If you scroll back through my Japan Travelogues, I think you might remember me saying my favourite store to buy manga, and mostly new/in-print manga in Japan, is the Tsutaya across from the Hachiko crossing in Shibuya. Unfortunately that changed with my trip there in 2010. They’d moved their manga floor from a very spacious basement to a smaller top-floor. It’s still a solid setup, but it’s less big, less hand-curated… Just lesser, unfortunately. Things change, even in the manga industry, even in Japan.
That said, I do still really dig what Tsutaya did with their manga selection, and upon leaving the country during my 2009 trip, I was shocked to come across the best-stocked airport bookstore Of All Time. Seriously, it was amazing, with a great selection of books and magazines, but also a surprisingly big and diverse selection of manga tankoubon, manga periodical magazines, and even a few artbooks too.
This selection of light novels and volumes of the REBORN! manga (waaaaay more popular in Japan than it is here) was just the tip of the iceberg, and it was heartening to know that even if I had (somehow) completely missed manga on my entire trip to Japan, all I needed to do was hit the airport an hour early and I could do a pretty decent shopping trip at the Narita Airport Tsutaya….!
As I mentioned, their wall of manga was nothing to sneeze at, and while it catered heavily to the very popular series it did evidence some of the curation of other Tsutaya manga sections I’d been in. And of course it still had people reading at the racks, looking to kill some time.
Opposite angle.
Bleach, One Piece, Takehiko Inoue, Naoki Urasawa, and more. Plus the then just-release oversized final volume of PLUTO.
Shown dead centre here are some of the English-instruction and English-language manga, including bilingual editions of Nodame Cantabile, Tale of Genji, Division Chief Kosaku Shima, and English volumes of Bleach, Death Note, Naruto, and The Davinci Code (novel of course, not a comic). Incidentally, if you’re in Japan and looking for a great gift to bring back, the bilingual manga editions including Doraemon (bottom left) are great souvenirs, as that manga isn’t available in English!
A close-up on the Doraemon bilingual editions and a few other titles.
Feature display for the Neon Genesis Evangelion manga.
And a great selection of manga magazines (top) and kids books, mooks, and activity books (bottom).
So yeah, if you can spare it, the shopping area at Narita airport is surprisingly amazing, and a great place to pick up last minute gifts for others… and just a few more manga for yourself too. Build the extra time into your trip back, if you can…!
Now this, finally, is my last blog post from my Fall 2009 trip to the great nation of Japan.
I’m gonna be honest, there’s a whole lot of photos from this trip that I couldn’t quite work into a blogpost, but one of the things I wanted to do was get all those photos up online in some form. I think I’ve decided on Twitter, after all, so look forward to that on my Flickr page imminently–maybe even as soon as this blog post goes up! 🙂 Thanks for reading, and sorry it took a year and a half (and I jumped ahead and did some 2010 travelogues in the interim).
Best,
– Chris