In the days of Book Off and Amazon Market Place, the used-book market in Japan is totally devastated. There is no chance for a windfall. I mean exceptionally good books at prices next to none.
But this principle of lucky encounter still holds true, to a certain degree, in the case of foreign books and you occasionally come across very good books in more than acceptable conditions at a price less than a glass of Starback's Frapuccino.
The other day I was at Jinbocho aimlessly wandering and picked up the following books nicely preserved. Not read at all, although the color of the paper has somewhat changed brown. I don't care. I just say, You chaps are brown, and I pick them up.
They are: Douglas Bush's Prefaces to Renaissance Literature (1965); J. Middleton Murry, The Problem of Style (1976; original 1922); Donald Davie, Trying to Explain (1979). Nice handy paperbacks, 300 yen apiece! Unbeatable. If I stick to English I can get plenty fuel very reasonably here in Japan to live at the writer's trade.
Davie's is a gem. I remember Barthes quoting Hobbes: "La seul passion de ma vie a été la peur." Then Davie says in this manner something that I have in common with him, Hobbes, and presumably Barthes:
And thus the first thing that I'm made to realize about myself, with this dream in mind, is how constantly, throughout my boyhood but also ever since, my strongest and most common emotion has been fear. Fear, or else perhaps apprehension; for the fear has not been of any one thing or person, not even of any definable happening, but always unlocalized, unfocused, pervasive. I have been a coward before life; always, against the run of the evidence, I have expected the worst. (20)
And this comes from an excess of imagination, whereas somebody like Lévi-Strauss talked about his lack of imagination when he first dared to tread jungles in Mato Grosso.
