If you are a fan of meta-narratives and like the vibe of Alice in Wonderland where you get stuck in a story, this Japanese healing fiction, The Vanishing Cherry Blossom Bookshop is for you. The story is reminiscent of Before the Coffee Gets Cold the most but also has elements of The Lantern of Lost Memories.

Hi, everyone, welcome back to another book review. I had The Vanishing Cherry Blossom Bookshop by Takuya Asakura on my TBR for a while now. I had expected this story to be the regular healing fiction that I have been reading so much of these days. It was all that, but it was also way more than all of that.

The Asian healing fiction genre is a favourite of mine, not least for its emotional aspects but also because of the way the stories are usually interconnected or all come together at the end. This story had an extra angle of the meta-narrative as the bookshop is written into existence after a writer’s wife’s car is swept out into the sea during a tsunami.

The bookshop is manned by Sakura and a cat, Kobako. Sakura is modelled on both the writer’s wife and his daughter. By the time he starts to write the story where she still exists, it has already been a few years since the death of Sakura. So, when he looks at his daughter, he sees her mother in her and models this character on both of them.

But what is this Vanishing Cherry Blossom Bookshop? The defining feature of this bookshop is the weeping cherry tree in the front yard. It also doubles as a coffee shop. Sakura and Kobako pick and read books that are on the shelves in the bookshop. That book, that page, that sentence is being read by someone at the exact same time, and all of this has to be in spring when the cherry blossoms are in full bloom — then the book opens up a passage between that person’s reality and this bookshop of the in-between space.

What this bookshop does for people is let them relive memories. Most of the times, these memories are forgotten by the person who walked into the shop. They call themselves peddlers of miracles, but Sakura and Kobako’s existence itself is the miracle. It is supposed to be a comfort for the family, but the bookshop ends up comforting more people than the writer had originally thought.

The stories center around a comic book writer who lost her mother, a man who lost his wife and his memories to age, twin sisters who are moving away from each other for the first time in their lives and of course, Sakura’s daughter who lost her mother to a natural disaster and father to grief. When the writer stops writing because he cannot fathom his wife’s death after giving life to this cherry blossom bookshop, it comes alive in a space between realities.

I like the fact that books are portrayed here as the connection between one’s reality and this magical bookshop. The magic realism of the plot opens up possibilities like nothing. The way stories connect people and hold memories is incredibly depicted in the book.

It’s a short read but something that left a lasting impact even with my heavy reading schedule.

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Have you read The Vanishing Cherry Blossom Bookshop yet? Are you a fan of Asian healing fiction? Which one is your favourite so far?

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