making a case for cozy fiction

"Never trust anyone who has not brought a book with them" -Lemony Snicket

Photo by 烧不酥在上海 老的 on Unsplash

The other day I was thinking about my first encounter with books, or at least the first encounter accessible to me in my memory.

I was in fifth grade and had just completed my ESL lessons the year before. At the beginning of the school year, we went to the library during homeroom as a class. The librarian, Ms. Woo, must have given us a talk explaining how a library functioned. I don’t remember the talk, but I remember the library. It was bright and inviting; there was an alcove with a reading nook by the large window against the back wall, which offered a view of the valley and rolling hills below.

I would sit against the cushions in that reading nook almost every day, easily befriending Ms. Woo, who recognized my love of reading immediately. She gave me recommendations for book series like Harry Potter, The Boxcar Children, and A Series of Unfortunate Events. I went to the library so often she decided to take me under her wing. I became an unofficial library aid, learning how to check out books for my classmates and making posters to paste up in the hallways. Ms. Woo even taught me the Dewey Decimal system so I could push the cart of returned books to the proper shelf and place them in their designated spots.

At some point, reading as a writer killed my once overzealous love for books. It must have started in high school, when we read everything so closely and analyzed every scene, trying to extract meaning from the most mundane passages. College and grad school only made it worse. It got to a point where I never wanted to read literary fiction ever again. But in the last couple of years, I’ve slowly returned to reading as a pastime. Changing up the genres I read has helped, and so has getting a Kindle. I breeze through memoirs, fantasy, psychological thrillers, poetry collections, and contemporary fiction. When I need a little bit of inspiration for my own writing, I return to short stories and literary novels, but in small doses.

Recently, I’ve been into cozy Japanese fiction, slice of life novels that give you very little in the way of plot. I think this is a great time of year to read such books, when we’re usually in reflective moods and need quick, easy books to finish our reading goals.

These novels, filled with melancholy and characters that tend to do a lot of introspection, show the way life really is without exaggerating or dressing up the often boring routine of just living in the day to day. Earlier this year, I read a few thick, plot-heavy fantasy novels and complex literary novels (The Will of the Many, Babel, The Sword of Kaigen), so I needed to cleanse my palate a bit by turning to something completely different.

There’s a certain charm in Japanese novels that I haven’t been able to find in any other kind of book. It might be because the characters are ordinary people, without much expectation for themselves. But they are still people, so they come with their individual messes and tragedies and love stories. But instead of hyper focusing on those elements, we are simply experiencing life as they experience it, slowly and one day at a time. As a reader, I know what to expect every time I read these stories, and I appreciate that.

I just finished reading Days at the Morisaki Bookshop by Satoshi Yagisawa, a relatively fast-paced novel about a woman who goes through a breakup and moves in to her uncle’s bookshop while she figures out what to do with her life. I enjoyed it for a variety of reasons. I liked that the female protagonist was flawed, that she had bad habits and a slightly irritating way of dealing with her problems (by running away from them). The people she interacts with — her uncle, her uncle’s wife, the man she meets later at the local coffee shop — all contribute in some way to her growth, which is not dramatic but just enough to be believable. I think it’s my favorite out of all these slice of life novels I’ve read so far.

I recommend trying out these kinds of books now, while the weather is just starting to chill. Wind down for the night with a cup of decaf tea and a blanket, and relax into a book that exudes warmth. Bonus points if you have a fireplace you can hunker down next to.

Happy reading!

Other cozy Japanese fiction I’ve enjoyed:

• Sweet Bean Paste, Durian Sukegawa

• What You Are Looking For Is In the Library, Michiko Aoyama

• Before the Coffee Gets Cold, Toshikazu Kawaguchi