‘World’s coolest neighbourhood’ Jimbocho makes browsing cool again

TOKYO – Sifting through a million second-hand books on roadside carts, I hope to touch something that will ensnare my fingers and make them part with my yen. I cannot help my itchy fingers when I see books, even if they are written in a language I cannot read.

There is a catalogue of the late Japanese-French painter Tsuguharu Foujita’s exhibition, a signed copy of the writer and ultranationalist Yukio Mishima’s Spring Snow, an English title on gender and kabuki, stacked posters of Western war films, rows of woodblock prints or ukiyo-e not unlike Katsushika Hokusai’s print that recently sold for $3.62 million and, oddly enough, a framed photo of re-di-ga-ga or Lady Gaga. There is a lot I do not recognise.