Smartphones and the Internet may have become an integral part of life, but the power of books — paper ones — is not all lost.

A nationwide book club network and a bookstore that prescribes literary drugs to salve the human condition are a few examples of how people in Japan are still turning to books to find new meaning in life.

At a book club hosted by the Read For Action association in Tokyo in early November, seven participants flipped through the Japanese translation of "The Shift," a best seller about the future of employment by London Business School professor Lynda Gratton, jotting down phrases that caught their attention and discussing their thoughts with each other.