Cover image: Kobayashi Kiyochika, View of Tokyo’s Shin-Ōhashi Bridge in Rain (1876), woodblock print (Public domain — source)
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Every autumn, I visit Jimbocho, Tokyo’s famous secondhand and classic book district, hoping that the gods of books might finally smile upon me.
Jimbocho is one of the world’s great book districts, with shops devoted to literature, philosophy, history, art, religion, and almost anything else you can imagine. It has even earned a recommendation from Time Out as a place worth visiting in Tokyo.
During the annual Kanda Used Book Festival, books spill out onto the streets. People lean over tables, examine old covers, and squeeze past one another in search of something interesting. The smell of paper fills the air, although the crowds can make browsing rather exhausting.
Still, it is a remarkable sight. An entire neighbourhood becomes an open-air library.
This year, I was looking for two books.
The first was Baken Gizōshi (The Horse-Racing Ticket Forger). The second was An Exorcist Tells His Story, by Gabriele Amorth, an Italian Catholic priest who served as an exorcist in Rome and became one of the best-known figures in the field.
I have been searching for the latter for years. Neither book is easy to find, even online. Looking for two particular volumes among Jimbocho’s countless books is like trying to find two grains of sand in a desert.
Why bother, especially with all those crowds?
Partly because I want to test my luck.
I sometimes imagine that somewhere among the shelves lives a god of books. Perhaps one day I will enter a shop, glance at a forgotten corner, and find a book I have been looking for for years, sitting there as if it had been waiting for me.
So far, however, my record is perfect.
I have lost every time.
Still, I keep returning. Surely all those years of reading and wandering through bookshops must count for something.
Dear gods, please smile upon me today.
Recently, I read about Anthropic, the AI company, buying large quantities of secondhand books, cutting them apart, scanning their pages, and using the resulting texts to train AI models.
People were destroying books so that machines could read them. It sounds like something from a dystopian novel.
I use AI almost every day, and I understand the value of making knowledge more accessible. Still, there is something strange about preserving the words while destroying the books themselves.
Perhaps I should buy my books before someone cuts them apart.
Of course, finding a book online is much easier. You can search for a title, compare prices, and sometimes have it delivered the next day. But in an old bookshop, you are constantly distracted by things you were not looking for.
A book catches your eye. You take it down from a shelf. Perhaps someone read it fifty years ago, kept it for decades, and eventually passed it on. Now it has somehow ended up in your hands.
You came looking for one thing and discovered another.
That is why I keep going back.
So, did I find either of my two books?
Of course not.
As the afternoon went on, it began to rain. I have a feeling it rains every year during the Kanda Used Book Festival. I don’t know what the organisers have done to offend the weather gods.
Umbrellas opened, the pavement darkened, and people continued searching the shelves, reluctant to give up. Eventually, I decided to head home.
I had bought two books.
The first was Le Clézio Speaks, a Japanese collection of interviews with J. M. G. Le Clézio, the French novelist and Nobel laureate. In these conversations, a young Le Clézio discusses literature, writing, language, and the world around him.
Not what I had come looking for, but a welcome discovery.
The second was Ajax, by Sophocles.
And it wasn’t even secondhand.
I had gone to one of Tokyo’s greatest used book festivals and bought a brand-new copy of an ancient Greek tragedy.
Ajax tells the story of a Greek warrior whose wounded honour and humiliation lead him towards a tragic end. The goddess Athena plays a cruel part in his downfall.
As I was leaving, I noticed a line printed on the paper band around the Japanese edition. Ajax declares:
“Surely I have become hateful to the gods, and an enemy to the entire Greek army.”
I had gone looking for a little favour from the gods and come home with a book about a man they despised.
Perhaps that was their answer.
My two missing books are still out there somewhere.
I’ll be back in Jimbocho. ◾️
First published on Substack on Oct 28, 2026 (JST). Archived here as part of the Fabio Caipirinha permanent archive (published on this site: Nov 4, 2026). Original: https://fabiocaipirinha.substack.com/p/a-little-luck-from-the-gods-of-books