「出会い系サイトで70人と実際に会ってその人に合いそうな本をすすめまくった1年間のこと」、花田菜々子

My Year of Meeting 70 People in Real Life via an Online Matching Site and Recommending the Perfect Book, by Nanako Hanada

I read this book when it was first published in 2018, drawn by the title and the fluorescent yellow cover, and read it again this year when it was made into a TV drama in Japan. You can read this book on many different levels—as a field journal of one woman’s experience on a matching site, a list of book recommendations, a primer on the bookselling industry—but it’s also just a great story of how roughly 70 strangers gave Nanako the courage to do what she knew all along she wanted to do.

The actress Miori Takimoto reading the book on which the drama is based. Source: WOWOW

The book starts with Nanako at her lowest point: killing time at a family restaurant at 2am, trying to decide where to stay for the night now that she’s left her husband and their home. She’s been essentially homeless for a week, and she chooses her accommodations for the night based on her priority for that day: sleep a full night, do laundry, or save money. Although Nanako does rent an apartment soon after this, this experience forces her to realize how narrow her life had become—she had no friends outside of work colleagues, and her only hobbies were reading and making the rounds of bookstores.

Nanako decided to find a bigger world, which she did through a meet-up site (she refers to it as “X” in the book, but it was the matching site AUxAU). In these relatively early days of matching sites, people used the 30-minute meet-ups to fill time between meetings, build their network, or just share business ideas, not necessarily to find romance or sex. In her profile for X, Nanako wrote that she would make a personal book recommendation to everyone she met up with (she also makes the mistake of describing herself as a “sexy bookseller,” which leads to some unintended consequences). The first two men Nanako met ended up angling for sex, but she still enjoyed talking to them, and once veteran users taught her how to adjust her profile and screen people, she had better experiences. She met people who read her poems, performed magic tricks, lied outrageously and, yes, men who propositioned her, but also a woman who gives her a truly life-changing coaching session. Another man wrote an entire porn novel starring Nanako, which almost convinced her to give up on the site, but she also met a woman who had been abused by her boyfriend and was sheltered and given a new start by women she met through X. She made real friends too, including Endo, with whom she had such an instant rapport that they stayed up nearly all night talking.

Nanako and Endo often miss the last train and end up talking all night. Source: WOWOW

Walking through the city streets after meeting someone new, the streets that had seemed so cold and unforgiving seemed like a “mad city” full of fascinating people. And all these people who did not hesitate to do what they wanted to do gave her a glimpse of freedom. No one was shocked when she said she hated her job and wanted to quit. Nanako was a manager at the Village Vanguard, a job that had been her dream job at first. When she first found the Village Vanguard, she felt like she’d found her tribe. The stores were packed with books, manga, CDs, and creepy and surreal novelty goods. Yellow post-it notes scrawled with comments that seemed aimed at making people laugh rather than to sell anything were slapped onto books and CDs. Nanako loved this chaos, but the company’s culture changed as they opened branches in big suburban malls and consumer preferences changed. Cheap kitsch began to account for a higher percentage of sales than books. Nanako felt like she’d devoted so much time to the Village Vanguard that she didn’t even know how to leave, but through X, she met people who thought nothing of quitting a job after two to three years, and she wanted to become that kind of person.

Nanako got to the point that she no longer felt uncomfortable talking to strangers, and began to think that the same methods that worked with X could work outside in the “real” world. She even got confident enough to just contact people she was interested in—writers, other booksellers—and ask if she could meet them. Ultimately, she even met Kenji Yamashita, a man she had idolized ever since she had first visited Gake Shobo, the bookstore in Kyoto that he ran until 2015.

X wasn’t a place where’d you meet people happy with their jobs, placidly married and content with their current situation. They were all people in the process of going somewhere else—changing jobs, starting companies, getting ready to travel around the world. Nanako describes her experience with X as something like climbing down a rope and then free diving down to the bottom of a lake, where she’d shake hands with a stranger once and then resurface, exhilarated and energized. Reading this book feels somewhat similar, and you might look at the people passing you in the street differently afterward.

Note on the drama: I was worried that the drama, which is a WOWOW production, would do disservice to the book because the promotional materials made it seem like the producers had tried to shoehorn the plot into a conventional romance structure. Luckily, the drama sticks very closely to the book, the best change being that we get the visuals that books can’t give us: lots of shots of bookshelves, bookstores, piles of books, and people reading. The recommendations that Nanako makes in the drama are remarkably faithful to those she makes in the book, but there are some updates and all of her choices are provocative and interesting.

Nanako Hanada herself. Source: Woman.excite.co.jp