Five people in present day Tokyo have come to crossroads in their lives and find their way to their local library, where reference librarian Sayuri Komachi felts objects while she listens to their stories and then creates a list of books for them to help them on their way, along with a felted object of her own making, a tiny frying pan, a tiny cat, a tiny globe, a tiny plane, a tiny crab, all of which resonate with something in their lives. (Later she claims her choice of object is completely random, but we don’t believe that for a minute.)

Twenty-one year old Tomoka discovers she isn’t stuck in a dead-end job after all and that the job itself isn’t dead end, either. Thirty-five year old Ryo, an accountant who has always longed to open an antique store, reads a story in Ms. Komachi’s newsletter that leads him to a man who has two jobs who tells him “The moment you say ‘don’t,’ you’re done for.”

Forty-year old Natsumi turned her back on her dream of becoming a book editor for motherhood and Ms. Komachi shows her one thing does not have to exclude the other. Hiroya, thirty, unemployed and living with his mother, failed to get a job as an artist out of design school and turned his back on ambition. Ms. Komachi is not having it.

Ms. Komachi rolls her head again and lifts an index finger. “I’m going to give you a math lesson.”
“What?”
“In the case of one hundred people, one person doing the thing they want to do, there is only yourself, which means one person out of one, which is one hundred percent.”
“Huh?”
“So there’s a hundred percent chance.”

Now there’s a mathematical formula I can get behind.

Masao, newly retired, has learned three things: That sixty-five is not as old as he thought, that he has no hobbies, and that without a job to define him he has become invisible to society as a whole and perhaps even to his wife and daughter. He finds himself at the library taking a Go class and asks Ms. Komachi to recommend some books on how to play. She adds in a poetry book, which leads by various ways and means through his near arrest for pedofilia outside a playground and into the basement office of his building’s super, a man we have met before. It is quite the learning experience.

Until now, I have always thought of things in terms of whether or not they could be useful to me in some way. But that may have become my stumbling block. Now I know the importance of the heart being moved, I have a list of things I want to try…My plan is to appreciate every new day. And take a wide view of things.”

Ms. Komachi asks each of her patrons “What are you looking for?” in a manner which makes all of them ask themselves, Well, what am I looking for? Ms. Komachi never fails them (see title). A lovely, gentle fable for our times, the kind of book that makes you feel good all over when you finish it, and a terrific translation, too. Highly recommended.

Book Review Monday Chatter alison watts michiko aoyama what you are looking for is in the library