What You Are Looking For Is in the Library by Michiko Aoyama is part of a recent publishing trend of Japanese and East Asian fiction that has captured Western audiences' attention.
It follows the life of a Tokyo librarian, Sayuri Komachi, who has the unique ability to read the souls of her library guests. Through this magic, she works to help the library's many visitors with their problems.
What You Are Looking For Is in the Library is a love letter both to the magic of libraries and a cozy, low-stakes drama about the necessity of community. Plus, it has a cute cat! If that sounds ideal to you, here are seven other books sure to appeal to fans of lo-fi, cozy, optimistic stories.
Summer Hours at the Robbers Library
Kit is the head librarian of the public library in Riverton, New Hampshire. She hopes that she can make this place a solace for visitors, a place where anyone can come and feel like they're home. Here, no one expects Kit to talk about her own past and problems.
That changes when Sunny, a troubled teenager gets arrested for shoplifting a dictionary. The judge assigns her to do community service at the library for the summer, leaving Kit to look after her. As they come to terms with how their lives have unravelled, they also discover how they might repair those broken bonds and form new ones.
Before the Coffee Gets Cold
This cozy fantasy novel has become quite popular, and is an especially good read for fans of What You're Looking For Is in the Library. In a small back alley in Tokyo, there is a café which has been serving carefully brewed coffee for more than one hundred years. It also has an incredible secret: It offers customers the chance to travel back in time.
A quartet of visitors enter, each hoping to make use of this unique offer. One wishes to confront the partner who left her. Another wants to receive a letter from their husband whose memory has been taken by early onset Alzheimer's. One guest wishes to see her beloved sister one last time. The last hopes to meet the daughter they never got the chance to know.
But the journey into the past does not come without risks. They must return to the present before the coffee gets cold...
The Midnight Library
Between life and death there is a library, a liminal space where people can look into the infinite ways their lives could have been different. Nora Seed struggles with depression and thinks her life has been nothing but misery and mistakes.
When she feels the need to end it all, she finds herself in the Midnight Library with the chance to live as if she had done things differently. With the help of an old friend, she can now undo every one of her regrets. But things aren't what she imagined and her changes might make things worse. Is there one simple way to live a good life? Nora's going to find out.
Welcome to the Hyunam-dong Bookshop
Yeongju has a high-flying career, a husband, and a busy life in Seoul, but it's left her feeling burned out. She cannot help but think back to an old dream from her past.
In a leap of faith, she decides to leave behind her old life and move a small residential neighborhood outside the city, where she opens the Hyunam-dong Bookshop. It's not quite what she hoped it would be, but as time passes, she eases into her new life and sees first-hand how books and friendship can change people's situations for the better. Create the perfect spot for lost souls and they’ll come together.
The Kamogawa Food Detectives
Everyone has that one meal from their past that they think about, the one they'd love to try one more time to see if it really was that good. In a secret restaurant in Kyoto called the Kamogawa Diner, Koishi Kamogawa and her father Nagare act as food detective. Through ingenious investigations, they are able to recreate dishes from a person’s treasured memories. The Kamogawa is a way for people to reconnect to their pasts and find delicious paths into their futures. Sometimes, the right meal can fix all of your problems!
Sweet Bean Paste
Sentaro works in a tiny confectionery shop selling dorayaki, a type of pancake filled with sweet bean paste. His life is in a rut, following a criminal past and failed dreams of becoming a writer.
Things begin to change when Tokue, an elderly woman with disfigured hands comes into the shop and offers to share her special recipe for sweet bean paste. It's the best thing Sentaro has ever tasted, and soon the woman is teaching him her craft and becoming his closest confidante. But social pressures and Tokue's dark past threaten to destroy their peace.
Days at the Morisaki Bookshop: A Novel
Nanako Hanada's life is in crisis. Recently separated from her husband, jumping between hostels and internet cafes for accommodation, and left in a rut with her job managing a failing bookstore, she feels like the world is passing her by.
In an attempt to change things up, she joins a meet-up site where people meet for 30-minute bursts to find romance, make friends, or find something special. For Nanako, it's the ideal way to find something in life beyond her own small world.
