes were bigger than their stomach here. Apparently it’s also been heavily pirated as well. Jesus.
A nice surprise when I arrived at Kinokuniya was this lovely little featured-display of Yoshihiro Tatsumi’s A Drifting Life, in its original two-volume Japanese edition. It features cut-outs, a hand-written recommendation, and a note about the Tezuka-prize win! I’m so very happy to see Mr. Tatsumi getting added attention in his home country, and I hope it continues… Because just to the right of A Drifting Life there is Tatsumi’s newest manga, a “rakuga” comedy manga that was released just as I was leaving Japan! It’s pretty “inside” for a manga, relying heavily on bits of Japanese culture (comedy duos) that are almost entirely unknown here in the West. A quick Google Translate/Amazon.jp mash-up says the book is “Beach Grass Vaudeville Comic Strip” which… I mean your guess is as good as mine as to whether that’s accurate. Still: Neato.
Oh, and I visited another great bookstore and found a similar, more extensive display for Mr. Tatsumi:
This is from the bookstore “Libro”, located on the 6th or 7th floor of the massive Seibu Department Store complex above Ikebukruo Station, at the east exit. They had a really well-maintained store, with a huge selection of alternative and adult work (not porn). Here Tatsumi’s work was used as the centrepiece for a display of gekiga work in general, much of which has been coming back into print since the popularity and attention that A Drifting Life has received. I’m going to go over some of these books in a future post, but yeah: Mr. Tatsumi’s getting some good attention, so that’s excellent :).
Meanwhile, back at Kinokuniya, up-and-to-the-right of the Tatsumi display is about half of their selection of alternative manga:
I spent a half-hour going through every book on these units, trying to absorb everything. Sadly most of the books were shrink-wrapped (although considering the crowds around the un-shrinked magazine racks, that’s probably a smart business move on their part…) but it was still great to just discover everything. I’ve done my best to allow you to capture that feeling, by uploading a super hi-res version of this photo…! Click here for the 4meg version: https://comics212.net/wp-content/uploads/2009/08/DSCF8698-large.jpg.
Some of the stuff is probably recognizable, the spines for Bambi and Her Pink Gun are written in English. 🙂 But just going over the picture now, seeing the little enclaves of books by Usumaru Furuya (Short Cuts) for example, brings back memories. Enjoy browsing!
Speaking of, here’s a close-up on some random gekiga re-release that looked awesome that I didn’t buy for some stupid reason.
Right across from the weirdo manga is… euromanga! Big full-colour anthologies with Skydoll on the cover, as well as the Japanese edition of one of those Watchment tie-in books. Actually, the European album imports were interesting and, as you might imagine, the manga-influenced comics were the ones that were widely available in Japanese. Hm.
So now we’re to the part of the post where it’s mostly just big shelves of manga… but let’s be honest: BIG SHELVES OF MANGA. Upper left is Shigeru Mizuki of Ge Ge Ge No Kitaro, Lower-centre is the red-and-white-striped spine goodness of Kazuo Umezu (Drifting Classroom, Cat-Eyed Boy). Top Middle seems to be Leiji Matsumoto of Galaxy Express, and the majority of the face-up books and the entire last two shelving bays? Osamu Tezuka, bay-bee. Lots and lots of Tezuka. With some cross-racked PLUTO for good measure and to bring in the ‘kids’.
A close-up on those neat Umezu spines.
That complete list of manga titles scheduled to be released in July…
…and August, just in case you thought July was a little slow.
In Japan, Kodansha’s latest printings of Akira are value-priced at like $10.00. They have cool gilded-edges that are the same colours as the spines too. It’s nifty. In North America Kodansha is releasing AKIRA at $25 per volume. … Sometimes pricing and sales is a self-fulfilling prophecy, you know that?
Golgo 13, anyone? Come on, even if you don’t really like the series, can you imagine how bad-ass you’d seem if someone walked into your apartment and found one hundred and twenty-three volumes of Golgo 13, and two best-of collections? YOU WOULD SEEM PRETTY BAD-ASS.
Seinen!
Josei(?)
I just kind of liked the look of these.
Blurry Shojo!
Happy Mania in a faux leather-bound edition. Moyoco Anno is REALLY popular in Japan. Note the new Moebius book there too. And the Hanawa-looking-title in the middle there.
See, it’s all at least interesting, and in a store full of it it’s just overwhelming. I could’ve spent days (and thousands of dollars) at this store.
When I took this photo it hadn’t been announced that Death Note artist Takeshi Ohbata’s Bakuman was on its way to North America. So this photo isn’t that interesting now. Note the stacks and stacks of One Piece behind it too… In Japan One Piece is much more popular, and with a wider audience, than even Naruto.
So here’s something. When you first come down the escalator from the upper floors, you’re greeted with this… a wall of artbooks featuring characters and art from manga and anime. There’s tons of stuff here, only about 2% of which ever used to make it into the Previews catalogue. That number has fallen to basically zero, in recent months… Copies of highly sought-after artbooks are scarce on the ground throughout most of North America, with most fans having to pay huge mark-ups through importing services.
Click for larger if you wanna take a look.
Now here’s the thing… this is the wall-of-artbooks based on manga and anime properties. What I didn’t really understand until the last second before I had to leave the store? There’s another huge wall of artbooks right-around-the-corner based on video game properties:
Now this is pretty blurry, but basically the unit on the left is game guides for Nintendo DS games,with more strategy guides on the wall behind on the left (which are usually heavily illustrated)… but the two shelving units on the right are all pure art books.
If you don’t care about this, I’m sorry for boring you. But if you’re a fan of this stuff? This is probably heaven for you. 🙂
That’s another thing that’s great about Kinokuniya–while I was downstairs nerding out about amazing manga and artbooks (I didn’t go near the DVDs), my husband was upstairs nerding out at their amazing collection of French and Latin textbooks. Kinokuniya, the store with something for everyone! If you’re an expat, this is probably your second home. If you’re a bibliophile or mangaphile visiting Tokyo? It’s a great stop on your itinerary.
– Christopher
All pictures by Christopher Butcher, ©2009
Bless you, Christopher Butcher! But my thirst for your excellent posts on Japan is still not saited. Bring on more!
“Beach Grass Vaudeville Comic Strip” is fairly accurate. “Shiba Hama” (“Beach Grass”)is a storyteller’s classic about a man and wife in old Edo. It is about their relationship and how it changes over time and how the revelations of misguided deceptions committed early in their relationship affects them later.
It is a story teller classic because the story was originally told orally by roving storytellers, the kind that in times past would wander into your neighborhood. They would tell you a story and sometimes take payment. They used illustrated placards as visual aids. They were very popular until they were pretty much replaced in pop-culture by… MANGA!
The story is a classic and it evolved to be told in theaters by storytellers rather than by wandering storytellers. Though there are currently CDs and MP3s and even a modernized drama version (featuring not a married couple but two people living together), it is considered a piece that is best viewed and heard when told by a master storyteller in a theater.
“Shiba Hama” refers to a strip of grassy beach that the story originally was set near. That strip of land is now mostly covered by the JR track near Tamachi station.
I expect the comic will be pretty great. My Japanese is not good enough to sit through a telling of Shiba Hama, but if you’d like to try, there are some bits of it on Youtube.
And those bookstores are really great.
I used to read complete sets of classic American comic strips in bilingual editions in a section containing only that. Though my little bookstore only had four floors.
That’s not the flagship store, that’s the Shinjuku south store. The flagship store is located north east of Shinjuku station.