A landslide of change in book distribution is occurring. Looking at the financial results of the two major distributors, Tohan and Nippan, the return rates for both magazines and books remain high and are not improving at all. Under these circumstances, two traditional new bookstores in Tokyo have announced that they will close in January next year.

One is Shoraku in front of JR Asagaya Station, and the other is Shogen in front of Tsutsujigaoka Station on the Keio Line. Although they are all bookstores near the station, they are well-established stores that do not rely solely on magazines and comics, but also carry a wide range of products, including humanities and literary books. The former is in Suginami Ward and the latter is in Chofu City, a residential area with convenient commuting distance, and it is thought that there are a large number of readers living in the commercial area. The impact of these excellent stores is extremely large as they all decided to close down early next year at almost the same time.

On a sign announcing the closure, Shoraku wrote the following: ”It is a great joy that we have been able to exist as a bookstore in Asagaya for over 40 years thanks to the patronage of everyone.It is a great sadness to retire from Asagaya, but we have no choice but to accept it as a trend of the times.”
Shogen did not disclose the reason for closing the Tsutsujigaoka store, but in 2017 they closed the Minamiasagaya store and Sengawa store (Chofu City), and in 2022 they closed the Takaido store (Kowa Shoten, Suginami Ward). With the closure of Tsutsujigaoka store, there will be no physical store. It can be said that this is a choice that is almost equivalent to going out of business.

What are ”trends of the times” that make it difficult to operate even in an environment that seems like the perfect location for a new bookstore?

There are many reasons why this decision was made at this time, such as thin profit margins that have remained unchanged for a long time, and rising fixed costs such as utility costs due to the weak yen, but from a long-term perspective, This is because people who used to be popular readers have changed their point of purchase to online sales, and readers who do not use online sales no longer buy books in the first place.

Until now, the problem of municipalities lacking bookstores has been viewed as a problem in regional cities. However, even in Tokyo’s Suginami Ward, a town with a liberal middle-class population, the survival of new bookstores has proven impossible. In other words, the survival of new bookstores is now at a critical point.

As an author and editor myself, I cannot ignore this influence. In conjunction with ”Literary Flea Market Tokyo 37” that I introduced in the previous article, I published a book called ”The Ruin of Newly Published Novels” in collaboration with novelist Osamu Fujitani, and it is currently on sale at an online sales site called BOOTH. ing. This is a dystopian novel that depicts a hypothetical situation in which all publishers stop publishing new literary books, literary magazines, and novel magazines amid slumping sales of literary books.

However, reality has already gone beyond that. This is because if new bookstores disappear first, the “literature” that has been disseminated through them will also cease to exist.
What is the essence of ”trends of the times” that Shoraku tried to convey to his readers in heartbreaking words?

There is no way upstream publishers can survive if they ignore the voices coming from downstream. Sales methods that rely too heavily on SNS also need to be reconsidered. This is not just nostalgia.