Biblia Koshodou no Jiken Techou Episode 1

Title: ビブリア古書堂の事件手帖 (Biblia Koshodou no Jiken Techou)
Aired: January 14th, 2013 - ongoing
Reason for Watching This Drama: books!
Reason for Continuing to Watch This Drama: books!

This drama is based on the mystery novels by Mikami En, set in Biblia Koshodou, an antiquarian bookstore in Kamakura. Shinokawa Shioriko, the owner of the bookstore, is a typical bibliophile, particularly in love with old books and the stories they tell about the people who owned them. Shinokawa is shy, especially when dealing with strangers, but she becomes very passionate when talking about books.

The story begins when Goura Daisuke, an unemployed man who has the misfortune of having a sort of phobia that prevents him from reading, pays a visit to Biblia Koshodou and meets Shinokawa. He had brought a stack of Soseki Natsume's collected works, a volume of which includes a signature. The books are among many that were passed down to him and his mother, after his bibliophile grandmother passed away. Neither of them are big reader, so his mother had told him to sell off the books. He brought the Soseki set to Biblia in order to determine the authenticity of the signature, and to find out their value.

Shinokawa takes a very long time looking through each of the books in the collection. Just when Goura is about to give up, she informs him that she could tell that the signature is a fake at first glance - after all, the imprint of the collection was created after Soseki's death. She's curious, however, because the position of the signature implies that Soseki is the receiver of the book, rather than the giver, as someone else's name, Tanaka Yoshio, is written where the author would usually write the name when giving a book as a gift. She asks Goura a slew of questions regarding himself and his grandmother, such as whether his grandmother had given him his name, and the year his grandmother married. Most of her questions he doesn't know the answer to, and doesn't really care about. But when he reaches home, and talks to his mother, their conversation reveals some of the answers that Shinokawa had been asking for, and it seemed to him that Shinokawa could tell so much about him from just studying his grandmother's books. He learns that his grandmother had been unhappy in her marriage, and that she had been in love with someone else before marrying, but would have been disowned if she had continued with that relationship.

He seeks her out again the next day, telling her that she had been right, but Shinokawa tells him that she had just been making conversation, and not too make too much of it. She offers a reasonable sum for the collection, but Goura decides to hold on to the books, thinking that perhaps he'd like to read them.

In the meantime he is still searching for a job, and after being lectured about how he's taking things too easily for someone in his position, he walks away from his mother, accidentally knocking his head on the door beams. His mother comments that recently one other person did the very same thing at their grandmother's funeral. He and his mother are the only family members that are tall, so she remembered the guest because of that. This spurs him to go through the guest book, and he finds the name Tanaka Yoshio written down in it. 

He rushes to the address written down next to the name, but no one in the area knows of a Tanaka Yoshio. He tells Shinokawa this, and she tells him that she isn't surprised - the address is the place where the novel Sorekara (the one with Tanaka and Soseki's names) was set.

The "mystery" is predictable enough - it doesn't take much to piece together the information and realise that Tanaka Yoshio had been Goura's grandmother's lover, and that his mother had been Tanaka's child. But it is this experience that made Goura realise how books can be personal to the reader - the way Soseki's Sorekara is personal to him. He learns that his name came from the book, and that the book had a special meaning to his grandmother and Tanaka. He attempts to read the book, but failing to, he goes to Shinokawa, and asks her to tell him the story in detail.

Shinokawa offers Goura a part-time job at her store, telling him that even if he can't read, he could still learn about books. I think even though he doesn't read, he seems to be a better part-timer than some of the ones working in my department now! (At least he could alphabetisize, and has the ability to learn).

I have to admit that the main reason I watch this is because it's set in a bookstore, it's about books, and the main character is a bookseller. I mean, I really dislike mysteries in general, but I loved that the mysteries in this drama all revolve around books. I loved watching the scenes shot in Biblia, and the cafe that Goura hangs out at is nice too!