What You Are Looking For Is in the Library by Michiko Aoyama
My rating: 5 of 5 stars

The Zen of Everyday Life

I think it’s easy to take this book as a YA self-help manual. It isn’t. One of its own characters sums it up accurately: “[It’s] easy to read and simple enough for a schoolchild to follow, but in language that is not in the least childish. ” There is a cumulative message that I think rightly can be called a philosophy, the central tenet of which is: Strive to understand a bigger purpose through the life and its circumstances you experience, and help others to do the same. Perhaps the modern, and slightly more precise and less sectarian version, of the perennial maxim of ‘Do unto others…’

Ms Aoyama’s suggestion for executing this philosophy is unexpected but straightforward: Read. Her rationale for this is far more subtle than reading for the accumulation of knowledge or power. As Ms Komachi, the librarian and central character, points out about the personal revelation of one of her clients: “You may say that it was the book, but it’s how you read a book that is most valuable, rather than any power it might have itself. It’s not what you read but how: ” The subject matter of the book, while not irrelevant in attracting the reader, is subservient to its power to promote practical meditation about one’s life. This may be through a single word, a phrase or by an idea not contained at all in the book but only inspired by it.

This power, according to Aoyama, is most significant at a point in life in which it is most difficult to access it, namely during personal or professional crises. Change, disappointments, frustrations provoke responses which, if yielded to, lead to more of the same. But action not thought appears most cathartic - shout at the spouse, quit the job, store up resentments, etc. etc. Nonetheless the magic of the book and its distractive, insinuating effect has its maximal potential at this moment to create new possibilities for action.

Aoyama is very concerned about finding new purpose through this kind of literary meditation (much in the manner of the American philosopher, Josiah Royce. See https://www.goodreads.com/review/show...). But she also recognises something crucial that is not often said, namely that no purpose is stable. It changes because we learn about ourselves and others through the pursuit of purpose, and because the world itself changes around us. Hence Ms Komachi’s admonition: “… you can start again halfway through. Even after your project begins to take shape, you can easily change direction along the way if you feel that you want to make something different after all.”

In other words persistence, single-mindedness, stick-to-it-tiveness simply leads to the same issues from which one might have escaped. In fact it is the cause of the disappointment, frustration and unhappiness we experience. Obsessively pursuing goals, objectives, and narrow achievements can destroy us. As Ms Komachi gently advises one of her patrons: “Never swerving from a path is not necessarily a virtue”

This may seem outrageous in a Japanese society in which the culture of the salary-man and corporate loyalty prevails. And it is probably equally outrageous in a Western society in which one’s worth is assessed in terms of personal ambition and monetary reward. Getting off the career train in either culture is certainly a courageous act. In any case, whatever we are as human beings is always conditioned by our circumstances and never fixed. This is what we all share - flux, uncertainty, and mutual dependence.

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